Ceres Power Holdings plc (LON:CWR) Chief Technology Officer Mark Selby caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the latest version of their SteelCell platform, commercialisation, progress of their large OEM projects and when we can expect to see fully commercial products in the field
Q1: Ceres announced today that you’ve released the latest version of your fuel cell platform, can you talk us through the key technological advances?
A1: The main thing we set out to do was simplify the processes further and think about how we’d combine some of the key manufacturing processes, if we can do this it reduced manufacturing costs from the energy required for each process, we need fewer machines and we can take less time to make each cell. Alongside that, at the same time, we were able to bring through some renovations on performance which will mean we need less cells to make the same amount of power using the previous version of the technology. Finally, we’ve always said this technology is one of the most robust solid oxide fuel cell technologies in the world and we continue to break records for robustness, no other technology can be thermally cycled as fast or as often. It’s our ability to demonstrate this robustness that is opening up new markets for example range extenders for electric vehicles.
Q2: How do these advances help in terms of technology commercialisation?
A2: So today showing something that simply works is not enough to convince high quality product engineering businesses to adopt new technology. They need to see that it works today and that we can continue to make the performance better so that we can stay ahead of our and their competitors, they need to understand that it will last in a particular application and they need to see that it can be made using real world processes that are scalable and that they might expect to find in a large factory environment and they need to see a route to having a cost point that makes it economically attractive. So really as technology developers our job is to hold these 3 aspects together so that our customers know we have a real world technology.
Q3: Now Ceres Power Holdings has announced some pretty large OEM partner projects this year; you’ve had Nissan, Honda, Cummins, can you tell us a little bit about how some of these are progressing?
A3: Our customer list is pretty exciting and I think it’s unique in the respect of the quality of the partners we’ve been able to bring on board. In terms of the actual technology programmes I can tell you very little but what I can say about each of those projects is a very high level view:
Honda is looking to integrate our technology into power products. Honda make 6 million small engines around the world a year, mainly for North America, so they’re in the business of producing power generation technologies up to a few kilowatts say. So they’re integrated our technology towards that market.
Cummins is similar, they’re a power generation business and they’re developing our technology, funded with the help unusually for a UK company with the US Department of Energy, to incorporate this technology into power generation for data centres. This is a huge market, it consumes around 2% of the primary energy in the US today and it’s growing exponentially and to help sustain this growth it needs very high efficiency products. We’re targeting in this with Cummins in the 5-10 kilowatt scale.
Nissan is working with us today to develop our stack technology to make it ready for vehicle applications for a thing called a range extender and that’s with Innovate UK. This allows Nissan to continue to be a world leader in electric vehicles without being held back by issues with the charging infrastructure or by customers who are worried about charging times, ideas like range anxiety.
The other thing I can say about all of these partners in the public domain is that they’re the types of companies who do their homework, they make very high quality products so they’ve all worked with Ceres privately to help them understand the benefits of adopting this technology and for them to take the step of going public with us is a huge endorsement.
Q4: Assuming all goes to plan, when can we expect to be seeing fully commercial products in the field powered by your platform?
A4: We’re a technology company so we don’t make products and our plan is to have 5 world class partners working to commercialise this technology by the end of next year, so the end of 2017. Today we’ve got 3 in the public domain and we’re working with a number of others confidentially and we think that’s a very positive step towards seeing this technology in the market.
