Research and scale-up of a microbial fuel cell for renewable energy storage

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The use of renewable primary energy sources, particularly wind and solar, possesses the greatest potential for solving both the environmental and long-term fuel availability problems of current electrical power generation world-wide, and more specifically, in Canada. Unfortunately, both wind and solar power generation technologies share one significant drawback intermittency, which is often unpredictable. Without effective smoothing or storage of energy, the widespread use of renewables cannot be viable. Recently, it was stated that “electricity storage really is the Holy Grail” of renewable power. Currently, there is no well-established, cost-efficient and widely applicable energy storage technology. Among the different storage technologies under development, it appears that hydrogen-based storage holds a great promise. One of the key elements in hydrogen energy storage is the conversion of hydrogen to electricity. A unique hydrogen re-electrification technology, named BioGenerator, was developed by the PI of this proposal in collaboration with students and researchers and was patented worldwide by the UWO. The general objectives of this proposal are: (1) to improve significantly the technical characteristics of the BioGenerator by studying its fundamental properties, including the biokinetics, hydrodynamics, mass transfer and electrochemistry; and (2) to work towards commercialization of the BioGenerator by performing scale-up, cost analysis and system integration.