Get Off The Grid: GE Announces Home Fuel Cells

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."

Comments

Re:Great!

[spot]

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).

Become your own utility co?

[tetrad]

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?

"Less emissions"

[webrunner]

I should hope that a refridgerator-sized generator has less emissions then an entire power plant!
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Re:Wow

[cybercuzco]

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.