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Get Off The Grid: GE Announces Home Fuel Cells

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the keep-your-mitts-of-my-juice dept.

Scareduck writes: "GE has announced a nifty home fuel cell system, the HomeGen 7000, that they claim will be able to generate enough electricity for a single family dwelling. 'About the size of a refrigerator,' there's no moving parts, but they still want to inspect the thing on an annual basis. All you need is a natural gas or propane connection. They claim that hydrocarbon emissions are much lower than conventional power plants, plus you get free hot water or space heating with the waste heat. GE's looking at a 2001 launch date, but they're taking names for early adopters now."

11 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great! by spot · · Score: 5
    These systems are only marketed and sold be GE, the company behind the technology and manufacturing is Plug Power, a publicly traded company (ie you can invest). The other leading fuel cell company is Ballard Power, also available on nasdaq. Plug is aimed at the home market, and ballard at automobiles (think about the california zero emissions regulations).

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  2. Wow by v4mpyr · · Score: 4

    This thing would be great if it didn't require the natural gas or propane. I thought the whole point of these new fangled power systems was to move away from the dependancies of natural resources. Oh well, if it turns out to be as good as they're saying I'll be getting an extra one or two just to overclock my whole home network.

    Just imagine a Beowulf clust . . . oh, never mind. ;-)

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    1. Re:Wow by cybercuzco · · Score: 5
      This thing would be great if it didn't require the natural gas or propane.

      Its all about the efficiency. Home fuel cells can get up to 80% efficient with cogeneration, 40-50 without. A natural gas power plant would be very very lucky to hit 40 % efficiency, and forget about seeing that with a coal power plant. Not only that but the emissions are much cleaner than even a NG turbine, since theres no combustion, NOx is reduced significantly, its mostly just giving off carbon dioxide and water. This is not a revolution in power generation, but an evolution, so far for fuel sources weve gone from solar to wood to coal to oil and now to natural gas and maybe back to solar again. Coincidentally each transition has resulted in a massive economic boost. Also, you can use electricity and air to actually produce natrual gas, which is what they did back in the 1880's before the discovered they could mine the stuff, so in theory you could just hook up a big solar array out in the desert somewhere and make natural gas and pipe it out to people everywhere.

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  3. Re: sorry this one is formatted properly by deglr6328 · · Score: 4

    H2O -->electrolysis--> 2 H2 1 O2

    2H2(from the electrolyzed water) + CO2(from your breath, the air, whatever) ---> CH4(methane [natural gas]) + O2

    robert zubrin is proposing this as the method by which a mars spacecraft could produce its own fuel for the return trip using the CO2 marian atmosphere and sunlight BTW. :]

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  4. Re:Why natural gas over hydrogen? by steveha · · Score: 4
    Nowadays, it seems that Fuel cells are always mentioned in conjunction with natural gas. Why natural gas over water?

    Fuel cells work by reacting hydrogen with oxygen to make water and electricity. You can't put water into a fuel cell and have it work.

    You could split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then run the fuel cell off the hydrogen. If you did that, the fuel cell wouldn't actually care where you got the hydrogen; it still wouldn't be a water cell.

    There are several problems with hydrogen for the home. No one has hydrogen lines running to his house; no company is set up to provide hydrogen even if someone was ready; and hydrogen is difficult to contain safely and effectively. (The tiny hydrogen molecules can seep through many materials, even including some metals, so you would probably want to use liquid hydrogen, which you would have to refrigerate... aack.) If you want to make your own hydrogen from water, you will need to get a lot of electricity from somewhere and you will need to store the hydrogen... see above for some of the problems.

    But recently an almost magical catalyst was discovered: feed it natural gas, and it strips hydrogen off. It's simple: natural gas and oxygen in, and electricity, waste heat, and carbon dioxide out. (You can also do this trick with methanol, or even gasoline, so we may get fuel-cell cars soon.)

    With natural gas, you can just hook it up and it will just work. Direct hydrogen feed would be much messier.

    As to the science fair project... I don't think you correctly understand what was going on. It sounds to me like the fuel cell would run on hydrogen and oxygen at night, producing water; and during the day solar cells would split the water back into hydrogen and oxygen. As long as nothing wears out or breaks, and as long as the sun shines, such a device could run continuously.

    steveha

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  5. Too bad for this company... by pclinger · · Score: 4

    that they didn't come out with these back in November for all those y2k "it's the end of the world" idiots. They coulda made a killing.
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  6. Become your own utility co? by tetrad · · Score: 5
    Why get off the grid? Why not stay on the grid and sell surplus electricity back to the power companies? With deregulation occurring in much of the US, this may be a real possibility...

    We've seen distributed computing, is it time for distributed power generation?

  7. "Less emissions" by webrunner · · Score: 5

    I should hope that a refridgerator-sized generator has less emissions then an entire power plant!
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    ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
  8. Single family dwelling? by Frac · · Score: 4

    Depends on what kind of family... I have enough electrical appliances in my dorm room to drain out a couple of third-world country power plants...

  9. Re:Interesting ... only a few concerns by cybercuzco · · Score: 4
    1: hydrogen is not as explosive as you might think, yes it is explosive, most energetic molecules are, however, if a hydrogen tank leaks, the hydrogen will disperse to nonexplosive levels extremely quickly, since it is so much lighter, and therefore a faster moving molecule, than say gasoline. leave a hydrogen tank open for 10 minutes, and everything is gone, leave a gas tank open for 10 minutes, its still highly explosive. Id be more worried about local yokels inspecting the gas tanks on their car while smoking a cigar, theyd be evolved out of the species quite quickly

    2.This is true, however when the NG is reformulated to extract the hydrogen, the sulfur is extracted as well. I think the figure that ive heard is its down to about 2 ppm, and the acceptable level is about 10 or so but im not sure on that. Even if they do need a catalyst that has to be swapped out, it would be like getting the oil changed on your car or something, plus the article says they will check the things and service them yearly, at which time i assume this would be done

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  10. But will it power... by alex_white · · Score: 4

    My Pentium IV? And never mind using the generated heat for space heating. Powering up the PIV should be enough..