A new eBay Data Center in Salt Lake City serves as the test site of a study conducted by three University ECE professors. The researchers are the first to look into how fuel cells, a lesser known clean energy, can be used as a primary energy source.

The professors, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, George Gross and Philip Krein, conducted the study to see exactly how effective the fuel cells are. Krein compared fuel cells to batteries, which produce energy through a chemical reaction.

“Fuel cells … basically bring two different chemicals together across some kind of a membrane. They interact and exchange electrons, so they can send electricity throughout a circuit, and then interact,” Krein said. “Classically (energy sources use) hydrogen and oxygen, and therefore produce water and electricity, but many other things can be used as well.”

The three professors aren’t the first to experiment with fuel cells; however, the fuel cells in use at the eBay Data Center are far more advanced than those used in the past, Gross said.

“The fuel cell idea is actually pretty old,” Gross said. “It originated in the 1830s, but only got to be applied 100 years later when NASA started using them.”

The use of fuel cells is beginning to promote clean energy in America.

“Anytime we can displace CO2 that we are generating with the (fossil fuels), we can clean up the environment. Essentially this country is a place where over 40 percent of the electricity is generated by coal,” Gross said. “We have so much energy production correlated with coal that we can’t do away with it overnight, it is going to take years and years to clean it up with renewable and cleaner energy sources.”

There is no telling if companies and businesses will adapt to this new type of energy, Krein said.

“Fuel cells are still relatively expensive, and not as efficient as people like to claim. It’s reasonably efficient, and certainty with natural gas prices as low as they are, it makes it a little bit more interesting,” Krein said. “In the long run it competes with wind and solar and other things that are sort of natural local generation methods.”

Will Krone, freshman in Engineering, agreed that fuel cells were highly expensive but reliable, and as a result, “it will take years to implement fuel cells into our every day lives.”

There is no guarantee if fuel cells will start to replace older energy sources, but due to their high reliability, Krein said it would be beneficial for companies to try to implement them.

“The reason industries are using fuel cells is because you can make electricity much more reliable,” Krein said. “In this country, energy is still very reliable, it only goes out for a few minutes a year, but in their case, they are trying to get to the point where it is absolutely continuous — it would never be interrupted.”

Andrew can be reached at [email protected].