This is a video of a 1 megawatt Fuel Cell Power Plant at California State University, Northridge, in Los Angeles, CA. The power plant has a reformer that separates hydrogen from natural gas and then feeds the hydrogen into a fuel cell, generating electricity. The plant also recovers the heat generated and uses it for domestic heating on campus. In the future, some of the carbon emitted will be sequestered in a sub-tropical rainforest that is under construction.

While at present this power plant still uses fossil fuels (the natural gas is needed in order to extract the hydrogen from it), in the future the hydrogen will be generated either from landfill gas, or else it will be electrolyzed using wind, solar, geothermal, wave or hydroelectric energy. What is most important and exciting about this plant is the fact that it is using fuel cells–touted to be the future of electricity generation–today, and they are working seamlessly on a large scale.

For more information, go to andyposner.org/videofuelcell