bluegen operation

A while ago, I mentioned the possibility of the Bluegen holding up power in the event of a power failure.

I emailed the office and this is the reply I received

Thankyou for your email and your interest in Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited.

The BlueGen has been designed as a grid-connect appliance. This means that it needs to see an electricity grid or what it thinks is a grid in order to export electricity. In the advent of a grid outage, the BlueGen will briefly "dump" the power that the fuel cells produce on to an integrated electric load bank (essentially a heater), and then the unit will ramp down the electricity level quickly until it reaches "self-sustain" mode. In this mode the fuel cells consumer's fuel to keep the fuel cells at operating temperature and to produce enough electricity to power the auxiliary components of the system, such as the air blower. After the grid connection is re-established, the inverter will re-connect to the grid and the unit will begin exporting electricity again.

However, you will notice that the BlueGen is at this stage not designed for remote, off grid, or backup power applications. While this is certainly possible, the current focus is on the grid-connect appliance.

The start-up time from ambient to operating temperature (about 750 C) takes about 25 hours. This is because a higher heating rate would lead to large and undesirable heating gradients across the fuel cell system. Once the system is at operating temperature, it will stay hot until the fuel cell stack needs to be replaced (approximately 2 years at present). The system can operate in different modes - it can produce power constantly or the output can be modulated (such as a daily or twice daily) cycle.

We hope this answers your queries.