Fuel Cells Solution for Auxiliary Services Backup Supply in a Power System Substation

This paper presents some considerations about fuel cell energy utilization instead of classical backup sources for substation ancillary services. The main necessity of substation ancillary services is to stay supplied and one modern solution to supply the substation ancillary services using a clean energy is compared versus an actual classical solution. The key elements of the investigated solution are the use of fuel cells with the presence of a DC/AC electronic inverter for substation AC auxiliary services supply in opposition with classical Diesel group solution. For the immediate next future the proposed solutions appear to be technically and economically feasible. Two fuel cell solutions are commercially available, the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), but finally the SOFC is selected for feasibility examination because the CHP possibilities. The conclusions are very stimulating.