PLEA Network

21 November 2016, Yale Climate Connections, Fuel Cells: Promising, but struggling to catch on. Fuel cells are efficient, generate clean electricity, and they run around the clock. So why aren’t we using them on a mass scale? Fuel cells have been the next best clean-energy thing for, well, a long time. The byproducts of that reaction are heat and water. The heat can be recycled into the fuel cell itself and/or used for external heating and cooling – generally referred to as combined heat and power. That makes stationary fuel cells – the kind used for electricity, as opposed to ones used in vehicles – extremely efficient and as clean an energy source as solar and wind.A technology with roots in the 1800s and modern-day use in every NASA-manned space flight from Apollo through the end of the space shuttle program, fuel cells just kind of look like a big box. Inside, they electrochemically combine hydrogen and the oxygen from ambient air to create electricity. But because the hydrogen source for most fuel cells comes from natural gas, they are generally not considered renewable, leaving them in an environmental limbo. Read More here