“This is CFCL’s second international contract to provide fuel cell units to energy utilities for field trials, following its contract with Powerco in New Zealand,” the company said.
The field trials are intended to evaluate and test the performance and reliability of CFCL’s fuel cell technology and its micro-CHP unit, a small combined heat-and-power generator.
In both the German and New Zealand trials, the units will be run on natural gas. But they are also capable of running on hydrogen and LPG.
“This contract with EWE is particularly significant as CFCL sees Europe, and especially Germany, as its target market for future volume production and sales,” said the company’s CEO Brendan Dow.
“This is the first of CFCL’s European field trials. CFCL looks forward to announcing further field trials in the future.”
The contract follows a recent visit by senior managers of EWE to CFCL’s head office in Australia to inspect CFCL’s extensive research and manufacturing facilities and demonstration fuel cell units.
The EWE Group is the fifth largest utility in Germany, with annual sales of €6.1 billion, 5,200 staff, and more than one million electricity customers and 750,000 natural gas customers.
EWE is involved in renewables, fuel cell technology, direct heat supply and distributed energy management.
In its 2004 Annual Report, EWE said it was working “closely with national research initiatives and industry in getting stationary distributed fuel-cell generation systems to the market-ready stage within the next few years,” CFCL told the ASX this morning.
“EWE is an excellent partner and customer for these field trials, not only for their established and strong position in the German energy industry, but also because of their integrated business structure and investment in new energy solutions,” Dow said.
EWE has said it was looking for fuel cell design that is suited to economically-viable serial production systems for environmentally friendly turnkey co-generation plants. CFCL claimed its flat-plate fuel cell design could meet these requirements.
