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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."
Thats just the right size for RV's. Lots of power their to run a computer, tv, and a few lights.
God, root, what is the difference?
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......
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Unfortunately the hydrogen problem's not solved yet... Would people feel OK if they've got a highly flammable and explosive gas cannister in their home?
Oh well, think of the pretty lights it can make if you bomb a neigbourhood filled with a couple of them...
"It will definitely be a premium price product and it will attract buyers who are willing to pay for these premium attributes of small, light, clean and quiet."
Ballard won't reveal the price or initial production volume of the Nexa fuel cell, which will provide power as long as it is supplied fuel.
I guess we'd have to pay both arms and both legs for this....
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Emitting only heat and water as byproducts of power generation, the NexaTM power module allows OEM products to be used in indoor environments and other locations not possible with conventional power sources such as internal combustion engine generators.
Assuming you stored the water byproduct in a bottle, this begs the question...
If you found a mouse in the bottle, would you get a free beer?
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
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
I think there is an enormous opportunity for North America to move to a distributed power system. Imagine this: natural gas feeds into your basement fuel cell, where you generate electricity for your entire house, plus you crack some of the natural gas into hydrogen during the day, to fill up your fuel cell car when you connect it overnight. Wired's article The Energy Web has similar ideas (and an opening paragraph that is now quite eerie).
anyone notice lifetime listed in the press release is 1500 hourse? So you have to buy a new one every 2 months? Tackle
If they're quiet enough IRL, this would be a great feature for RVs though. Both from the "green" standpoint and the fact that if you're at a park you won't be annoying the neighbors as much.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Cost...Much more than you want to know.
Lifetime...ONLY 1500 HOURS...What??? That is way to short to be practical except for critical backup cases. I.e. this isn't going to be "mass produced". We aren't quite there yet.
Noise...72 dba at 1 meter. Where is all this noise coming from? Hydrogen leakes.
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
For those insterested, here's a link to a more technical article on Hydrogen Fuel Cells:
a nd _fuel_cells/hydrogen_and_fuel_cells.html
http://www.altenergy.org/2/renewables/hydrogen_
"You'll see it under Christmas trees or powering your Christmas trees by the end of the year," Ballard's Harris said.
Great, now all packaging will read "Hydrogen not included"
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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?
If that is the case why do they list a 'Lifetime' of 1500 hours? That's only ~62 days.. definitely not as long as it is supplied with hydrogen
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Hydrogen seems like a neat way to store and transfer energy. It's a pure, simple, easy to transport, easy to extract form of energy.
However, there are number of issues that makes the short-term outlook for hydrogen difficult to justify running out and buying your own fuel cell...
In order to manufacture hydrogen in any meaningful quantity, "toxic" (environmentalist definition) by-products are an inevitable. To wit:
1. Electrolytic conversion from water requires electricity. The vast amount of electricity generated comes from icky dirty coal.
2. Extraction of hydrogen from fossil fuels still generates some toxic pollutants, and is still in relatively early stages of development.
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?
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.
In the future, wind and/or solar power could provide the greenhouse gas-free hydrogen generation alternative to make it a sound fuel source from an environmentalist standpoint.
Advances in storage mediums, extraction and distribution should one day make hydrogen an exceptional fuel.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
This isn't the first time that there have been people trying to sell fuel cells to the public. Every year or so, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics will hype somebody's fuel cells. One year it's a hydrogen-powered camcorder or laptop battery system, so you can have longer lifespans. The next, it's a fuel cell car. The next, something else.
;)
The problem is that they are a few months too late. California power, more or less, has stabalized. That would have been a great market for them to edge into.
I mean, really. I think fuel cells are a great idea. But where are you going to easily get the hydrogen? Sure, you can get a tank from the welding supply store, but you can get gas from any gas station and Compressed Natural Gas from most gas stations. There aren't any hydrogen pipelines to hook up to, like there are natural gas pipelines.
The real good model is a larger one that can produce substantial amounts of power off of a natural gas line. It just has to fit into a small trailer. You could solve a California-style power crunch (at least, until the Natural Gas lines run out of capacity) by parking a bunch of those all throughout the cities. Nobody gets up in arms about a power plant in their backyard because they don't even know it's there.
And remember, this is another stock listed on the famed Vancouver exchange. This is the same exchange where that company traded for 2 years before the founders realized that the company had no product and the demo was smoke-and-mirrors.
Gentoo Sucks
Yes, Hydrogen can burn, when it reaches appropriate fuel/air mixture.. just like many other chemicals.
Propane or Natural gas are more dangerous than hydrogen.
Everyone thinks hydrogen is severely dangerous because of the Hindenberg disaster... which modern science attributes NOT to the hydrogen in the blimp.. but to the canvas covering of the ship that was, unbeknownst to them at the time, coated in a reflective paint made of SOLID ROCKET FUEL (they did not know that aluminum-oxide and some other chemicals were explosive)
The hindenberg got screwed up because a spark ignited the coating... which quickly spread across the whole ship.
Another fact.. people report seeing huge orange flames billowing from it.. but hydrogen burns as an almost invisible blue flame.... of course, the hydrogen added to the fire... but wasn't the cause.
At least! So only the rich nerds out there (what few are left) can afford them in the short term. Doh!
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Now that I've read stories that they can grow algae in the dark feeding on glucose, as well as use it to exhale hydrogen naturally.. I'm starting to see large vats of algae producing hyrogen for use in fuel cells on a commercial level...
Personally, I give it 10-15 years before fuel cells start hitting the markets in force.
Here is another link about how hydrogen full cells work. http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/stia/studen ts/osgood.htm
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
Hydrogen is no more dangerous... probably LESS dangerous than a normal fuel tank or propane tank or.. the gas pipe coming in to your house.
It is NOT a higly volatile chemical... it just burns when it reaches the correct fuel/air mixture, like anything else.
Why do people think hydrogen is so dangerous?
The long term solution would be to wean the USA off of an economy dependant of international oil supplies.
While many oil and energy companies may want to retain control of their assets in the area, solutions such as Fuel Cells may ultimately be the most elegant solution to the situation.
Fine, if they want to be poor, we can let them be poor.
This is something that I think the Bush Administration should go after Hard. Unfortunately, he may have some conflicts of interest given the support he has received from these very same oil companies.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
does one get hydrogen? Hydrogen atoms can be removed from Oxygen atoms in water via electrolytic(sp?) cells, correct? Is this practicle? If one wanted a hydrogen-powered house, where would he get the hydrogen? I haven't seen it available around my city like gas is from filling stations...
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grep "xercist"
A fuel cell is only truly zero-emission if it is catalyzing hydrogen gas from zero-emission sources. 95% of our current supply of hydrogen comes from natural gas. So currently the fuel cell is only as clean as the natural gas reforming plant, effectively "burning" that gas and releasing CO2.
They're a great idea, but they're not zero-emission yet.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Is it just me or is this the future???
***I GOT NUTHIN***
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Apparently, acccording to a Toronto Star (www.thestar.com) article, one of the first applications of fuel cells commercially produced is for personal/worksite generators.... like those used on construction sites, or small house size backup generators.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Haha... Read the post before yours...
Looks like science can be profitable and fun after all.
Neat, but i'll wait until i can run my car on somethign more akin to a Joe Cell
-shpoffo
This is just the thing to provide power to my Short Bus when the engine isn't running.
~.Evanrude
This means the sound should be about 400 times less at 20 meters or about 46 dBA at 20 meters. Another way to look at it is that this should be about as loud as a car 20 meters from you when you are one meter from this unit which should be rather quiet. That is unless you drive an old VW bug. :)
It burns clean as long as you have a clean source of hydrogen... There's the rub.
I heard talk of the new Fuel Cell cars still releasing CO due to the need for a speedy source of Hydrogen.
These guys just make the fuel cell, not the hydrogen source, so they shrug and say, "Not my problem..."
Didn't Chrysler vow to have a fuel-cell-powered car in production by the mid 2000's? Any information on how that project is progressing?
My sigs always suck.
Ballard Power Systems launches Nexa hydrogen fuel cell for consumer use.
STEVE ERWIN - Canadian Press
Thursday, September 27, 2001
TORONTO (CP) - Ballard Power Systems is starting commercial production Friday of emission-free fuel cells designed to power anything from home offices to lawn mowers in what it calls a "historic" move forward for alternative energy applications.
Ballard is optimistic the 1.2 kilowatt modules - a pollution-free, hydrogen fuel cell power source for industrial and consumer equipment - will be sought out by numerous manufacturers who want cleaner, quieter and lighter power alternatives in their products.
Analysts, meanwhile, say the release of Nexa's specifications show evidence that wide commercial revenues for Ballard are just around the corner. Until now, the company's sales have mostly come from fuel cell prototypes distributed to companies internationally, including to car and bus makers looking for cleaner running engines.
"They wanted to let the market know that they're ready," said Rich Morrow, a Toronto analyst for CIBC World Markets. "They've given us product specs - size, weight, power output, operating conditions - great detail that was missing before."
Investors also applauded the news, sending shares of Vancouver-based Ballard (TSE: BLD) shares up $2.58 to close at $30.98 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
But the lingering question for analysts is how quickly sales for the likely pricey technology will grow. Ballard has not said what it will charge companies that decide to use Nexa fuel cells in their mass-marketed products.
"That's a piece of the puzzle that's missing here," Morrow said. "In terms of operating efficiency, certainly it's efficient. But what is missing at this point is what's the product going to cost?"
"It will definitely be a premium price product and it will attract buyers who are willing to pay for these premium attributes of small, light, clean and quiet."
Ballard won't reveal the price or initial production volume of the Nexa fuel cell, which will provide power as long as it is supplied fuel.
Ballard's zero-emission fuel cells combine hydrogen - which can be obtained from methanol, natural gas, petroleum or renewable sources - and oxygen from the air to generate electricity without combustion.
"As you can imagine with any new technology, the initial pricing would probably be a little bit higher than the conventional technology," said John Harris, Ballard's vice-president of marketing. "We expect that as volumes grow over the future those prices will come down significantly."
In the meantime, Ballard's new technology could bring down the price of conventional portable generators, said Marko Pencak, a Toronto analyst with CS First Boston.
"I suspect that at this early stage (Ballard is) going to be focusing on the higher-end consumer," Pencak said.
Consumers will first see the technology applied in a portable generator being introduced in the United States this year by Coleman Powermate.
Coleman - which has yet to announce a launch date - says the generators will be ideal for homes, camping and other applications that otherwise would use a conventional generator.
"You'll see it under Christmas trees or powering your Christmas trees by the end of the year," Ballard's Harris said.
The fuel cells are intended to be used as an extended backup or intermittent electrical power source that will run as long as it is refuelled with hydrogen.
"It's not like a battery that would run down and you'd need to go back and recharge it," Harris said.
Also, as opposed to a power source that uses an internal combustion engine, products with the Nexa fuel cells can be used indoors since they're powered by hydrogen and are free of toxic emissions - unlike gas-powered generators.
"There's lots and lots of portable generators out there that are used on construction sites, campgrounds, marine applications," Morrow said. "It could be anything from a guy at his construction site or a guy at his cottage powering power tools, anywhere where there's a power requirement without access to the electricity grid."
Harris said recent Ballard tests had the 1.2-kilowatt generators powering a desktop computer, monitor, printer, fax, stereo system and desktop lamp. He added that they can be easily stored under a desk or in a closet.
Ballard also has prototypes in Asia, Europe and the United States for 250-kilowatt units that could power a factory or residential block. Their wide commercial release could be at least three years away but the company sees a future for the products as the world looks for alternative energy sources to reduce reliance on oil and natural gas.
©Copyright 2001The Canadian Press
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Or does it cost more electricity to break down H20 than it generates?
(Thinks back to the day in chemistry class when he used an electrical current to break down water...)
At any rate, this is outstanding, especially if it can be converted to run water. No more worrying about keeping gas for that generator during a floor or storm. Just stick a siphon pump or a funnell out the window.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is on topic... trust me! =)
The other day I heard the best suggestion yet on what we should do to "pay back" for what they did to on Sept. 11, 2001. We should invest the billions of dollars into products like this hydrogen fuel cell for our cars, and us breaking away from using OIL products/bi-products in our everyday transportation instead of spending billions in bombing a few people.
This way we get rid of the mid eastern funds of doing terrorists attacks and make the U.S. self sufficiant and able to use our own oil for the rest of our needs and not be dependant on other nations for anything.
Invest in the U.S.A. and running them out of their money.
are run into homes, i.e., most california homes.
I'm sure that will help the power crisis... oh wait, what power crisis?
Go Lakers!
I'm not an audio scientist, but according to inverse square law wouldn't that make is about 1/400 as loud?
You make it on the spot from hydrocarbon gasses or liquids:
methane (natural gas as piped to houses)
propane (LPG canisters - typically used for country houses, RVs, barbercues).
butane (Another LPG - typically used for smaller stuff like cigarette lighters. more energy per volume but prefers room temperature to come out of the tank.)
methanol (rubbing alcohol - very toxic)
ethanol (drinking alcohol - very regulated and taxed)
other higher alcohols
gasoline (pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane, etc. plus miscelaneous branched chains and additives)
We don't know yet whether this puppy has its own hydrogen-from-hydrocarbon generator built in or if you need an external one if you want to run it on hidey-carbons rather than hydrogen gas.
Of course you COULD feed it hydrogen gas from a tank of compressed hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, or hydrogen-disolved-in-metal-powder. But a hydrogen-gas system with a large amount of stored gas (rather than enough to make a small popping sound at any one instant) is a major explosion and fire hazard.
Gaseous hydrogen leaks through VERY tiny holes (including the space between metal atoms in solid metal) and burns with an invisible, super-hot ultraviolet flame. If you have a leak big enough to support a flame it WILL have a flame on it within a very short time. You'll find the flame by walking into it and having your clothes, hair, or skin start burning, if it doesn't set something nearby on fire first.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When the thing can run on the very impure output from a reformer running on natural gas or propane that is when it will be truly useful. However this is a good first step at commercializing the product.
I am a big fan of Ballard and their technology and I have 4 friends/neighbors who work there. I actually spent about 9 months trying to get hired back when they were ramping up employment. No dice, it might have been tricky though since my current boss does not want me to leave and he is a friend of the CEO.
.... where an article discussing the benefits/drawbacks to the different energy alternatives are? Something that compares wind/solar/nuclear/hydrogen/coal etc. on a somewhat objective basis?
thanks in advance
I know a little sig that's just ten words long
Emitting only heat and water as byproducts of power generation, the NexaTM power module allows OEM...
With heat and water as the byproducts, would it be possible to use the heat to boil the water thereby powering a steam generator of some kind?
Now take it one step further, couldn't the water byproduct be used to refuel the device. I've read that it's fairly simple to split water from being H20 into it's components (supposed to be in use in prototype alternative-fuel automobiles). Send the hydrogen back into the system; this could be the first true infinity-machine, resulting byproduct then becomes just oxygen.
That would take care of a host of environmental and social ailments at one fell swoop .
Between this technology and LED lighting, cultivators of certain brain-change vegetables will have a much easier time staying out of jail. Let's see: low power, low heat waste, a renewable energy source...now all the world needs is for someone to invent robotic scissors for manicuring the finished product. Cheech and Chong meets Mr. Science!
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
So when is the Jig-a-watt model coming out?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Now then, if you really wanted to get me excited.... you'd be talking about a consumer grade 5 Kw or so Fuel cell that could operate with good efficiency using a high grade of Bio-diesel. Which BTW can be made from virtually any vegetable oil or even oil derived from diatom algae. Of course, you'd have to learn to make your own fuel from the leftover peanut oil that the local burger joint cooked it's fries, in, but fortunately, the book with the recipe for how to do it isn't that hard to obtain...
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
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
I was told that a company made a hydrogen fuel cell for a mobile device. Major talk and standby time on those babies :D Just dont drop it :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Make them helium, they'd float! :)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Many people are commenting about the difficulty of storing and transporting hydrogen gas. Here's a company with an interesting idea:
powerball.net
Their idea is to use a low-pressure tank filled with water and "powerballs" -- small plastic covered spheres of sodium hydride.
When the system wants to create more hydrogen gas, it uses a mechanical cutter to cut one of the powerballs in half. The sodium hydride instantly reacts with the water in the tank, producing sodium hydroxide and hydrogen (and a fair amount of heat):
NaH + H2O --> NaOH + H2 gas
When all of the sodium hydride spheres are used up, the result is a tank full of sodium hydroxide. The tank is then returned to their factory, where the sodium hydroxide is converted back into sodium hydride, so there's no waste stream from the process.
The cool thing about this system is that the hydrogen is stored and transported in solid form -- as metal hydride spheres, so you don't have the danger of high-pressure hydrogen to work with. The hydrogen is generated as needed at low pressure.
The site hasn't been updated in a while, so I have no idea if they've successfully brought a product to market, but I thought that this was a really interesting idea, and it would probably work fairly well with these sorts of fuel cells.
That rattle in the bug? That's not noise -- that's just the valves singing along with the radio. :)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
It's not a good idea for cities, apartment buildings and other small institutions. The smaller units, made by GE, do not yet provide electricity cheaper than can be bought right off the grid without any of the infrastructure and maintenance hastles you mention. If it works small scale, it's generally cheaper large scale and you should expect 500MW combined cycle cells compete with gas turbine setups of similar size. From a long term resource standpoint, however, burning petrol instead of making plasics is kind of like burning trees for heat instead of making furniture.
On the other hand (and this is a common myth where folks always bring up the Hindenburg) hydrogen isn't inherently any more dangerous then any other energy-rich fuel. Indeed it's probably slightly safer as it's lighter then air and so doesn't "pool" and become concentrated.
Hydrogen is a pain in the ass. It takes electricty or radiation to make, so it can only be used as an energy storage. In it's cryrogenic form, it's difficult to handle in reasonable quantities. Every single line has rupture disks in case the vacuum line insulation fails. Nature abhors a vacuum, and unrelieved pipe full of boiling liquid hydrogen is a pipe bomb. Despite your fond wishes of dipersal, large quantites of cryroginic hydrogen tend to FALL back to the ground untill it warms up. Warming up by ignition is a possibility that no one likes to think about. When you compare this to the ease of handeling gasoline, natural gas or even propane, you can see how much more expensive it is to deal with.
These days the cheapest and best solution is not always the one that wins out. Manufacturers would love being able to sell millions of these things as well as the service plans to keep them up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, BC (in Canada, eh),
Technically they're in Burnaby and not in Vancouver. They just down the road from where I live. Nice industrial park. Walk the dog there often.
They have some sort of noisy machinery behind one of their buildings that I haven't been able to figure out what it does. Probably some sort machinery the aliens gave them to build fuel cells.
Ballard Power is world renowned. It is widely traded on the TSE and NASDAQ, NOT the infamous Vancouver exchange.
This company has been around for years, and is hardly comparable to some fly-by-night internet dot-bomb.
No offense, Walter, but where did you get that info? Diesel fuel is generally quite stable and burns very slowly. That's why it is often used to cause fires to clear brush. I don't think it could have been the cause of the Hindenburg disaster.
Here is the most accepted theory:
"After years of exhaustive traveling and research, Bain uncovered what he believes is the answer to the Hindenburg mystery. His research shows that the Hindenburg's skin was covered with the extremely flammable cellulose nitrate or cellulose acetate, added to help with rigidity and aerodynamics. The skin was also coated with flecks of aluminum, a component of rocket fuel, to reflect sunlight and keep the hydrogen from heating and expanding. It had the further benefit of combating wear and tear from the elements. Bain claims these substances, although necessary at the time of construction, directly led to the disaster of the Hindenburg. The substances caught fire from an electric spark that caused the skin to burn. At this point the hydrogen became the fuel to the already existing fire. Therefore, the real culprit was the skin of the dirigible. The ironic point to this story is that the German Zeppelin makers knew this back in 1937. A handwritten letter in the Zeppelin Archive states, "The actual cause of the fire was the extreme easy flammability of the covering material brought about by discharges of an electrostatic nature." For more information about Dr. Bain's investigation, please refer to this article from the California Hydrogen Business Council."
link
the people living above the snow line have a 500 gallon propane tank in the front yard now.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
Like go eat a doghnut, eh...
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
I saw a demo of this type of technology here in washington state about 2-2.5 years ago. The demo was done by Washington Water Power. It had a smallish fuel cell, that lit up a small light bulb, and the only by-product was pure water.
Is it possible to make a small enough one to power a Palm Pilot (given time for the technology to advance enough)? How much hydrogen is there floating around here in the air that we breathe?
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
I want a respiration fuel cell. Feed it sugar, water, and oxygen, and out pops carbon dioxide, energy, and crap - literally. If we humans can do it, why can't computers, damnit?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Now my superbattlebot will live because it finally will have a powersupply to feed its thirsty power requirements.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
Not true! Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan. Mirror/boiler schemes show more promise, but scraping togeter megawats from 22 watts per square meter is not easy and pilots worry they will be blinded flying over them! Do you want to get into the specifics of making and maintaining the millions of ugly little windmills that are needed to make windpower practical? Multiply your estimates to account for the fact that the wind generally blows when people don't need extra electricity. Do you really want to cut down trees to set up the farms? You did not mention biomass conversion as an indirect solar, but corn was made for eating! Cost = prohibitive on all of these options, so far about 10x the cost of normal generation.
The environmental future is in nuclear. No greenhouse and managable waste all nice and concentrated in a few very large plants. The infrastructure is in place for transmition, so no new scars are needed. The technology is well understood and the safety record is enviable.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well perhaps. But the best efficiency fuel cells only convert about 60% of the heat energy of their fuels into electricity. So at max you have another 480 watts of heat energy with which to create steam, and the best efficiency steam generators (the really really big ones) are only about 40% efficient. So now were down to reclaiming what, 192 Watts of energy if the best efficiency plants could be microsized?
So about the only reasonable use for the waste energy would be to heat up a fairly small amount of water.
Which, btw is similar to the oft-quoted maxim that solar water heating is a usually a more energy efficient use of roof space than current generation PVs.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
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.
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.
No matter how meaningful quantities hydrogen are generated, greenheads will hate the fact that mother earth will incur vast amounts of greenhouse gases.
True. However, it changes the nature of the problem. H2 cells development must go hand in hand with development of greenhouse gas/waste containment.
Or, even, use nuclear energy to make H2 fuel cells. Nukes makes lots of radiative stuff, but the bad stuff is in one nice chunk, not spread out in the atmosphere like the CO2 crap our cars spew out.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I did my science fair project on this. The best way to fuel it now is to creat an electrolysis attatchment that can get its power from solar pannels or another external source. In my experiment my effecience was (amount of energy put in over energy produced) 80%. The only problem is the electrods for decomposing water. Platinum is the best but over time it wares away and is very expensive. I used graphite. Graphite is great but after several hours of operation it starts to disentergrates. Thus less efficient. But no matter what they do they need to make some type of suppliment to create their own hydrogen.
Nothing like going camping and some fool at the next campsite has to catch her Friends reruns (or read /.) at 9PM so he's got the generator running full tilt.
I want to drink beer, slap mosquitos and keep moving away from the campfire smoke in peace and quiet, thank you very much.
Guess I should be backpacking, but it's hard to bring enough beer and still have room for the tent.
Bleh!
If you're wondering what kind of technical issues there are when considering the H2 supply, visit www.airproducts.com for more information on various delivery methods and specifications for different uses. The site is most informative. Especially about information regarding highly reactive and flamable gases.
"Chemestry is Physics without thought. Mathematics is Physics without purpose."
I miss that car. *sniff*
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The hour long episode on Discovery seemed rather concise and definite. They tested a sample of the hindenberg covering.. they checked the formula used... etc.
It's not an urban myth.
As for diesel.. the diesel fuel is at the *bottom* of the ship.. nowehre near where the huge, orange flames were shooting from.
I'm not saying Hydrogen can't explode.. it certainly does. But the Hindenberg didn't explode. It burned.
The TV show I saw (PBS, Discovery Channel, TLC??? can't remember which one) said the airship's covering was sealed with a highly flammable paint that contained large amounts of powdered aluminum mixed with *iron oxide*. Aluminum and iron oxide happen to be the ingredients in thermite, a very hot-burning mixture used to coat welding rods and melting large pieces of steel together. In retrospect, the chemists who designed the covering and didn't think of this were morons.
While I know that it produces no pollution at all and am completly for the technolgy (can't wait to but a car powered by one of these babies), it will be using up Oxygen. Multiply that by all of the fuel cells that we will one day be using and that is a lot of oxygen that will be used, probably comparable to the amount used for hydrocarbon combustion today. That will seriously reduce the amount of Oxygen in the air, turning it into water, and plants can't breath water.
Another point is getting the Hydrogen. We will take Hydrocarbon based fuels and break them apart, releasing the carbon in them as Carbon Dioxide, increasing the carbon dioxide levels on Earth, much like burning it does.
Has anybody studied the effects that this may cause in comparison to what happens simply burning the hydrocarbons. If anybody know anymore about this, PLEASE reply, I want to know more.
Having never seen a fuel cell in person before... do they make any noise? If so, what do they sound like?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It was designed fore Helium! That is why the accident occured. The Germans got most of their helium form the US, and WWII was starting up, the US stoped selling them the helium. So they used hydrogen in a craft designed for helium and boom!
:>
Needless to say, these circumstances are not likely to occur in your back yard!
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
For the distributed power folks, this is the big complement to solar. H2 by hydrolysis is efficient and this finally gives you a decent way to store solar electricity.
Screw Natural Gas. It isn't free, it isn't pure hydrogen (CH4), and contains impurities that'll clog your membranes -- Hydrogen sulfide is added for the rotten egg smell.
That sulfur and carbon have to go somewhere...
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Quiet?
Fuel cells are silent as the grave. The noise of the bus is from motors, tires, power steering, cooling blowers and gearing.
Electricity generation from fuel cells is inaudible.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
to power my 1.4GHz Athlon.
"The power module generates up to 1200 watts..."
They are starting production of the product this Friday ... and don't have a price set for it yet.
Sounds like a dot com business model.
=brian
... right.
Consider this a (-1, Misinformative), although I hope most people are intelligent enough to realize that sound gets quieter as you move away from the source.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
GE will be marketing a fuel cell designed by PowerPlug next year. It uses natural gas or propane, and doubles as a space heater and water heater. These units are not any more dangerous to own or operate than a natural gas forced air heater.
Some Specs Are:
System Performance
Natural Gas 40% @ 2 kW output
Natural Gas 29% @ 7 kW output
LP Gas 38% @ 2 kW output
LP Gas 27% @ 7 kW output
Cogen Efficiency >75%
Fuel Cell Operating Temperature 160F
Exhaust Temperature (simple cycle) 220F
Power Quality IEEE 519 Compliant
Emissions
NOx 1 ppm
SOx 1 ppm
More info can be found at
www.plugpower.com
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
You may be forgetting that both Bush and Cheney were oil executives. There's no way they'd advocate any solution that would hurt the finances of oil companies. That's where he comes from, that's where his dad's money comes from, and that's where most of his friends' money comes from.
While weaning us from oil would be good for the American people, it would be bad for people like Bush and Cheney, so it'll never happen while he's in power.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Getting hydrogen from natural gas produces far, far less pollutants than the current emissions from cars or the burning of coal from power plants. It also opens the door, economically speaking, for eventually developing even more environmentally friendly systems.
Also, most natural gas is just burned off when drilling for oil. At least this way, we'd be putting it to use instead of just letting it pollute the atmosphere for no good reason.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
72dBA sound pressure level
Where does the noise come from ?
Absolute statements are never true
That is something that I'd like to hear more about. The article didn't mention noise factor, but I imagine if it could be "hidden under a desk" that it must not be that loud.
Who did what now?
There are a few good reasons why this won't work.
1) US investment in the Middle East
Most of the nations that we are friendly with in the Middle East are friendly with us because we purchase large amounts of oil from them. Cutting off money to oil producing nations because of the actions of a few nuts would declare our enimity for those nations. If we led an international push to move technologically away from their major source of export revenue over this issue instead of others, we'd be more likely to anger them.
2) Doesn't effect Osama bin Ladin
There are many, many more places where Osama bin Ladin can invest his money other than oil. In fact, his money mostly comes from his inheritance from his father who was a construction mogul, not an oil baron. Furthermore, it won't effect the country he's in. Afghanistan is so poor because it has nothing to export except opium, which the Taliban government has been working to stop.
There another good reason it won't happen.
Bush and Cheney are oil executives. They have too much invested in fossil fuels. Have we already forgotten their self-serving Energy Plan? There's no way the administration would back initiatives to downplay the importance of oil acquisition in our foreign policy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ok
Take your Gas Engine.
Lets say it's a 1 liter gas / hour.
=> to get 1500 hours, you need 1500 liters.
Lets go easy and say Gasoline is same density and volume as water.
YOU NEED 1.5m^3 of storage. For Gasoline. I know it doesn't bang as well as hydrogene, but 1.5 tons Gasoline could do something very smoky.
Also, please consider the fuels efficiencies, see how much gasoline you need per hour to get 1200W and converse yourself in Gallons and other non linear mesure system (coming from the brits, no ? god, are they perverse 8)
my 0.2 cents
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
According to this site:
US Department of Energy, a carbon material needs to store 6.5% of its own weight in hydrogen to make fuel cells practical in cars.
and
scientists from the National University of Singapore have released figures for nanotubes and nanofibers that can store 10-20% of their weight in hydrogen.
And this site claims over 70% hydrogen storage by weight at about 40 atmospheres storage pressure, but maximum charging requires about 130 atmospheres and several hours.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This would be a good time to jump in and say "What about hemp?"
Last summer a group of young scientists drove an unmodified, diesel engine Mercedes Benz across country to promote hemp for fuel. They ran the car entirely on fuel created from hemp seeds. Although mileage was slightly impaired, the amount of pollution generated was greatly reduced because, unlike gasoline refining, which adds many noxious and dangerous chemicals, hemp fuels rely on natural methods.
Just like somebody posted earlier: Everything has to go somewhere when it burns, and the gasoline releases all of those naughty things back into the environment as gas or liquid. The hemp releases some gas, but greatly reduced emissions. And the processing requires very little un-natural additive to create fuel.
Who did what now?
i wish my computer was as quiet as one of these... damn cheap case!
Agreed. I think it would be far, far better for us to have pulled out already. I'd like to think that if Gore had won that our energy policy would've already made pulling our interests away from oil a priority. Use of oil is just bad all around for the nation.
However, I don't think that pulling out of oil would improve our situation there. We would pull out of all the friendly Arab nations, but we'd still be involved with Israel. None of our oil policy is a factor in favor of our involvement there, so pulling out of oil would only make us more clearly on the Israel side of Israel vs. Islam. That's the key factor in Arab hatred of us. If we stop giving them reasons to like us, though, we might be in for trouble.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
ive always hated those damn laws... btw anyone know how efficient one of these fuel cells is?
"Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan."
If you buy a solar panel new from a reputable manufacturer (say, Siemens) it will come with at least a 20 year warranty. That is, they will replace it if it falls 10% below it's rated wattage output any time within 20 years. And they pretty much picked "20" out of the air since they have no idea how long they'll last--all they're sure of is that it'll be more than 20 years.
Furthermore, depending on where you install it (Arizona vs Maine, say) it will produce the same amount of power required to build it in 2-7 years. In other words, however much toxins it puts out, it can clean them up before it's half-dead. A net gain. These are actual working numbers, not theory.
Solar power at ground level approx 1kW/m^2. Market available panels are 15-20% efficient which is 150-200W/m^2, not 22. And laboratory panels have been pumped up to 30% which would be 300W.
I'm not some whacko greenie that thinks nuclear power will kill us all. I'm just somebody that adheres to the KISS principle: the sun is already generating billions of times more power than we could ever use--why not tap into it with a simple collector rather than reinventing the wheel here on earth?
324006
It's a dual fuel engine. The sucker runs on hydrogen and petrol. Do you even bother to read the bits you quote?
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
Whenever I see arguments about Nuclear power, it always looks like a religous issue to me. For some reason, there are people who think that it's completely insane not to have nuclear power, and that there is no reasonable alternative possible.
I'd really like to know where this comes from. Regardless of if it's true or not, it's certianly an issue that is not black and white (ask any of the portlanders that had to pay to shut down the Trojan plant a few years ago how they feel about it--it was the power companies decision too..not any environmental concerns)
So why is this question so bloody important to some people? What do they expect to gain either personally or as a country--even if they are right and the whole world agrees with them?
And yet the question is as important to them as the evolution issue is to Christians.
IIRC Toshiba has laptops right now which are using hydrogen power sources. Apparently they're not widely available right now, and extremely expensive, but they last for many more hours than your standard batteries.
If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
Why is it that everytime I hear "power cell" I think "energon cube"?
I'm a child of the 80's I guess...
Shawn
This admittedly gives a whole new meaning to "vaporware" though.
"And seriously, next week we'll start up Photoshop and begin drawing the box covers for the product!" Someone call me when I can BUY one of these mystery units.
All plants DO breath O2. It's just that in the day time it's said that they breath CO2, This is wrong. This is because in carrying out photosyntisis, O2 is produced as a byproduct (6H20 + 6CO2 -> C6H12O6 + 6O2). Out of this a persentage is recirculated to carry out respiration and the excess is useless and is discaharged. So they still breath O2, but use CO2 in carrying out photosyntisis. Then in the night when theres no sun to carry out photosyntisis, they take O2 from the air.
Besides, it won't be much of a problewm because 70% of the earths O2 supply is exchanged out in the sea and not by trees on land (Think Plankton).
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
1.2 kw isn't enough. Right now, I've got a 300W ps running in my box, a monitor, a 60W bulb and a TV (not sure about the TV wattage). Upstairs there is another TV running along with another 60W bulb. If the living room and master bedroom were occupied, and if we were doing laundry and drying clothes right now, I don't think the unit could handle it. I'm not sure exactly what our peak load is. Actually... let me wander over to the breaker box (afk) OK, it says 125 A max, 120-240V. I'm not sure if they mean that we can draw 125 A at 240V. I'm not sure if any of our appliances actually draw 240V.
Anyhow, P=VI so if everything is 120 that's 15kW. IIRC from my power electronic courses the 120 is a RMS (Root Mean Square) voltage so you can use the P=VI equation as if it were DC.
So, for the device to be practical to drive our 2 story house, it needs to output 15kW after being inverted.
The other problem is that H2 is not readily available. Natural gas is piped right into our house, so here is my conclusion:
If they manufacture a unit that can run on natural gas (integrated gas to H2 converter) and output 15kw after inversion they might have a residential market.
At times when electricity from the grid is expensive or unavailable (e.g., California a few months ago) the ability to switch to such an alternative source could be an attractive selling point for a house.
Of course in it's current configuration I'm sure it will find some applications, but if they can't penetrate the residential real estate market they are missing out on a major revenue stream. The several hundred kW unit sounds intriguing for a small town power station.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
A post about the Hindenburg modded as flamebait???
You guys kill me!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Just want to disspel this myth.
Suppose we are using a dirty, toxic coal power plant to generate electricity that we then use to split water. The hydrogen is then pumped into cars.
This would be exactly the same, in terms of damage to the environment, as having cars burn gasoline instead, right? Wrong! For several reasons:
1. Efficiency. This cannot be emphasized enough. A car engine has many constraints. It must be powerful, light, small, etc. Efficiency and greenhouse gas emissins come last in the list. A power plant has only two constraints: it must be efficient and environmentally friendly. Moreover, the power plant owner has a monetary incentive to make his/her power plant as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. Who cares how big or heavy it is? you don't need to drive it. Because of this a dirty coal power plant is a lot cleaner than N cars generating the same amount of energy. That alone makes fuel cells very attractive.
2. Location. Not much to say here. Cars have to be in the city. Power plant can be in the middle of nowhere.
3. Centralization. Suppose that someone invented a new gizmo that reduces the emission of greenhouse gases. It's a lot easier to install it on a 1000 power plants than on 100 million cars, especially since you don't need to worry about size/weight constraints (see above).
Furthermore, it's a lot easier to check for violations of enviromnal laws if you have to deal with 1000 power plants instead of 100 million cars.
Also, it's a lot easier to switch from a coal plant to a wind/solar power plant than replace every engine in N cars that generate equal amount of energy.
And this just scratches the surface. Other people have pointed out other benefits too...
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I'm curious as to what happens to the natural gas, methanol, etc... after the conversion. I understand that there is hydrogen generated, but what about the left over carbons, and other elements?
You can find a chemical to store hydrogen. That is how a battery works, or make a gas. These people are trying to make solid sodium and a possible product is PowerBalls Problem: It takes 2000 degrees to make solid sodium, and they use methane as part of the process....not very renewable.
You can store it as liquid H2. Getting H2 to -432 degrees takes power. And it is dangerously cold. BMW has been using this method in their hydrogen cars. A liter of liquid H2 has 39,000 watts of power. Alot of power in a small space.
You can store it as a compressed gas. At standard temp and pressure, a liter of H2 has 3.5 watts of power. Not alot of power here, is there? As you increase pressure, more H2 will work its way out of your tank, and embrittle the metal.
Finally, you can shove H2 inbetween metal. TiFe was patented in 1988, and automakers plan on selling Hydrogen cars in 2010. (Do the math, what technology becomes public domain?) Contaminated TiFe can be reclaimed (it is just like mining it) Ti Sponge (pure TI) goes for $3.80-$4.50 a pound. A research site Texico owns part of Ovonic has a few patents on this technology also.
Now, which way should one go here? LH2? Compressed H2? Chemical? or metal lattice storage?
Without good, "safe" storage, H2 won't be more than a playtoy. Anytime you generate, store or use power, there is danger. It is the preception of Hydrogen danger (hindenberg) that needs to be addressed. Some pinto drivers know how dagerous gasoline is...yet we 'accept' the dangers of Gas. Oh, wait. gasoline, Natural Gas, Propane are chemically stored Hydrogen! Eeek, the horror!
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
(that post got 3, informative? gah....)
I did a little reasearch project on alternative energy a while back and here is what I discovered. (Bear with me I don't remember the details any more).
The NaH (or some other group 1 element) is used to store hydrogen. This compound is unstable under normal conditions and needs to be stored under pressure (only 2 athmospheres, less than a car tire) and low temperature (-20C or so). All you need to do to get hydrogen is.. reduce the pressure!
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
To have microbrobes make CH4, they need to kept between 84 and 88 degrees. Rather hard/energy intensive. Not to mention 'strange off-gasses', stuff like sulfur, nitrates. All these off-gasses makes scubbers less useful and contimates fuel cells.
Renewable, well, sorrta.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Walter,
Actually, what caused the Hindenberg to burn and crash was the fact that the doping compound for the canvas covering of the airship was a combination of nitrocellulose and aluminum powder.
Guess what folks: these are the prime ingredients for solid rocket fuel. It was only good fortunate that a NASA scientist was able to get a sample of the Hindenberg's canvas covering that survived, and spectral analysis showed these two ingredients. Small wonder why when a small patch of that surviving canvas covering was ignited it burned very violently.
In short, the Hindenberg was a flying bomb waiting to happen.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-processor.htm
Found the answer to my own question. How Stuff Works is a great site. They also have more articles on the other aspects of fuels cells.
Ok, first off, it has a lifespan of 2months. That is bullshit. Secondly, it is louder than all hell. I don't want something that is rated at 72dba @ 1 meter anywhere near me. That thing is loud enough to wake the neighbors. Anyways, short lifespan, only 1200 watts, and louder than hell makes it useless for me.
This would be a good time to jump in and say "What about hemp?"
Last summer a group of young scientists drove an unmodified, diesel engine Mercedes Benz across country to promote hemp for fuel. They ran the car entirely on fuel created from hemp seeds. Although mileage was slightly impaired, the amount of pollution generated was greatly reduced because, unlike gasoline refining, which adds many noxious and dangerous chemicals, hemp fuels rely on natural methods.
This fuel "created from hemp seeds" was almost certainly just an alcohol. You can make alcohol by fermenting just about anything organic.
The problem is that both the growing of the plants and the fermenting are not terribly energy-efficient. Direct synthesis by burning CO2 in a hydrogen atmosphere would almost certainly be a better option.
The other thing that they might have produced from hemp is something vaguely resembling diesel fuel. This too can be produced fairly readily from many types of plant (think "low-grade vegetable oil").
The problem is that burning long-chain hydrocarbons cleanly is very difficult to do. This would probably not be a viable fuel source even if you weren't stuck with plants' energy efficiency.
The "...which adds many noxious and dangerous chemicals" line is mainly trolling on the part of whatever source gave you this information. The most dangerous things coming out of a gasoline engine are sulphur and nitrogen oxides. The sulphur came straight from the ground with the fuel, and the nitrogen oxides are a natural byproduct of burning any hydrocarbon under engine conditions. Hemp deisel would contain as much sulphur as the hemp did (all plant and animal matter contains some of it; at least one of the amino acids uses it). Hemp alcohol wouldn't... but I don't see any reason to use hemp alcohol over direct-synthesis alcohol.
In summary, I don't see any real advantage to using hemp as a fuel.
I've been doing a lot of reading on alternative power systems lately, and I've come to the conclusion that biodiesel is probably the best alternative fuel right now. It can be made from vegetable oil (waste or fresh), and creates a product that will run straight up in current diesel engines.
The real advantage to this is that the CO2 created when burning the biodiesel becomes part of a cycle, and is consumed by the next crop pruducing more vegetable oil.
Its basically power from plants, and would also allow North America to become energy independant, while stimulating more agriculture (though I agree we may not be able to grow enough, but it would be a good start).
Of course, diesel is used a LOT in for transportation, power generation etc.
For info see http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html or
http://www.biodiesel.org
Yeah, now you can grow marijuana without having a suspicious power bill. The United Pot Farmer Association must be going into paroxysms of joy.
With a couple of nukes and all the tea in China, we could make this world a British paradise.
Effectively, you are electrolysing water while adding value to the natural gas. You can also capture the waste CO2 more easily.
Go here for more
Alex
Not much louder than a normal speaking voice really:
h tm
http://www.shpna.org/caltrain/caltdbexmpl.htm
Comparable to a premium-brand gas generator:
http://www.hondapowerequipment.com/genecoframe.
Noise isn't really the point of this anyway...there's still going to be plenty of moving parts in a generator....no?
Why waste the time and materials creating fuel cells when you can just make a tank of hydrogen gas and burn it in your barely modified gasoline car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
I'd like to think that if Gore had won that our energy policy would've already made pulling our interests away from oil a priority.
Don't forget that Gore's money comes from oil too.
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?
No, the fuel was almost certainly an *oil*. Diesel engines will burn corn oil, safflower oil, petroleum, organic sludge, coal slurry, and so on. You don't need to ferment hemp seed oil to make alcohol if you're planning on burning the product in a diesel.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The hempcar runs on transesterized seed oil. Particulate emissions are about 1/10th of those produced using conventional diesel fuel in the same engine. The exhaust smells like a deepfryer. Sulfer content is about 1/4th of petro derived diesel fuel. (As biomass is concentrated to petroleum in geologic processes, less of the sulfur is outgassed than the hydrogen)
Last spring, soy oil prices were below those of pretax deisel fuel for the first time since 1920. Price of vegetable oils is closely related not just to production cost of seeds, but also to the market for the high-protien seed cake from which it is pressed, so while vegetable oil will not replace ALL petroleum in automotive use without driving prices thru the roof, it is a viable replacement for a significant part of the market.
For fuel, hemp as an oilseed is about equal to sunflower. More relevant to the fuel cell topic, hemp stalk is the champion plant feedstock for methanol production in continental climates (for N America roughly above the Mason-Dixon line.)
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
They also have plans for a 250kW unit.
I for one am very happy to see fuel cell technology being made available to the consumer. I'm guessing that the cost per kilowatt-hour of juice generated by one of these fuel cells would be less than that of juice from the electric company. Am I right?
I hope so, because I've got a big VAX in the garage. It turns me on, and I'd like to do the same for it. A fuel cell seems like it would be cleaner solution on many levels as opposed to having the electric company bring in a three-phase industrial power feed.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Only until Congress finds out about it. Then it will be regulated to death.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
about a noisy washing machine. Check this dBa reference.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I've done the math as well. Electricity in my area is around $.14/kWh. If I converted to solar I would recoup the loss in 25-30 years. Just over the warranty period of the panels.
Converting a whole city would gain you economies of scale, not to mention reduced manufacturing as the development costs get paid off. A horseback guess would be that if you converted (residential) Portland it would be paid back in 10-15 years.
But even leaving all that math aside, what makes you say fossil fuels are "cheaper"? Are you counting all the billions we are spending to clean up the environment in that number? What about health-care costs associated with asthma and cancer?
324006
More dangerous than... Propane? Natural gas?
They use Liquid Hydrogen in jet aircraft? Really?
Yes.. the flames are light blue, bordering on invislbe. you wouldn't see them in daylight.
And chances are, if you stepped in a puddle of burning H2.. you would FEEL your body burning before you smelled it...
How is it more dangerous than current, compressed fuels?
If you want to see stupid compressed gas tricks Taiwan kicks ass all over Texas. Fifty liter propane tanks are delivered in sets of three by motorcycle ridin' cowpokes wearing flip flop rubber sandals in the perpetually pouring rain.
I've seen one of these good ol' biker boys go down under the tire of a bus and them tanks got kicked around by the oncoming traffic like it was a damn soccer tournament and none of them exploded. Of course traffic in Taipei is awful slow.
Found this while looking up parts for my Mini...looks like BMW is headed somewhere.
Doing home steam can, or course, be dangerous and isn't a great answer for even a minority of the people. But for those who are into solar steam, the danger is just part of the problem. The night cycle is a non-insignificant issue. Things like flywheels are talked about, but the prices are not reasonable for a homesteader budget. If these things are really heading for the consumer market, it could have a spillover effect on solar steam.
And if the small scale picture bores you, what about the big side?
If you look at what our dear Commander in Chief has commented on so glowingly in the corporate funded Solar Electricity Generation System projects in California what you find is that at the early stages, SEGS (Check the huge trough halfway down the page) one of the biggest concerns for investors was the night time part. Since these troughs are hooked to conventional turbogenerator units, downtime every night is totally unacceptable because it means losing steam in the turbine every night and inevitable damage to the turbine from condensation making it a losing investment all around.
Initially, the answer for the SEGS projects was to use gas cogeneration, but the biggest plants, the ones Bush commented on (an interesting interview with the president is somewhere on those DOE/Sandia pages) eventually overcame the lack of sunlight issue by simply using vast insulated swimming pools filled with oil field toxic sludge that they heated up during the day with sunlight and supposedly can run the 80MW turbogen set for days without light.
If the problem with hydrogen is the cost of producing and compressing the hydrogen, then the problem has been solved and the president already said he likes it because it's controlled by a corporate body and isn't revolutionary.
Hell, in the end it's all about extremely minor changes in the overall balance. That's why nothing ever seems to change. Things do change, this may be part of where we're going. Sounds cool to me. When do we start blasting the shit down as microwaves?
Yeah baby. I want to see some huge steel/aluminum alloy architecture in the 21st century. Let's see the electricity squandering seacrete cities floating in the South Pacific, dirgible cities thousands of miles across flashing ads down on the unenclosed lands, all that Bucky Fuller/PK Dick futuropolis stuff. I, for one, am into it. You know the Japanese and Chinese are into it too. The future looks bright, intense even.
...is that the hydrogen was NOT the main cause of the fire. The fire was caused by a part of the frame not grounding when the first rope was dropped from the ship to the ground. That then created a spark that went from the metal frame to the fabric that surounded the ship. This fabric had some iron oxide in it's paint. Also some aluminum was added to reflect sunlight so the gas wouldn't heat up. When this spark hit, a chemical reaction occured that melted the frame and lit the fabric on fire. This then lit the hydrogen that was kept inside a few seconds later.
Commonwealth Edison generates most of it's power via nukes. This annoys a lot of people, but they're trying to take advantage of the gap between how the plants generate energy and the way people use it.
Homer Simpson notwithstanding, they don't hit a giant "off" switch at night. So they have a number of efforts to use the power generating capacity of their plants during the off-peak hours.
One of these is a set of building in downtown Chicago that make ice all night long. During the day, the 33 degree water from the melting ice is distributed to downtown buildings. They get cheaper air conditioning, more rentable floors because they don't need to build chillers and ComEd gets less demand during the day.
Another is to make hyrdogen from water during the evening. There are hydrogen powered buses running on the streets of Chicago today.
Neither of these are very efficient ways of using energy. But it is compared to letting the reactor heat go to waste because people are not demanding it at the moment.
Disclaimer: I'm aware of this because I was paid as a freelancer for an animation of the chilled water system.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I read some info about a "dirty" diesel a small group of inventors is working on (it can run on vegetable and animal refuse as well as refined vegetable and animal products). Apparently one of the problems they're trying to overcome is that the smell produced can be unpleasant, obviously, petrolium-based diesel smells pretty bad too, but I guess people have gotten used to that.
Few but politically motivated stoners and true environmentalists know that the original practical "diesel" engine (I believe Rudolf Diesel's third prototype) ran quite well on hemp oil. This is an excellent fuel for diesel engines and other applications, but there's still a considerable prejudice against the plant itself.
At this time, there is a fair amount of biodiesel testing going on, including combining petrol-based diesel and biodiesel. The primary problems appear to be reluctance by many trucking companies to subject diesel engines to testing (engines aren't cheap), the expense of producing, converting to and purchasing biodiesel, and apparently less efficient operation with some types of vegetable oils (soy, for example).
If I get rich someday, one of the first "difficult to make a profit" businesses I'll be starting is converting Volkswagon and other small diesels to run efficiently on biodiesel, converting fuel oil-fired equipment to run on vegetable oils, and figuring out a way to produce that much vegetable oil.
AC's cheerfully ignored
I look at this as the start of something new, the same way computers looked 20 years ago. Fuel cells? Nano-tubes for hydrogen storage ?(personal computers?? 20 years ago), what are you nuts!!
I see the ballard system is the equivalant of a 1979 Apple, it's an expensive toy for hobbiests, those hobbiests will fund the next generation of machines until we can drive our 2008 model Hypercar(tm) 3000 miles on a nanotube tank, we plug it in at work to power the office (and sell the electricity to work), plug it in at home (a car takes WAY more energy to run than a house). Where is the hydrogen going to come from? probably algea
www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b866c1563e7.htm
Until our children are no longer molded into castrated sheep democracy remains a fake and a danger. -A. S. Neill
Apparently one of the problems they're trying to overcome is that the smell produced can be unpleasant... As you noted, part of the research is to convert animal fats into diesel like fuels as well as to reprocess used vegetable oil(s). Currently, while animal fats can be converted, it is much more difficult to get what we would think of as a "clean" fuel --especially in regards to smell -- than that produced from used vegetable oils.
By the way, the most common source of the used veggie oils is the fast food industry -- so it is a somewhat humorously stated but true that the exhaust from a diesel engine using this type of biodiesel smells quite a lot like french fries.
"I believe Rudolf Diesel's third prototype) ran quite well on hemp oil...." It is correct that Diesel had planned and had some success using vegetable oils, prior to his somewhat mysterious and untimely demise. However, hemp is not anywhere close to being the best source of vegetable oil -- that belongs to several different classes of mostly tropical trees, canola (otherwise known as rapeseed), then soybean, then a few others, then hemp. Part of the benefit to hemp, however, is that the hemp fiber is better than cotton for many clothing applications, etc., with the oil being a free and useful side-product.
In terms of fuel efficiency, bio-diesel is about the same as higher grade, low-sulfer diesels which the government is now mandating for use in future engines, so the main problems are now not scientific, but governmental and in achieving a doable economics-of scale, as follows:
If a biodiesel plant processes used veggie oils, the cost to produce the fuel is quite low (on the order of 60 cents per gallon or so in small to medium quantities), mainly for the methanol and/or ethanol used in the process. Conversion directly from crops would cost a bit more, but could and probably would be better done at the or aggregator (silos, etc.) level than at a "biodiesel refinery". However, IIRC by the time all of the regulatory red tape is factored in, a commonly state industry figure is that biodiesel could be produced and retailed for between $2.80 and $4.00 a gallon -- but "it could be cheaper if more people bought it!"
The best hope of breaking the regulatory stranglehold held by the petroleum companies is probably in the agricultural sector, because the regulations aren't about who can produce the fuel, but are regulations governing what makes the fuel "sellable". At present, an ag-co-op has a lot of rights which resemble those of an individual, so some farmers are banding together within the coops and setting up facilities to produce larger quantities of bio-diesel without so much regulatory overhead.
By the way and finally, the only other big consideration is that biodiesel ain't good for rubber, so the hoses, etc. for a diesel engine need to be made of other materials.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I'd like a link. You seem to know something about this, would you share one of your knowledge sources?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.