Ballard Power Systems Brand Guidelines: The Burnaby Fuel Cell Maker That Began as a Battery Lab

A battery laboratory that turned to fuel cells.

Ballard Power Systems began in 1979 as Ballard Research Inc., founded by the geophysicist Geoffrey Ballard with Keith Prater and Paul Howard, English Wikipedia says. Its first subject was not hydrogen at all: the company was set up to research and develop high-energy lithium batteries.

The turn came in 1989, when, according to the same source, the company committed itself to proton exchange membrane fuel cells — the PEM technology in which hydrogen and oxygen react across a thin polymer membrane to produce electricity. The name it trades under today, Ballard Power Systems, describes that product rather than the laboratory.

Ballard went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1993 and was listed on the Nasdaq in 1995, Wikipedia says; its shares trade under the ticker BLDP in both markets, the company’s website shows. In 2000 it opened a fuel cell manufacturing facility in Burnaby, British Columbia, in the Vancouver area; Burnaby is where the company says it is headquartered today.

For much of its history Ballard was tied to the car industry. On 1 February 2008 it spun out the Automotive Fuel Cell Cooperation, or AFCC, a private company developing fuel cell stacks for cars, owned at the start by Daimler, Ford and Ballard itself, Wikipedia says. Ballard kept the listed business and turned to non-automotive uses, buses first among them.

Buses, trains, ships and backup power.

Since the AFCC split, Ballard has described itself as a supplier of fuel cells for heavy-duty transport and stationary power rather than private cars. Wikipedia lists bus makers among its customers — Van Hool in Belgium, New Flyer in Canada and Solaris in Poland — and adds trains, mining trucks, marine uses and backup power for infrastructure such as radio towers. It also records a development partnership with Audi on automotive fuel cells, and a strategic partnership signed in 2018 with the Chinese engine maker Weichai Power, which took a 19.9 per cent shareholding and planned with Ballard to supply fuel cell systems for trucks, buses and forklifts in China.

The company’s current range is organised in a few named families. FCgen is its line of PEM fuel cell stacks; FCmove is a family of modules designed to be built into heavy-duty vehicles; and FCwave is a cabinet-based module for marine and stationary uses, the company says. In March 2026 a 1 MW FCwave system was used at the Phynix Baseload Power Hub, part of the CrossWind Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind project in the Netherlands, where stored hydrogen is turned back into electricity, the trade journal Renewable Watch reported in August 2026.

On where its products are made, Ballard says it is headquartered in Burnaby with facilities in North America and Europe, and that it also manufactures in Bend, Oregon, where it builds FCmove products for the United States market. Its European arm, Ballard Power Systems Europe, is based in Hobro, Denmark, and handles application engineering, sales and after-sales service, according to the company’s website.

The company’s website frames the business around markets rather than products, grouping its work under bus, truck, marine, rail, power generation, and off-road and material handling, with a product finder that matches modules to each use.

Hydrogen and its presentation.

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.

From fuel cell supplier to hydrogen power provider.

The last two years have changed the company’s shape. On 31 July 2025 Ballard announced what it called a strategic realignment, led by Marty Neese, who became chief executive that month after serving on its board since 2015. The company said it would cut operating costs, mainly through workforce reductions, discontinue programmes outside its core, concentrate on the fuel cell products with the strongest commercial traction, and aim for positive cash flow by the end of 2027.

A larger change followed in 2026. On 23 June, The Canadian Press reported that Ballard had signed a deal to buy GeoPura, a British company that develops, leases and sells hydrogen power units and supplies hydrogen fuel from three production sites, including a half share in HyMarnham Power. The two companies were already partners: GeoPura’s units use Ballard fuel cell modules to turn hydrogen into electricity for off-grid power, Renewable Watch reported. Neese called it a transformative acquisition. The deal was completed in late August 2026, according to Renewable Watch, and GeoPura’s founder Andrew Cunningham, who set up the business in 2019, became Ballard’s president, reporting to Neese, as the company’s website now shows. Lord Harrington, a former UK business minister, sits on Ballard’s board and chairs GeoPura.

The result is a company that still calls itself Ballard, is still listed on the TSX and Nasdaq, and still makes PEM stacks, but now also sells hydrogen-fuelled generators under the GeoPura HPU name and supplies the hydrogen to run them.

For a design guide, Ballard Power Systems shows how a technology company’s name can outlast its first idea: a battery laboratory became a fuel cell maker and now a hydrogen power provider. Compare Hydrogenics, another Canadian fuel cell name, and Plug Power. For this guide we use a navy, a mid blue and a mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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