After decades of collecting dust, HydroGen Corp. is giving Westinghouse’s fuel cell technology new life as it prepares to take the clean, pollution-free energy source worldwide.
In the process, the company has plans for "significant" hiring.
The company's story began in 2001 with a team of entrepreneurs, founded by a man who had previously bought the rights to fuel cell technology developed and shelved by a financially troubled Westinghouse Corporation in the early 1990s, explains Joshua Tosteson, president.
HydroGen was born and after four years of planning, the Cleveland-based company raised private and public financing and began ramping up production at its 35,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Versailles. The plant produces 400-kilowatt phosphoric acid fuel cell modules, building blocks for multi-megawatt fuel power plants. The plants generate electricity electrochemically using waste hydrogen as fuel and produce only water vapor as emission.
“The only by-product is water,” says Tosteson. “It’s a zero pollution technology.”
HydroGen hopes that its first 400-kilowatt power plant, to be installed in March at an Ashta Chemicals Inc. plant in Ashtabula, Ohio, will demonstrate to other industries the benefits of reusing hydrogen to generate free electricity. The company also has teamed up with Korea's Samsung Corp. that will market and distribute fuel cell power plants in Asia and the Middle East.
Regionally, the Clairton U.S. Steel coke works is studying the feasibility of using fuel cells to generate power from its coke gas oven that will feed back to the U.S. Steel power grid, a project supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority .
All this means a significant number jobs in the near future. The company will be hiring a number of technicians, engineers and managers, but Tosteson declined to say how many.
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Joshua Tosteson, HydroGen Corp.
Image courtesy HydroGen Corp.