An award-winning hydrogen fuel cell generator project is bringing zero-emissions energy to remote Victoria.
For engineers installing energy generators at telecommunications sites across Australia, diesel theft is a risk to manage.
“The problem’s more common than you might think,” said Sam Rowe, Engineering Manager at Energys, the company who claimed Project of the Year at the 2025 Engineers Australia Excellence Awards. “There are people who enter unmanned sites and siphon off the diesel for their own use.”
Energys has been responsible for Australia’s first commercial deployment of 10 kW hydrogen fuel cell generators across five remote telecommunications sites in Victoria. The award-winning project replaced existing diesel generators with hydrogen fuel cells – eliminating the risk of diesel theft while also bringing decarbonisation gains.
“Our client, Telstra, wanted to reduce the carbon footprint from its telecommunication towers,” Rowe told create. “That was the primary driver for the project. But existing technologies weren’t necessarily meeting their requirements.
“Many of the telecommunication sites use diesel gensets. Because they are designed as an emergency backup power system, a diesel genset means you can run into issues like the need for regular maintenance. Then there are issues with diesel going stale if it’s not stored properly, so the storage life wasn’t ideal.
“Plus, a lot of these sites are very remote, so going in regularly to swap out the diesel or perform maintenance on these gensets can be a struggle.”
Energys required a backup power superior to that achievable with batteries, in order to address Telstra’s energy demand. Hydrogen fuel cells emerged as the most viable solution, not least due to the relatively competitive costs of maintenance.
Diesel and hydrogen are two very different technologies, each with its own pros and cons, according to Lead Electrical Engineer Michael Henderson.
“A diesel genset is a rotary genset, and if you look at the power quality from a diesel genset, it’s not that good. You don’t have a very nice sine wave. You have frequency variation and voltage variation. Whereas with a hydrogen fuel cell, here’s an inverter output, meaning you achieve very stable, high-quality power.”
Custom components
Henderson described some of the key challenges involved in building this kind of integrated system.
“Energys has managed generators of a similar size before, so we know how they work,” he said. “But these sites are on top of mountains. There’s the humidity to consider, and mist that blows through everything and gets through any little gap. We had to install special mist filters to collect that.
“It seemed that, almost every week, the customer would tell us about how their sites are invaded by ants, bugs, wombats and other creatures that dig through the ground and damage equipment. This meant we needed to design our generators so frogs couldn’t crawl up the exhaust pipe or anything.”
The solution was ensuring a robust enclosure design around the genset to allow for significant ventilation.
“The fuel cells produce a lot of heat,” Henderson said. “This meant having all the vents well-filtered.”
The compatibility of the fuel cell components was also front of mind.
“One of the problems we face in the fuel cell industry is that various subsystems and components – the DC converters and inverters, the power conditioning pieces of our equipment – aren’t actually designed to be compatible with certain fuel cells,” Rowe said. “A lot of this equipment would normally have been developed for batteries, solar panels or other forms of electrical generation or electrical storage.”
Finding suitable equipment meant approaching suppliers with a custom request, according to Henderson.
“A customer will tell us they want a certain power output,” he said. “In this case, Telstra wanted 10 kW. We chose a fuel cell that, when stacked up, matches that power level. And this sets the voltage we have to work with. We then looked on the market for a power converter that would run with that uncommon voltage.”
The remote nature of the site also weighed in the planning process, Energys Chief Scientific Officer Joe Varga said.
“The constant monitoring requirements mean we need to be compliant with all necessary cybersecurity standards and regulations – because you don’t want a system exposed to possible hacking.”
One of the biggest challenges the company faces is the strict regulatory framework it has to work within. These frameworks have been set up for larger-scale industry, such as hydrogen production facilities.
Varga looks forward to more being possible in the future.
“We don’t currently have an established supply chain supporting us like a lot of other industries, because hydrogen is a relatively new industry,” he said. “We rely a lot on the supply chain that supports the fossil fuel industry, which does the job but raises design and materials configuration issues – do they necessarily suit us?”
READ: How do you build a hydrogen refuelling station?
Problem solved
In their assessment of the project, the judges of the Engineers Australia Excellence Awards noted its problem-solving approach to providing reliable emergency backup power to off-grid infrastructure.
“The project demonstrates the commercial viability of hydrogen technology for critical telecommunications infrastructure, establishing a new benchmark for sustainable off-grid power solutions in Australia,” the judges said.
“The project overcame significant technical challenges including system integration in harsh environments, hydrogen storage optimisation and ensuring seamless transition during power outages.”
At the national awards ceremony in Sydney, Engineers Australia CEO Romilly Madew AO FTSE HonFIEAust EngExec said this year’s winners exemplify the innovation, leadership and impact that define the profession.
“Our finalists [come from] an outstanding field [of engineers] and exemplify the positive impact of the profession on so many facets of society,” Madew said. “Their work elevates the profession and raises its profile in the community, and with industry, government and educators.
“Engineering is where creativity meets impact. It’s a career where you get to solve complex challenges, design the future and make a tangible difference in people’s lives.”
Read the full list of winners from the 2025 Engineers Australia Excellence Awards.
Finally, a useful application for Green Hydrogen. But the main driver is theft, not saving the planet as, in the general course of communications, it will never be needed.