A typical farm supply pulls from a spring, creek, bore or rainwater tanks, through a pressure pump and filter, then out to the house, the sheds, and a network of troughs. Some farms pump up to a header tank on a hill and let gravity do the rest. Add a UV steriliser for drinking water and maybe a booster pump for the yards, and that is the water system. None of it works without power. A header tank buys time, but in a long outage it runs dry.
Water pumps are modest, intermittent loads, which makes them well suited to stored hydrogen. The battery and inverter handle each pump start, and the fuel cell keeps the battery charged as the pump cycles. Hydrogen made on off-peak power, wind or micro-hydro sits at 30 bar or less for weeks until it is needed, so there is no fuel to keep fresh for the occasional outage.
How it works →
The system uses filtered, de-ionised water itself, about 9 litres per kg of hydrogen, and the fuel cell returns most of it. That is a small draw compared with what a farm uses. A large stock water scheme with big lift pumps or long pipelines may exceed 15 kW, and the pilot would check that. Round-trip efficiency is 30% or less, so this is about keeping water flowing in an outage, not cheaper pumping every day.
Yes. The LiFePO4 battery and hybrid inverter take each start surge, and the fuel cell keeps the battery topped up. Frequent short cycles are the kind of load a battery is good at.
Usually, yes. The 15 kW output covers an average home with headroom, and a farm pressure pump adds a modest load. If you also want sheds and heavy machinery on the same supply, the pilot would check the total.
No. It needs about 9 litres per kg of hydrogen, and most of that comes back from the fuel cell into the loop. Compared with stock and household use, the top-up is very small.
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