Reducing Cost and Decreasing CO2 Emission Using a Shared-Distribution Fuel Cell System

We studied the characteristics of a shared-distribution fuel cell system that supplied a community center and several houses. The system was confirmed to be effective. Compared to costs estimated before the proposed system was installed, this is projected to become economically viable after 9 years with low CO₂ from the first year

I. Introduction

Global environmental concerns such as global warming and air pollution are serious. Of particular concern is the increase in CO₂ emissions that has occurred in response to our dependence on fossil fuels and which is considered to be the major cause of global warming. Consequently, in an attempt to alleviate this environmental burden, the development of distributed power supply systems that employ fuel cell technology in conjunction with variety fuels is expected; because cogeneration is possible, the fuel cells can decrease the amount of CO₂ emitted. However, given that fuel cells are expensive at present, the generating costs of power plant employing fuel cell technology would be higher than that of existing power plants. In response to these prohibitive costs, it is proposed that more effective utilization is applied to use of fuel cells is implemented to increase their popularity and thus decrease their cost. We propose a shared distribution fuel cells system that supplies different electricity consumers in an attempt to improve efficiency [1]. To achieve this in this study, we used a model in which fuel cells are shared among a community center and many houses.