FuelCell Energy, Inc. (Nasdaq:FCEL) announced the sale of a fourth DFC300 fuel cell unit to the City of Tulare, Calif. to expand the municipality’s existing fuel cell power plant to 1.0 megawatt (MW) and increase the amount of green electricity produced at the regional wastewater treatment facility.
The sale price was not disclosed.
With this expansion of its on-site Direct FuelCell(R) (DFC(R)) power plant, Tulare will generate more than 40% of the electricity needed to run its water treatment operation. The City of Tulare wastewater treatment facility serves a population of 58,000, processing 12.5 million gallons per day of sewage from domestic households and commercial sources of water discharge, including waste from the region’s seven large dairy-processing enterprises.
The San Joaquin Valley region has a myriad of challenges to improving local air quality because the City of Tulare is growing at more than double the rate of California’s state-wide average. Fuel cells help address air quality concerns because they do not burn fuel, instead processing it electro-chemically to transform it into electricity, with near-zero emissions of NOX, SOX and particulate matter.
Additionally, heat is created in the process, which the system captures and applies to Tulare’s wastewater treatment process. This combined heat and power system can deliver an overall efficiency of up to 90%, FuelCell said, which results in low CO2 emissions and reduces the wastewater plant’s overall electricity costs.
"The combined heat and power capability of FuelCell Energy’s power plant has been ideal for us," said Lew Nelson, Tulare’s Director of Public Works. "The fuel cells generate clean electricity and heat that we use in our anaerobic digester, making this system the most efficient and cost-effective for our needs."
Because these DFC power plants operate on methane, a renewable byproduct of wastewater processing, they eliminate the air pollution that normally would result from releasing the biogas to the atmosphere or flaring it.
"Tulare’s wastewater facility is a perfect application for our products," said R. Daniel Brdar, Chairman and CEO of FuelCell Energy. "Wastewater facilities produce methane–a gas that is over 20 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Instead of releasing the methane to the atmosphere or flaring it, wastewater facilities use that gas in our power plants to cleanly and economically produce electricity and heat."
Tulare’s success in applying this approach to wastewater treatment was honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with its Clean Air Excellence Award earlier this year. Under the EPA’s Green Power Partnership program, Tulare was named to the Top 20 List of the agency’s "partners generating and consuming the most green power on-site."
FuelCell Energy develops and produces stationary fuel cells for commercial, industrial, municipal and utility customers. FuelCell Energy’s DFC(R) fuel cells are generating power at over 55 locations worldwide. The company’s power plants have generated over 400 million kWh of power using a variety of fuels including renewable wastewater gas, biogas from beer and food processing, as well as natural gas and other hydrocarbon fuels.
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