Ceres Power Holdings
Company Name: Ceres Power Holdings PLC
Headquarters: West Sussex, UK
Ticker: CWR listed on the London Stock Exchange
Year Incorporated: 2001
Category: Fuel Cells / Electrolysers / Green Hydrogen / Energy Storage
Profile from Company: Ceres is a world-leading developer of electrochemical technologies: fuel cells for power generation, electrolysis for the creation of green hydrogen and energy storage. Its asset-light, licensing model has seen it establish partnerships with some of the world's largest engineering and technology companies, such as Weichai in China, Bosch in Germany, Miura in Japan, and Doosan in Korea, to develop systems and products that address climate change for power generation, transportation, industry, data centres and everyday living. Ceres is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange ("LSE") (AIM: CWR) and is classified by the LSE Green Economy Mark, which recognises listed companies that derive more than 50% of their activity from the green economy.
Ceres Steel CellTM
CERES through the Net-Zero Ninety Lens
Ceres was founded in 2001 as a lab spin out of Imperial College London. The mission, to use their expertise and unique Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology to become a leader in the world of clean-tech. The organization today is composed of two licencing business lines; 1) the established Ceres Power business, and 2) the emerging Ceres Hydrogen business. Both business lines are based on licencing the technology behind their SteelCellTM solid oxide cells - a thin structured coating of their special ceria-based ceramic on a steel cell backbone, the technology can either convert fuel to electricity & heat, or electricity & heat to fuel.
Sustainable Scalability
The established Power business licenses Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology which can generate power running on fuels including natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen and deliver electricity at 70% efficiency and electricity plus heat at over 85% efficiency. Their core power business today creates stacks of fuel cells big enough to deliver power of 1kW-20kW for commercial buildings, industry, and data centres. Potential future markets could use stacks of over 500 kW to provide electricity grid reinforcement in high-use areas (such as EV charging stations), and for replacing the dirty diesel engines of container ships with cleaner fuel cell power.
Lean Green Economics
The emerging Hydrogen business aims to run the technology in reverse as a Solid Oxide Electrolyser Cell (SOEC). It will take renewable electricity, waste heat, plus water and turn it into ‘green’ hydrogen. This uses the highly efficient electricity conversion (70%) plus the added energy from otherwise wasted heat (from interconnected industrial processes) to achieve a potential 80-95% efficiency.
Ceres’ technology compares favourably to established low-temperature Alkaline electrolysers (used for continual hydrogen production) which run at 50-70% efficiency; and low temperature PEM electrolysers (used for variable hydrogen production) at 50-70% efficiency. And because energy costs are the biggest component of hydrogen production… efficiency is key – perhaps why Ceres target hydrogen production (using their technology) at $1.5/kg by 2025 – which is comparable to ‘grey’ fossil-fuel-based hydrogen today and over three times cheaper than today’s green hydrogen.
Slide from Ceres’ SOEC presentation 2021
Ceres have proven the efficiency of their Solid Oxide Electrolyser Cell (SOEC) on a small 0.1MW pilot plant, and now in collaboration with industrial giants Bosch and Linde they are scaling up to a larger 1MW plant expected to be operational in 2024. If they can deliver, then SOEC technology should prove highly cost competitive and scalable.
A Boat for the Moat
There are a number of unique attributes to Ceres’ SteelCellTM solid oxide technology, including 1) the high efficiency, 2) the flexible fuel solution, and 3) the reversibility:
In producing ‘green’ hydrogen the technology can achieve efficiencies 25% higher than other electrolysers through a combination of high temperature operation (>500C versus <120C) and utilization of otherwise wasted industrial heat. Hydrogen production will likely be coupled with downstream manufacturing of fertilizer, steel, chemicals and e-fuels located in cheap renewable electricity hubs – by using waste heat recovery the integrated process become more efficient and cheaper.
The ability to use different fuels to feed the fuel cell power generation units also creates a fundamental advantage through futureproofing – this could be especially important in areas such as shipping where the availability of green hydrogen is limited in the near-term but natural gas could be used in the interim (which has significantly lower emissions profile than bunker fuel or diesel) creating a path to decarbonized mid-haul shipping.
The reversibility of the technology is an advantage because both business lines are based on the same SteelCellTM solid oxide technology which uses the same patents, the same manufacturing processes, and the same materials – substantially de-risking scale-up for manufacturing partners.
Other Pure-Play Fuel Cell/Electrolyser Companies
ITM Power PLC, Bloom Energy, FuelCell Energy, Pug Power, PowerCell Solutions, McPhy Energy, Nel ASA, SFC Energy, Enapter, Green Hydrogen Solutions, H-Tec Systems, Hydrogen Pro, Ohmium, Sunfire.
Long-Term Energy Storage in a Net-Zero Future
Reaching Net-Zero by the middle of this century means that our energy supply will increasingly shift towards electricity (from 20% to ~80%), and our electricity will be increasingly supplied from wind and solar PV (from 10% to ~80%). Renewable electricity is already the cheapest form of power generation in the World, but as the installed capacity continues to increase wind and solar will continue to get cheaper still (20-30% cost reductions each time installations double). As renewables become a larger share of the grid and variability of generation increases, solutions will need to be deployed to better manage energy supply and energy demand over the short-, medium- and long-term. This will require advances in demand management, better integration of electricity grids, and large-scale deployment of energy storage technologies.
An Illustration of Global Daily and Seasonal Energy Storage Needs
Storing energy over the long-term requires solutions with low energy leakage and with very cheap storage that is decoupled from the cost of the power conversion equipment/materials. This allows for scale up of cheap storage whilst holding the cost of the power equipment steady. Longer-term/seasonal energy storage and management in a net-zero future will likely be supported by a mix of thermal storage, pumped-hydro, and green hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is made from water (H2O) which is split into hydrogen (H2 ) and oxygen gas (O2) using an electrolyzer powered by zero carbon electricity. There are three main technologies for electrolysis: Alkaline, Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM), and Solid Oxide, each with its pros and cons. The hydrogen gas can be compressed and stored very cheaply in salt caverns or depleted gas reservoirs for use when needed. Hydrogen has an extremely high specific energy (energy per unit weight) and a decent energy density (energy per unit volume) meaning hydrogen (or fuels made from hydrogen) could play an important role in hard-to-decarbonize areas of the economy such as producing fertilisers, chemicals, or virgin steel; and hydrogen fuel has some potential in areas of transportation such as very long distance/remote trucking, mid-distance shipping and flying. The use of hydrogen in these applications creates a natural store of accessible energy which can be called upon as emergency back-up for the electricity grid in times of very high demand or very low supply. At Net-Zero we estimate around 10% of final energy could be transformed, stored, and re-used via green hydrogen in a net-zero future. Creating a market for electrolyzers worth in excess of $100 billion per year, and a total market for green-hydrogen of over $500 billion.
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