The oldest U.S. national park is hosting a test of one of the latest power technologies. The Fall River Rural Electric Cooperative has installed a proton exchange membrane fuel cell for a year-long tryout at the western entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Project participants say the test puts the cell in thin atmosphere and rough winter weather.

The fuel cell is operating on propane to provide 4.5 kW of electricity to three entry-station kiosks and an office building at the park's busiest entrance. Jim Evanoff, a management assistant at Yellowstone, said up to a million visitors a year enter by the west gate.

Besides powering the lights, computers, and other electrical needs of the office building, the cell's heat passes through an exchanger to warm the place. The kiosks use electric resistance heating powered by the grid, Evanoff said, but their other electricity demands are met by the fuel cell.

Propane is the fuel of choice because of the remoteness of much of the park. Yellowstone Park, established by an Act of Congress in 1872, covers more than two million acres, or almost 9,000 square kilometers. According to its Web site, the park gets more than 2.5 million visits a year.

Evanoff said the west entrance has access to natural gas, as well as to grid electricity, but most of the park does not. Remote ranger stations and other facilities in the park's interior used to rely on generators, which burned diesel fuel. Now, under a program called the Greening of Yellowstone, diesel fuel is being replaced by pro- pane and renewables.

Perhaps someday many of the mechanical generators may be replaced by fuel cells. Evanoff said the Park Service is considering a fuel cell to power a new visitors center being planned for Old Faithful.

Yellowstone's west entrance will host a year-long beta test of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell. The altitude and weather are expected to give it a workout.

Some newly repowered stations are hybrids that use propane-fueled generators and photovoltaics. One site, the Lamar Institute, an educational center for visitors, gets 70 percent of its electricity from solar panels, Evanoff said.

According to Dave Peterson, a staff engineer at Fall River in Ashton, Idaho, the co-op has been the electricity provider to the western entrance of the park. Fall River will own and operate the fuel cell, which was made by H Power Corp. of Clifton, N.J.

The cell is one of several that H Power has put into beta testing in various environments around the world, said Tom Michael, the company's vice president for administration. The Yellowstone site will allow observation of the cell in the rarefied atmosphere at 7,000 feet above sea level and during the Montana winter, which is not only cold, but long.

When Fall River co-op personnel installed the fuel cell in May, they ran into snow and below-freezing temperatures. According to Evanoff, that kind of spring weather isn't uncommon. He added that, when the cell went into operation, technicians had trouble at first adjusting the regulator to get the right mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in the thin atmosphere.

A PEM fuel cell requires pure hydrogen in order to work. The H Power model contains a steam reformer to extract the necessary H2 from the propane gas, which is piped to the cell from an underground storage tank.

The connection between the Idaho co-op and the New Jersey developer came through another cooperative venture called ECO, for Energy Co-Opportunity, in Herndon, Va. A national organization owned by energy co-ops, ECO was formed to explore areas of diversification, especially distributed generation and alternative fuels.

ECO has an agreement with H Power to develop fuel cells for the co-op market. Bob Gibson of ECO noted that one concern to be addressed is how fuel cells will tie into a utility's network. ECO has a program that encourages member co-ops to buy fuel cells for field testing. According to ECO, the Yellowstone test is one of eight that have begun under the program.

The Propane Education & Research Council kicked in $44,000 toward the purchase of the cell and $6,000 for fuel at Yellowstone.

Gibson wouldn't put a number on the going price for fuel cells, but said they are "pretty expensive." As he explained it, "Like any beta technology, it is way more expensive than the commercial version is going to cost."

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