King County, Washington, USA, is to have a 1MW fuel cell power plant built at the County’s South Wastewater Treatment Facility to come on line in autumn 2002 and partly funded by a grant from the EPA. It will be installed and operated by FuelCell Energy Inc, and will be fuelled by municipal waste water digester gas, a methane rich fuel produced by an anaerobic digester process. FuelCell won the $18.8 million contract following a competition last July for the contract to install and operate a 1 MW fuel cell plant as a two year demonstration project.
This represents the first MW sized commercial field trial for an advanced wastewater digester/fuel cell project and it is expected to show that the technology is a practical and profitable proposition with great potential among the 500 or so municipal waste water treatment plants in the USA, as well as demonstrating the flexibility of FuelCell Energy’s Direct FuelCell product. As a rule of thumb, a 30 million gallon/day treatment plant generates enough digester gas to fuel a 1MW fuel cell power plant using carbonate technology.
Current DFC trials in operation or slated for 2001 include 250 kW plants at the University of Bielefeld and the Rhone Klinikum Hospital in Germany, a 250 kW system in Japan for Marubeni and a 250 kW unit at Mercedes-Benz US International in Tuscaloosa.
