Ceres Power Brand Guidelines: The Imperial College Spin-out That Licenses Its SteelCell

A materials laboratory in South Kensington.

Ceres Power began as a university spin-out. Its technology comes from solid oxide fuel cell research in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London, led by Professor Brian Steele. The company’s own history dates that work to a 1990 research-council grant to Steele, aimed at lowering the operating temperature of solid oxide cells and making them more robust when heated and cooled, and says Ceres Power Ltd spun out of Imperial in 2001 to commercialise a metal-supported cell using doped ceria as its electrolyte, a material Steele had proposed. English Wikipedia also gives 2001.

Imperial’s own account differs by a year. In July 2023 Imperial News wrote that the company “was founded in 2000” to develop fuel cell research by Professor Nigel Brandon, later Dean of Imperial’s Faculty of Engineering, together with Professors Brian Steele, John Kilner and Alan Atkinson. Brandon told the college that when the founders set the company up, none of them foresaw how significant the technology would become.

The company went public early. Its history says Ceres Power Holdings listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange in 2004, and that grants from public bodies supported its first prototypes. In 2008, it says, it moved into its present headquarters in Horsham, West Sussex, where the company is still based.

The early years were spent on home energy. Ceres says it launched a wall-mounted combined heat and power unit with British Gas in 2007, and that British Gas ended its investment in the technology in 2012. In 2013 Phil Caldwell became chief executive and, by the company’s account, a new strategy and business model followed. English Wikipedia links his appointment to investment from IP Group.

A cell made on steel.

The company’s product is a cell. Ceres calls it the SteelCell: a solid oxide cell built on a steel support rather than on a thick ceramic base. According to the Royal Academy of Engineering, it uses a gadolinium-doped ceria ceramic membrane as its electrolyte and works at around 500 to 600 degrees Celsius, which the Academy called a “Goldilocks” temperature for balancing performance, fuel flexibility, cost and robustness. The same cell runs in two directions. Used as a fuel cell, it makes electricity from fuels including natural gas and hydrogen; run in reverse as an electrolyser, it uses electricity to make hydrogen.

That reversibility won Ceres the 2023 MacRobert Award. The Academy, which calls the MacRobert the UK’s longest-running award for engineering innovation, announced on 13 July 2023 that Ceres had won it for its SteelCell, and that the Princess Royal presented the gold medal to the team at its awards dinner in London. The Academy’s judges praised a cell based on common, low-cost materials, a new deposition technique and a distinctive stack design. In 2021, the company says, Ceres also received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the international trade category.

Ceres does not plan to build products in volume itself. It describes itself as a licensing company: it licenses its cell and stack designs, and system designs, to manufacturers, which build them into their own power and hydrogen products. Its website lists partnerships with Doosan in South Korea, Weichai in China, DENSO in Japan, Delta Electronics in Taiwan and Thermax in India, and a megawatt-scale electrolyser demonstrator with Shell in Bangalore, which the company says produced its first hydrogen in May 2025. It says Doosan Fuel Cell began mass production of power systems using its technology at a factory in South Korea in July 2025. In Britain, it says, it opened a pilot manufacturing plant at Redhill, Surrey, in January 2020.

Design and documentation.

Hydrogen and fuel cell companies sell equipment that most people never see in use. An electrolyser splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity; a fuel cell runs the reaction the other way, turning hydrogen into electricity. In the PEM designs made by several firms in this guide, the work happens in stacks of thin membranes and plates, assembled into larger systems that are often delivered in standard shipping containers, painted white or pale grey and lined up in rows at an industrial site.

That makes the sector’s public image a matter of pictures and words more than products. Company websites lean on photographs of factory floors, stacks being assembled, container rows beside wind turbines or refineries, and the vehicles that use the gas: hydrogen buses, delivery vans and, in the warehouse market, fuel-cell forklifts. Products tend to carry short, technical names, and greens and blues, suggesting water, air and renewable power, are a common choice.

The firms differ in what they actually make. Some build electrolysers to produce hydrogen; others build fuel cells to use it; and Plug Power says it covers production, storage, transport and use in one business. Several are listed companies, so their history is told as much in stock-exchange announcements, fundraisings and restructurings as in product launches, and a company’s own claims about capacity or cost should be read as claims.

The industry meets at trade fairs such as Hannover Messe in Germany and the Hydrogen Technology Expo, where stand design, demonstration stacks and project announcements do much of the brand work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes its equipment — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A licensor, not a factory brand.

Its longest partnership ended in 2025. Bosch had been Ceres’s first manufacturing partner, the company says, from 2018. On 20 February 2025 eeNews Europe reported that Robert Bosch would stop industrialising solid oxide fuel cell power systems and focus on electrolysers, that it had told Ceres it would seek to end their partnership in an orderly way while meeting its contracts, and that it would sell its minority holding of about 17 per cent. Ceres’s chief executive said the decision reflected Bosch’s new strategy rather than its view of Ceres’s technology.

The listing changed too. In June 2023 the company moved from AIM to the London Stock Exchange’s Main Market; Imperial reported the debut in July 2023, and English Wikipedia lists Ceres Power Holdings plc as a member of the FTSE 250 index. Since then the company has continued to add partners. In March 2026, it says, it signed a strategic partnership with Centrica on fuel cell power for the UK and Europe, and in April 2026 it launched Ceres Endura, a solid oxide stack platform. It also names data centres, industry and shipping among the markets its partners serve.

Ceres has also gathered recognition beyond the MacRobert. Its history lists the London Stock Exchange’s Green Economy Mark in October 2019, membership of the Hydrogen Council from June 2025, and a Net Zero Champion title at the 2026 Engineering Matters Awards. English Wikipedia notes that the UK government’s Hydrogen Strategy named Ceres, with ITM Power and Johnson Matthey, among British companies at the forefront of hydrogen technology, and that Ceres was a founding member of the Long Duration Energy Storage Council.

For a design guide, Ceres Power shows how a company that sells licences, not machines, presents a technology through its partners. Compare ITM Power, another British hydrogen company, and Bloom Energy, which builds its own solid oxide systems. For this guide we use a deep teal and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ceres Power’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.