FuelCell Energy, Inc. (NasdaqNM:FCEL), a leading manufacturer of fuel cell power plants, and its partner Alliance Power Inc., announced the sale of a 1 megawatt (MW) fuel cell power plant to California State University, Northridge.
The fuel cell will be used in a combined heat and power plant. It will generate base load electricity for the university’s facilities and surplus heat for hot water.
Uniquely, the university also plans on routing exhaust from the heat exchanger into an adjacent greenhouse and arboretum to enhance photosynthesis, boosting plant growth and harvests by 10 to 40 percent. The carbon dioxide enrichment potential provided by the fuel cell plant may be used for specialized plant research, or as a convention of study within the regular biology academic program — an opportunity rarely made available to baccalaureate biology students.
CSUN’s unit will be the single largest fuel cell power plant at any university in the world and is the seventh DFC plant of any capacity installed at a university. Institutions of higher education represent an excellent application of fuel cells’ 24/7 electrical generation — where they can power academic facilities during the day and address critical base load needs at night.
Because the units are quiet and environmentally friendly, they often can be installed close to the classrooms and dorms where energy is needed.
The DFC power plant will be commissioned in the second half of 2006 and operated by CSUN with technical support from FuelCell Energy and Alliance Power.
Other university sites with DFC power plant installations include Yale University in Connecticut; Ocean County College in New Jersey; Grand Valley State University in Michigan; State University of New York at Syracuse; Chosun University Hospital in Korea; and Pohang University in Korea. The combined heat and power market potential for college and university applications in California exceeds 340 MW according to a 2000 study by Onsite Sycom Energy Corporation prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy.
California State University, Northridge has 33,000 full- and part-time students and is among the largest single-campus universities in the nation.
After two years of lobbying by students, the CSU Board of Trustees voted unanimously for one of the most comprehensive university policies on clean energy in the U.S. Part of the resolution called for all new buildings beginning in 2006/2007 to meet the CSU Sustainability Measurement System certified level which shall be equivalent to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified, with regard to the microclimates and physical diversity of the CSU campuses. The policy also encouraged clean and ultra-clean cogenerating energy technologies including fuel cells. CSUN began its drive to install onsite power generation from clean technologies in 2002 with the installation of 692 kilowatts of solar panels that provide a portion of the campus’ peaking electricity requirements.