From the outside, the house at the bottom of Stocking Street looks no different from any other in the cul-de-sac. But step around the back and a purpose-built shed hums with the latest in green technology - a state of the art hydrogen fuel cell. Today the house in Lye, near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, will be opened as the first permanent hydrogen-powered home connected to the national grid. The refrigerator-sized fuel cell unit will produce 1.5kW of electricity and 3kW of heat for the occupants of the house, with any excess power being fed into the national grid. "You shouldn't notice any difference in the house," said Waldemar Bujalski from the University of Birmingham's fuel cells group, which will monitor its performance and reliability. "For the typical house, the unit is capable of providing 65% of the power on average and about 75% of total energy demand, both electricity and heat." There is no way yet to pipe hydrogen directly into homes, so the demonstration house will use natural gas that comes in via the existing mains supply. This is first passed through a steam reformer that generates hydrogen. The hydrogen is then combined with oxygen in a fuel cell unit, made by German company Baxi Innotech, that produces both electricity and heat and without producing carbon dioxide. Although creating the hydrogen from gas does produce some carbon dioxide, using the fuel cell cuts overall household emissions by 40% compared ...
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