'First of its kind': plans for new hydrogen-powered house in Mendip village
A former TV show robot builder has ambitious plans here in the South West
A former-robot builder is hoping to build a house running on first-of-its kind green power technology in a Mendip village.
Andrew Cotterell, who describes himself as “a bit of a techy nerd,” competed on Robot Wars in the 2000s as builder of robot Ming the Merciless. He has since worked building robots for theme parks and on a short-lived robot football project with Kevin Keegan.
Now he is seeking planning permission for a house in South Widcombe which he plans to be both his family home and a demonstration of a new type of green hydrogen generator called a “battolyser”.
This is a device being developed at Loughborough University that stores electricity in a battery which, when fully charged, uses any excess power to turn water into hydrogen. This hydrogen is captured and stored for when there is less electricity available.
Mr Cotterell is working with these scientists to make this house the first demonstration of a battolyser in a real world setting.
He said: “This is an evolutionary process. This is at the early stage. Nobody else has done this in the UK yet so there will be some stuff we still have yet to discover.
“But what it needs is people like the professors at the university, and the people at their disposal, and people like me, who are prepared to muck around with prototypes and feed information back in order to make this work properly and make it commercially available.”
Professor Dani Strickland, one of the experts behind the technology, said that this demonstration would be “key to our research going forwards.”
The Cotterells are hoping the technology can also get local children interested in green energy. Tracey Cotterell, who works as a teacher, has contacted local schools about coming to see the battolyser working.
Mr Cotterell said: “I think there’s a whole bunch of stuff here that we can get kids involved with so they can really start getting into science and thinking about what we may be able to do going forward green energy-wise to improve things. And I want them to see it working in practice.”
The battolyser would be powered by solar panels and use water that is naturally on the site. It would be housed in a special room in the house.
Asked how safe this would be, Mr Cotterell acknowledged that people are nervous about hydrogen. He said: “Hydrogen technically is slightly more explosive than natural gas but they are both explosive. There’s no getting past that.”
He added that this would only be a domestic-level system. The hydrogen would be stored in gas cylinders with safety valves which would be buried beneath the drive.
The Cotterells had previously applied unsuccessfully for planning permission for a larger house on the site which would have generated hydrogen through an electrolyser instead of a battolyser. It was after this that Mr Cotterell met the team from Loughborough University who introduced him to their work.
He said: “We have ended up with something that is much better all round. I just hope that planning let us do it.”