A fuel cell (FC) system includes a fuel processor plus subsystems to manage air, water, and thermal energy, and electric power. The overall system is high-priced and needs peripheral devices. In this paper, a FC simulator is designed and constructed with the electrical characteristics of a fuel cell generation (FCG) system, using uses a simple buck converter to overcome these disadvantages. The characteristic voltage and current (V-I) curve for the FC simulator is controlled by a simplified linear function. In addition, to verify FCG system performance and operation, a full-bridge DC/DC converter and a single-phase DC/AC inverter were designed and constructed for FC applications. Close agreement between the simulation and experimental results confirms the validity and usefulness of the proposed FC simulator.