Government launches hydrogen fuel cell competition

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has launched a competition which it claims could see up to £7.2m in funding awarded to innovative projects around hydrogen and other fuel cell technologies.

The competition is part of measures announced in the Budget to help stimulate the low-carbon economy, Decc said in a statement this week. Companies will be able to bid to the Technology Strategy Board for a share of the funds to help develop and test their fuel cell systems.

"The UK has the right combination of expertise, ingenuity and determination to bring hydrogen and fuel cell technology to the global market. We’re providing real help now to advance this technology in the UK, keeping us at the forefront of advanced green manufacturing," said energy and climate change minister David Kidney.

The final deadline for applications to the competition is 29 October.

Decc said: "The competition is designed to support fuel cells for use in transport as well as stationary power generation including micro-generation projects. Other applications could include the production of hydrogen from non-carbon sources and its use as an energy carrier."

Despite their credentials as a zero emission technology, the commercialisation of hydrogen fuel cells has been consistently hampered by the energy intensive and costly nature of hydrogen production.

But in June, UK-based AFC Energy announced that it had identified a low-cost and sustainable source of hydrogen in the form of the waste gases produced by the chlorine industry, and following successful trials at a chlor-alkali plant at Bitterfeld in Germany the company is now working on a 50kW commercial-scale version of its fuel cell technology.

Earlier this week, the technology board also announced that it is backing a competition to award the funding to leading research projects into smarter approaches to electric vehicle design.

The competition is being run under the board's Integrated Delivery Programme – a £200m investment designed to speed up the introduction of low-carbon vehicles on to UK roads. About 30 companies, which will also invest about £10m in the initiative, and seven universities will take part in the electric development projects.

The Technology Strategy Board was set up in 2007 as a non-governmental body backed by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.