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I did not know such a thing existed. Anyone have any better shots of the "GE Show Power?"

American companies are active in the wind energy arena. Consider General Electric's Windpower business. General Electric has started to take both wind and Solar Power seriously lately, which is typical of the large American companies once these technologies get to a certain stage. The US has a mixed research environment, with much of the basic research happening in Universities under Government funding and guidelines.
This research model may prove to be flawed in the long run, simply because foreign corporations and students have perhaps just as easy access to research produced in US Universities as do US corporations, given that over half the PhD candidate positions in engineering in the US are given to foreign students.
Still, it would be kind of silly to claim that the US doesn't make significant contributions to global research, simply because the model in the US has most of the basic research occurring in University rather than corporate labs. The problem for the US is that America has to sell nearly half a trillion dollars of corporate assets per year to foreign nations to pay for its trade deficit, resulting in the loss of fundamental research capacities like IBM's former world class storage systems research labs in Silicon Valley, which sold for a mere $2 billion. Sell, oh, two hundred of those each year and it really puts a crimp in your long term plans.
Still, there's no chance the US will address this problem because to speak of it is politically incorrect, so in the future countries which care about their trade balance will be the wealthy ones who can support research.

Firstly, the company mentioned in the article description is called Hydro Quebec for a reason - much of the electric power they produce is hydroelectric.

So, if you had to convert **ALL** cars in Quebec to electric power, you would have to build SIX TIMES AS MUCH dams in the north than there are right now. So, there is no way on earth that all north-american cars could be economically converted to hydro-electric power.

Liberal is not a dirty word.

Why? Well, to help their little friends in the gas industry...

GE makes a 3.6 megawatt turbine. That's 6 times as big, in case you are innumerate too.

but I haven't yet seen cost figures that make it worthwhile.

Because you are an ignoramus who does not even know what's going on, and you are too stupid to look before posting. Even when you are right, you discredit it with all the blatantly wrong things you claim as truth.

Had this been a Windows-based system, the torrent of comments about how unreliable the OS and platform fundementally was would be huge.

Funny, just because this ships for "industrial strength" AIX / Solaris RISC systems (see specs on pg 8), I don't see any cheap, reflexive comments about the platform.

I guess the message here is that good or bad code can be written for any architecture.

Check out the last page of this. What it says is server is Compaq/Unix (which is either dec unix or SCO unix) and the desktop display is NT. All the processing is done on the client side and the servers simply hold the data. HUMMMM.

Extra space in the link. Try this: http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada_so ftware/en/xa21.htm

Product manual for the GE Harris XA/21 Power Management System SCADA unit:

http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada_ so ftware/en/downloads/xa21_overview.pdf">

Standards
Standards benefit the vendor as
well as the customer. XA/21? is
built on a foundation of industry
and de-facto standards:
* UNIX(R) * ODBC
* POSIX(R) * DNP 3.0
* UCA? * ICCP
* MVME * SQL
* DXF graphics exchange format
* TCP/IP-based Networking
* ANSI(R) C, FORTRAN
* X Windows Systems
* IEC(R) 870-6 TASE.2
* ELCOM 90

I just saw on TV (TLC I think) that Denmark was building wind generators offshore...

Here is my idea, we build a powerplant (hopefully wind/solar but nuclear is ok too) and hook the generator up to a hydrogen refinery (a la iceland)... that way the power can be stored (ok not perfect efficiency but still pretty good)...

I think we should do what makes the most sense. For instance, if we're burning fuel to make heat and we need electricity too, we should look at heat engines to convert a little heat to power along the way. It probably makes more sense to create storable fuels via chemical or biological processes (like crop wastes or the hydrogen from algae trick) instead of converting solar or nuclear electricity into hydrogen. Then there are the no-brainers, like compact fluorescent bulbs, hybrid vehicles, insulation and daylighting. None of this is rocket science, it's just attention to detail.

GE manufactures a turbine rated for 3.6MW output. Ge is currently an industry leader in these types of turbines though, they are desiged primarily for offshore use. Smaller MW ratings between 1.5 and 2.8 are more common. Unfortunately, even with wind turbines producing @ 3MW it would require approximately 1.26 Million of them to meet the U.S.'s current power demands. Currently Coal plants are responsible for the majority of our power capacity in the U.S.

While the *idea* of wind power is certainly a nice one, and the notion of helping the environmement is well intentioned, the reality is that wind is insufficient as a power source and as a result - it's ability to displace the most polluting source, coal, will be ineffective. Other solutions will be required to truly solve the pollution/capacity problem that we face.

A potentially viable start to "solving" some fo these problems would be to distribute residential power generation, especially in dense urban areas. Technologies such as fuel cells, and compact turbines could be used for this. An added benefit of this strategy would be zero emissions and heat reclemation in the case of fuel cells, and better regulatory control over the emissions of compact gas fired turbines.

My two cents.

CAT Entertainment services can have a truck anywhere in the US in 24-26 hours with a complete setup. GE Energy Services also rents truck generators 6KW-22MW and portable AC and chiller systems. Looking at their locations, they should be able to reach anywhere in the US in 8-12 hours.

Yeah, GE is the man and the man wants to keep you down, keep thinking that. /sarcasm

Now back to reality GE is leading many areas of alternative energy including work towards one of the first commercially viable home fuel cells See here

I have been waiting for GE to make good on their HomeGen for several years but the web page hasn't changed in years. The HomeGen was even announced here on Sept. 17 2000. I believe even the Colaman product has been posted
here before. I have been ready to fork over wads of cash for this technology for over 5 years but all I keep hearing is "Just a few months". I may just have to get some coconuts and make batteries like the professor on Giligan's Island.

I have to disagree with this. Just because these "mainstream" companies offer a product, it does not make that product mainstream. General Electric makes a lot of refrigerators, lightbulbs etc., which are mainstream, but I don't think you can claim that a 480Mw gas turbine is mainstream. It is mainstream if a large portion of everyday (i.e., non-expert - this means non-programmers/sysadmins/etc. for software) users actually use it.

How about this?

Sorry if this sounds a bit sharp

Feel free, I explained badly. I didn't mean literally a capacitor you find in Maplins. I meant in general terms some short term storage medium which I was hoping someone else would fill in.

I ask again: where are these commercial fuel cells?

Personally I'm looking forwards to one of these, though if you want to see where a lot of them are being used then the Ballard web site is a good place to start.

How long does it take to build up mass in a new technology?

The good thing about hydrogen is that it can be easily extracted from a number of sources and in a number of different ways. I've even seen a "hydrogen gas station in a box" for sale, where all you provide is water and electricity. This means a much lower barrier to building infrastructure, as opposed to a power source that is geographically limited and has to be securely transported.

I'm going to be using a Zimmer frame before these babies are parked at the mall in large numbers.

If you are in your 50s then probably. It will be at least 30 years (imho) before fuel cell cars start to outnumber petrol cars, and that's with governments taxing the hell out of petrol and imposing highly punative emissions fines. That's fine though, as we are stuck on this planet for a long time to come yet.

Phillip.

Link to GE fuel cells

I actually used some of these, these and these to build
some of these. They
tried to stop me by using these
and these
but I did not give in!
I know a guy and he helped me to bring these in so we could design and design some more and build some of these and these and fight everyone off and scary the rest.

So finally, I could use more of
these and these and these to get my freakingly cool nuclear powered microprocessor.

No doubt - GE is already well on the way to producing such a beast with PlugPower.

Granted, we are a ways away - but the potential to get better efficiencies is there - If you install a Fuel Cell for the house, you don't rate it on pure power generation efficiency when comparing to the grid since they produce a LOT of heat - so most prototype designs are setup to heat your hot water as well. When this is done the efficiency of the units overall goes way up when looking at your total energy bill. The interestin gthing is - most of the home fuel cell units are supposed to run off natural gas since its available to many folks - but if a Hydrogen cell in a car were more efficient it would be way cool to go partially off grid by plugging the car in :)

Indeed. Just last week I saw a 24,000kVA backup power system. It's 5 tractor trailers, one of which contains a modified jet engine. The bad news is that it puts out 13.8kV or more. CS majors - don't hook that to your PC. Rent one today!

Because the power provideres LIKE their state sponsered monopoly. It is in their interest to suffer line losses, as opposed to people putting up solar, or heating their homes with co-generation solutions GE's fuel cell solution that does NOT do co-generation, and you still can't buy or this stirling cycle engine that needs to have the cool side cooled, you could use this in a radiant heat system and a hot water tank pre-heater. (Yea, if mass produced could be in a $3k range or less, but is $16K today)

How does the power company keep its monopoly? By requiring you to take out insurance to have a grid-intertied power generation JUST to reduce your load on the grid. (In my case $180 a year. That happens to be $10 less than the electricity my 'proposed' PV would have generated in a year at $0.07 kwH) Why the insurance? Because the utility workes might get a shock....nevermind if there is no AC power on an intertie unit, the unit shuts down.

Look at oil prices, at $20 a barrel. Why? Because right now, there is a vocal group calling to get off Arab-obtained oil as a way to avoid/solve the terrorist issue. By keeping oil prices low, the demand to move from cheap energy to more expensive renewable solutions will be blunted, and the 'energy independance' voices will fade, as the masses go back to driving their big SUV's and cheap power.

Unfortunately, the latest word is next summer at the earliest. Plug Power reported a $30 mil loss as of their past fiscal year and their press releases talk more about financial transactions rather than actual sales or product delivery so things aren't looking all that great for GE or Plug Power's offering right now.

What's worse for Plug Power is their initial offering doesn't take advantage of the fact that the fuel cell produces hot water as a waste product. Were they to design the unit to feed the hot water to a water heater, the fuel cell efficiency would be greater than 70%. Supposedly, the water capture feature won't appear until the second generation offering which makes you wonder who would buy the first one - especially at $15k a pop.

By coincidence, Chevron Oil in San Ramon, CA fired up their 200 KW unit today for the first time. That puppy set them back $850,000 or around $4,250 per KW. More info is available at
SF Chronicle.

Notice the odd ratios - The Chevron unit that's real and online cost about twice what GE's not-available unit is supposed to come in at. Maybe there's a hint there as to why Plug Power can't deliver.

12345, it's in Schenectady, New York and it belongs to General Electric, Power Systems. (i live in 12304, blocks away.) I love using that one when pestered by Radio Shack people and other places that ask for zip and I used it all of the time in Subscriptions.

Too bad that when I actually am at GEPS (as a "shadow IT" contract worker) I can't get anything but CNBC streamed on the intranet (they rebroadcast it from an internal site, live, continuously, as they own it).

However, I'd like to point to General Electric HomeGen. Published reports and stats on this show a very extremely low emmissions rate. How [sic] do that happen? I have to admit that I'm not up to the technology involved (my EE is twenty years out of date) but the specs on pollution show very low CO output.

I was going to put some stats here about the FC, but I just browsed the site and I don't see them anymore. (They were there about five months ago.) As I recall, the thing does 7KW full bore and costs about US$12,000, but I can't re-check those stats.

This is a re-badged device. I forget who the OEM is, but I'm sure a search would turn them up.

I'm actually looking at these generators to

extend operation of our computer center during power failure

reduce battery maintenence costs (we spent US$12K last year on new batteries, and will again this year

reduce our battery count to gain space. (With the generators, we will only need 1 hour of run time on batteries, vs. the 72 we have now.)

My point is that if, for example, the major server farms in the Bay Area started generating their own power using clean, efficient systems such the Capstone microturbine or fuel cells, it would go a long way towards relieving the shortage. The server farms win because they get a reliable source of clean power that they can control (so if they have enough capacity, they are safe from rolling blackouts). The public wins because, with the peak demand reduced, the impact of the "crisis" would be much reduced. They win again because they are spared the waste and wait associated with the long, drawn-out process of getting a new megagenerator plant built. Mostly the ones that lose are the power utilities who now have to deal with competition from their former customers that is more agile, more efficient, and more responsive than they are. Thus they (the utilities) have a strong incentive to throw as many regulatory roadblocks up as they can.

The power shortages that CA faces are due largely to the fact that, after deregulation, the utility companies decided to sell off a bunch of their plants and buy the extra power from the free market, and pocket the difference in price. Sometimes, a little regulation is a good thing.

A little regulation is also often a dangerous thing. The situation you have identified is half the problem, but only half. First of all, it's not a free market in power: there are all kinds of restrictions on the buying and selling of power, up to and including the requirement that all power trading be done in a particular building (talk about mistaking the market for the marketplace!). Secondly, while they partially deregulated the supply side of the equation, they did not deregulate the demand side. PG&E is now bankrupt because they were buying power at hugely inflated rates (largely from their parent company) but were forbidden from passing most of those costs on to their customers. There have been rate hikes, but they don't even begin to reflect the increase costs of power. The result is that the market system, in which supply, demand and price form a self-regulating feedback loop (i.e. supply is less than demand, price goes up, people conserve, demand goes down, prices come down) is broken.

The power crisis in California is not a market failure, it is a political policy failure. The problem is that the market has not been allowed to function.

There aren't many distributors yet, but I bet their list will grow by leaps and bounds after the California debacle.

--- Chris