Profitable for both sides

The young company Swiss Hydrogen is located in Fribourg. Here work is under way on competitive high-performance fuel cells that could be used in environmentally friendly vehicles or deployed as stationary power generators. In the company's collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, as CEO Alexandre Closset explains in this interview, both sides profit. 5232: Mr. Closset, what links your company to PSI? Alexandre Closset: Since the founding of Swiss Hydrogen in 2015, PSI has been our closest research partner, and we're very happy about that. In the beginning all we had was office space, no laboratories - during this time, we used labs at PSI. Our firm only survived, in fact, because we were able to carry out the assembly and testing at PSI. And since that time? By now we have our own assembly and storage spaces, but the collaboration with PSI is still intensive: The knowledge that is created thanks to the PSI research flows to us. We use it to further advance fuel cells. We test our new developments, in turn, at PSI's ESI Platform - and in doing so, we rely on the PSI infrastructure and on the expertise of the PSI researchers as well, to interpret the test results well and correctly. In return, among other things, we have made a commitment to provide four novel 60-kilowatt fuel cells. And then the collaboration has also been, from the start, a very close and personal one. One indication of this, among others, is that former early-career researchers at PSI now work here; one of them is our head of development. Could you briefly explain why Switzerland needs fuel cells?