Lyngby, 11 October 2006
Topsoe Fuel Cell was yesterday, Tuesday October 10th, awarded the American Chamber of Commerce in Denmark’s Entrepreneurship Award at the annual Ambassador’s reception at the ambassador’s residence. The award was awarded to Topsoe Fuel Cell for the significant expansion it has shown in the two years since the company was formed, for the collaboration with US and other international, public and private partners in development of the fuel cell technology and for its engagement in educating tomorrow’s workforce through an internship programme with the Technical University of Denmark.
“This is a fantastic situation for our company. We are both very honoured and very proud of being granted the Entrepreneurship Award and would like to thank AmCham for selecting our company for the award. We see this as an encouraging recognition of the achievements within both technology performance, market development and manufacturing capacity that TOFC has accomplished over the past two years,” says Claus Olsen, Managing Director, Topsoe Fuel Cell. “In this period, we have ex-panded our workforce with 75% and increased our income with more than 100%. Further, by the end of 2006, we are ready to invest close to 10 million USD in a new pilot production facility to be ready for operation in 2008. This will be a major capacity increase and enable us to meet the increased demand for cells and stacks for devel-opment and demonstration,” he adds.
The North American market is very important for the development and commerciali-sation of SOFC fuel cells and is thus a target market for Topsoe Fuel Cell. In May, Topsoe Fuel Cell was selected to develop a high power density solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack concept and to deliver 2 SOFC stacks for a 1.5 – 2.5 kW power unit for a US government (US Air Force Research Laboratory) supported project led by United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), a unit of United Technologies Corpo-ration (NYSE: UTX). The power unit is intended for various military applications.
“This is only one of the activities we have in USA. We also have close contacts with both Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with whom we exchange knowledge and scientific results helping us to continuously im-prove our technology. And we are continuously seeking to expand our network of partners in North America,” explains Helge Holm-Larsen, Director, Business Devel-opment, Topsoe Fuel Cell.