A startup powered by technology developed at U of T Engineering aims to offer compact and sustainable power solutions for grid resilience and more, using a new fuel cell design.
Serenity Power was founded in 2023 by a team of U of T Engineering graduates, including Chief Operating Officer Yvonne Liu (ChemE 2T0 + PEY, MIE MEng 2T3) and Chief Executive Officer Aleisha Cerny (MIE MASc 2T3).
Liu says she first got excited about sustainable energy during her PEY Co-op internship at Toronto Hydro, which she completed after her third year of her undergraduate program.
“I realized just how much work it takes for the power grid to stand up to challenges such as growing demand and extreme weather,” she says.
“When I heard about fuel cells, I thought it was a really cool way to provide sustainable, distributed power. This can improve grid resilience and also help remote communities that aren’t connected to the grid.”
Liu switched to MIE for her MEng so she could work with Professor Olivera Kesler (MIE), a fuel cell expert. It was in a course taught by Kesler that Liu first met Cerny, who was completing her MASc under the supervision of Professor Hani Naguib (MSE, MIE).
Both felt that the time was right for fuel cells to make something of a comeback.
“There was a lot of interest in fuel cells in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but a lot of that hype was coming from the media, not the scientists,” says Cerny.
“The technology needed time to catch up to the promises that were being made. Over the past two decades, a lot of advances have been made, including many from people who are looking to use fuel cells to generate clean hydrogen.”
Like batteries, fuel cells use chemical reactions to produce electricity. But unlike batteries, they are not sealed containers: instead, new fuels are added and waste products removed continuously as they run.
One potential fuel is hydrogen, which reacts with oxygen inside a fuel cell to produce electricity, with only water as a waste product. Unfortunately, most hydrogen used today is produced from fossil fuels such as natural gas.
But fuel cells can also be run in reverse, using electricity to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. In this mode, they can act as a way of storing excess electricity — including from sustainable but intermittent sources such as solar and wind power — in the form of hydrogen.
The particular type of fuel cell that Cerny, Liu and their team are working on is known as a solid oxide fuel cell, or SOFC. One of the advantages of this technology is that, in addition to hydrogen, SOFCs can run directly on other fuels, such as natural gas.
“The fuel flexibility is a big advantage, because we don’t yet have a robust hydrogen infrastructure,” says Liu.
“But there is a lot of natural gas infrastructure, so we can offer SOFCs as a drop-in replacement for natural gas power plants. We can seamlessly switch to hydrogen, without any changes, when it becomes more available.”
Since SOFCs produce electricity directly from chemical reactions, rather than burning the gas to run a turbine, they can also be more efficient than natural gas power plants. Liu says that SOFCs can be up to 60% efficient, compared with only about 45% for a natural gas power plant.
But this technology still has drawbacks. One is that SOFCs operate at high temperatures, between 600 to 1000 Celsius, which means they take a long time to start up and shut down. They are also larger and bulkier than other types of fuel cells, making them impractical for portable, remote or vehicle power.
Finally, the natural gas feed must be processed or reformed with steam before it is fed to the fuel cell; hydrocarbons cause carbon build-up and block catalyst reaction sites, damaging electrode integrity and hindering performance.
Serenity Power is banking on an innovation developed by Kesler and Yifei Yan (ChemE 1T9, MIE PhD 2T4), who serves as the company’s chief technology officer, to overcome some of these limitations.
“Today’s SOFCs use bulky electrodes made of ceramic materials, causing systems to take hours to start up,” says Cerny.
“Our team created a much thinner electrode with a metal support, enabling a much faster start-up time. We also created a carbon-resistant composite material that protects the electrode from carbon fouling in the gas feed.”
By eliminating the need for external fuel processing systems and a water supply, the new SOFC design has the potential to be much more compact than previous versions.
At present, the team has created a working fuel cell that measures 5 cm x 5 cm; the next step is to scale the cell size and stack 35 of them together to create a complete prototype system that can generate up to 1 kW of power.
This is about the same amount of power that is produced by small gasoline or diesel generators commonly used to power equipment such as those found in food trucks. In fact, when it is complete, the team plans to work with the Food Truck Association of Canada to demonstrate their new unit at street, music and film festivals.
Both Cerny and Liu say that their journey from students to entrepreneurs was strongly supported by The Hatchery, a business accelerator based at U of T Engineering. Serenity Power went through the Hatchery’s Nest program in the summer of 2023.
“It was an intensive four months of pitching and honing our business plan,” says Cerny. “We got great advice from the mentors that they brought on for us, and we started making customer calls. It really showed us that we were onto something real.”
The team envisions their first product as a replacement for diesel fuel generators, which are commonly used to provide power at oil and gas or mining facilities, or in communities that are not connected to grid power. Eventually, they hope to use their compact SOFC design to power large vehicles such as 16-wheeler transport trucks.
The company recently completed the Phase-0 Program with HAX by SOSV, a pre-seed program focused on supporting hard tech startups.
“Our U of T Engineering experiences, both undergraduate and graduate, helped us get to where we are,” says Liu.
“PEY Co-op helped us understand the needs of industry, while The Hatchery gave us tremendous support with filing IP and building an advisory board. In general, it was just a really solid foundation that helped us learn how to solve problems and communicate with people. We really appreciate all that now.”
