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Consumer Hydrogen Fuel Cells
axis-techno-geek writes: "Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, BC (in Canada, eh), has stated that it will start production this friday of their consumer level Nexa(tm) hydrogen fuel cell (article here). The power module generates up to 1200 watts of unregulated DC electrical power that can keep going as long as it is supplied with hydrogen, and produces no toxic by-products (i.e. you can use it in your home). They also have plans for a 250kW unit. No price as of yet."
Any word on hydrogen storage? How dangerous is it?
I worked 2 blocks away from one of their offices in Burnaby, and always wondered how they were storing the hydrogen in those test buses that circled the industrial complex......
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They have prototype buses running fuel cells - They look a bit like hunchback buses, but they don't reek of diesel! Seems like good timing, perhaps we can ween ourselves off the internal combustion engine without resorting to huge battery packs
air and light and time and space
What I want to know is where we're going to get the hydrogen. It says in the article that you can get it from "methanol, natural gas, petroleum or renewable sources." What are the renewable sources (besides methanol)? More importantly, what are the sources that will give a net energy gain in the process from start to finish? There's no point in having renewable fuel if we need to burn coal or oil to make it useable.
So how would you go about building, say, a 120V inverter to run off this gizmo without wasting too much energy or winding up with voltage stability problems on the output? Switching power supply to generate a fixed DC from the unregulated DC?
Here is another link about how hydrogen full cells work. http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/stia/studen ts/osgood.htm
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The short-term question is where are people going to get the hydrogen from? That infrastructure's not in place yet.
I think one scenario that would make this thing particularly kick-ass right away is this: if the generator is to be used just for backup and emergencies - i.e. it will be idle most of the time - then you could slowly generate your own hydrogen at home from tap water and a solar-powered hydrolysis rig. FREE! Take that, Exxon.
The hydrogen can be generated (as the article says) locally. Since hydrogen tends to leave any container because its molecules are so small... storing it doesn't make sense for any length of time.
If hydrogen is generated locally (by stripping hydrogen from say methanol, ethanol, or gasoline) and feed directly into the cell, all the hydrogen storage you have to worry about is your little buffer between the hydrogen generator and the fuel cell (likely a very short tube).
No need to store large amounts of a gas that just won't stay in any container.
Or how about their pockets?
Think about that next time you stick that disposable lighter full of compressed butane in your front pocket, inches the family jewels.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought it was powdered aluminum and some other chemicals.
If the aluminum had already oxidized then it would have been less dangerous
Noise...72 dba at 1 meter. Where is all this noise coming from? Hydrogen leakes.
That sort of number implies they're using a cooling fan (and chose a noisy-but-efficient one).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My train of thought:
Then I thought: ``would there be a way to pipe drinking-quality water into the home?'' The answer, I think, is basicly no since you'd need to chlorinate to keep the miles of pipes from becomming a breeding ground.
Then I thought: ``what about piping hydrogen to the house and making pure water there?''
If people were to power their homes with hydrogen, then there would be a household source of pure hydrogen. Here's my question:
Obviously if you have pure hydrogen and clean air going into a fule cell, you could possably get pure H2O out. Is this the case? and How much water is generated per KWh? (maby not enough for drinking water.)
--Ben
Arguably it wasn't, but GM used one of its own prototype electric cars as a political lever on the technological readiness issue -- claiming it couldn't manage even a hundred miles on a charge, etc. They'd contracted Ballard to build the cells; Ballard built a battery pack that could manage more than twice what GM was claiming to Congress (around 200mi), but GM's contract allowed GM to suppress the information, ultimately forcing California to roll back state legislation on ZEVs (10% of all sales by the early 2000s, IIRC).
Source: Taken for a Ride, by Jack Doyle. Sorry if I've misremembered the details, but that's the general picture.
Here's a simple system :
solar or wind generation of electricity
electrolytic separation into H and O
low to med pressure gas storage
H O to fuel cell
Water back to gas generator
Sure it's elaborate but it is a clean way to store the day for nighttime use. I think we ought to use all these out of business fabs to make Si Solar cells.
And don't get started on how dirty fabs are...
No matter how meaningful quantities hydrogen are generated, greenheads will hate the fact that mother earth will incur vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Shall we address the infrastructure problems associated with hydrogen? The costs of retooling fuel distribution channels to handle hydrogen?
The advantage to switching to hydrogen or another easily-synthesized fuel like methanol is that it centralizes the power generation, allowing you to switch to a different system (solar, nuclear, hamster wheels, or what-have-you) without requiring another upgrade to all of the cars and service stations on a continent. This is a very respectable accomplishment.
You can also generally install better scrubbers on a coal power plant than on a car, even before you start switching to alternate power sources.
Another issue conveniently ignored is the storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in its current form, is not particularly dense, requiring large tanks to store the equivalent energy stored in fossil fuels.
That's why I like the idea of using methanol as a fuel. You could handle it in existing service stations without too much refitting, and you could burn it in a conventional internal combustion engine (though you'd probably want a ceramic engine to avoid corrosion over time). Fuel cells can process it too, though with greater difficulty. Methanol's boiling point is low enough that you'd have to store it under pressure, like propane, but this isn't too difficult (we already have the infrastructure for it for propane).
Methanol can be produced by fermenting plants if you're desperate, or produced by direct synthesis if you have a source of power, hydrogen, and CO2 handy. Plunk a fuel plant next to a big city, and you have all three (water, exhaust, and the local power plant).
This gives us the advantages of a hydrocarbon fuel without having to short-circuit the carbon cycle or depend on exhaustible fossil fuel deposits.
Of course, we'll only really switch when fossil fuels become scarce enough to make this cost-effective.
Back in 1996 as part of a technological entrepreneurship program for students. (The program was put out by the Canadian Institude for Technological Advancement, for which I cannot find a link.)
The bus engine, powered by fuel cells, was very quiet. Fuel cells themselves have no moving parts so they don't make much noise.
When riding that bus the loudest part of the journey were the air brakes.
I've seen a number of comments pointing out the noise of this generator: 72 dB at 1 meter. A car is about that at 20 meters, so what they're really saying is that this generator is as noisy at 1 meter as a car is at 20 meters.
Better still imagine this... Put these puppies on every closed landfill and run them off the methane. Staten Island could power a good portion of NYC for the next 100 yrs.
The ugly little windmills of the late 70s and 80s are history (although some of the little buggers are still spinning.) Modern windmills are enormous, with blades the size of a 747's wingspan. New models can generate 2.5 Megawatts, but that's by no means a limit (output has jumped by 100-fold in the past 15 years.)
It'd still take a lot of those turbines to replace a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, there's a lot of development to be done (and lots of space in this country and offshore.) By the time we've finished building the next generation of nuclear plants, turbine output and efficiency will have increased significantly. When we're trying to figure out what to do with the first trainloads of waste, most non-nuclear countries will be building turbines and be generating power without fuel.
As to the ugliness... Well, I think they look pretty nice, actually. And if you've ever driven through the Great Plains, you'll probably agree that a few windmills aren't going to get in anyone's way.
"All this noise"?
If you put your ear 1 meter away from a car engine or a lawnmower, you're going to hear a lot more than 72 dba. Their noise levels are usually measured at 20 meters.
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The advantage of Hydrogen as a by-product of water is that it does _not_ require derivatives of fossile fuels, thus not polluting. Using natural gas kind of destroys that principle. Much easier and cost effective to buy some distilled water and use solar energy to split it, store the hygrogen for the night. + you get no carbon residue or emissions.
I follow the 2 major laws of thermodynamics : maximum entropy, minimum enthalpy.
Look forward a bit, for a moment© Ignore the adoption sequence and other transitional aspects, or whether this is even a good direction© What else would change if we used more locally-generated electricity?
One thing we should recognize is that some of these newer forms of power generation differ radically from our current grid in a very familiar way: AC vs© DC©
Power on the present electrical grid is AC, largely because AC can be transferred over long distances with less loss than DC ¥mainly because it's easy to transform AC across a wide range of voltages© The fact that many electrical plants use generators ¥AC is actually not as relevant©
But power from fuel cells, solar cells, and most other systems that don't involve spinning something in a magnetic field, produce DC power©
If you were to try to drive normal house power from a fuel or solar cell ¥and, yes, people do this, you'd need some sort of inverter to convert their DC to standard house AC ¥120V, 60Hz in US©
Of course, you already have many devices ¥esp© computers which expect DC and are powered from the wall© So you have rectifiers which convert AC to DC© We tend to call these "wall warts" transformers because they also tend to transform the power from 120V to a lower level©
We might wish to eliminate this bulky local DC/AC/DC conversion© We might find ourselves changing the nature of home wiring© What would work well? Would there be a low number of desired DC voltages that devices would desire? Would we send a wire bundle to each outlet to support the variants? What would such an outlet plate best look like? Would we want AC as well for motors and for the ease of voltage transformation? Or will we just find that we are better off with AC and accept both of those transformations?
Found this while looking up parts for my Mini...looks like BMW is headed somewhere.