Depoe Bay Looks to Hydrogen Fuel Cells for Emergency Power

By Brian Bahouth

Depoe Bay resident Joe Cannon is a long-time power industry operator who has always been interested in alternative power sources, especially green energy. In January 2024, an ice storm severely damaged the central Oregon coast power grid. Cannon says Depoe Bay was without power for nearly 4 days, and other communities in the ice-crusted coastal environment were without power for as long as a week or more. The experience prompted Cannon to make Depoe Bay more power-resilient.

“When you have no electricity, you have things that you take for granted that don’t exist—traffic lights, your garage doors won’t open. You won’t have any banking. You can’t get fuel from fuel stations. Police and fire are limited. Communication is next to nothing. If you don’t have fuel in your vehicle or roads, you’re not going anywhere. All of your medical devices won’t work. Grocery stores are shut down. Your refrigerator and your freezer is going to melt. You have no waste [disposal], so you’re really in bad shape, and there’s no way to leave.” 

Cannon is on the Depoe Bay city council and is a former director of the city’s Resiliency Task Group. The group helped the city win an Oregon Department of Energy (ODOE) grant to analyze the site and study the options for a green, self-sustaining emergency power source. 

“I looked at wind,” Cannon told me by phone, “I looked at solar, I looked at biomass, I looked at wave, I looked at different components, what would and wouldn’t work, and evaluated each component of electrical generation that would work best for us. (Hydrogen) fuel cells hit all the marks, and I really couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So every system has a plus and minus, and this was the best one that we could use that would suit our needs for energy resilience.”

The ability to convert hydrogen into electricity has been around since the invention of the “gas battery” in 1838. A pair of German chemists made electrochemical history when they first used the term “fuel cell” in 1889. NASA has famously relied on hydrogen fuel cells since the 1960s. Cannon has worked with hydrogen, and he found a North Dakota–based company, Oncore Energy, that makes scalable hydrogen fuel cells and has developed a sustainable way to make hydrogen.

Imagine, during an emergency, the power has been off, maybe for a while, but a separate fuel cell, about the size of a file cabinet, is producing electricity in a key government office, a grocery store, a gas station, independently of the power grid.

“It doesn’t make any noise, it doesn’t have any heat signature,” Cannon explained. “I’ve had a lot of requests for folks who say they stand by generators, and that thing’s loud as hell, and I listen to it [the hydrogen fuel cell] all the time, and none of that. It’s all quiet. There’s no pollution, there’s no thermal signature. It’s mobile. You don’t need transmission lines. It’s what’s called a microgrid. So each one of these systems is specifically made for a specific building. They’re not interconnected, so it’s a different concept from what you’re dealing with now through normal electricity. So if someone else has a problem down the line, it doesn’t affect you, because your building is the way it is.”

But where do you get hydrogen? There is virtually no hydrogen supply infrastructure in the state. Cannon says you make it with a device known as an electrolyzer. As in submarines that can stay submerged for months at a time, an electrolyzer uses electricity to separate the hydrogen and oxygen molecules from water. Grid power and solar panels can generate the electricity needed to make and compress hydrogen by the gram. With an electrolyzer in Depoe Bay, along with a decentralized emergency power grid, the city could endure  the loss of grid power for a month or more.

Cannon explains, “They [submarines] have what’s called an O2 generator, where they take sea water in, they electrolyze it, they separate the hydrogen from oxygen, keep the oxygen and distill the hydrogen. 

“Well, it works that way, similarly, just reverse. So we keep the hydrogen, then we cool it and compress it upwards of over 5,000 PSI and put it in storage tanks. Now it’s six times lighter than gas, so if there’s a leak or any type of inversion, it just evaporates. 

“The reason why the Hindenburg went up was because the skin on that airship was highly flammable, and there was an ignition point. It [hydrogen] normally would just dissipate and escape. So there are some things that you have to have for safety. But it’s easier to deal with than propane, as far as maintenance, compression, movement [are concerned], and that’s what you use for your fuel cell.”

Determining where to place fuel cells is no small planning feat.

“We’re starting with City Hall, because that’s going to be the command center, and then that’ll be the primary system. And we’ll also have an electrolyzer for it, which will generate our hydrogen gas for what we need to power the building. And we’ll use that as our base to power all of our systems that we have in Depoe Bay. 

“We’re going for critical operations, the water plant, sewage plant, police and fire, warming shelters, fuel stations, communication, the command center, all the emergency factors that are needed to keep the city alive in a catastrophic event. 

“If you plan for a catastrophic event, you don’t have one when it actually occurs, because your system’s kick in, that’s our goal. So, power, water, sewage, communication, those are life-saving issues, and that’s what you need to have.”

Out of 80 entities to apply for the ODOE site analysis grant, Depoe Bay was one of 16 recipients. Now that the site assessment is complete, Cannon says the city has just submitted an application for an ODOE grant for the first construction phase of the project, an award worth up to $1 million.