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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...
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).
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
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.
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?
Renewable sources of hydrogen include cracking methane generated by decomposition, and cracking water using solar, wind or water generated electricity. Why not just use that electricity directly? Because it's often not there when you need it. Batteries expensive, but storing hydrogen can be cheap.
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"
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?
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.
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 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. :)
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.
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.
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
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?"
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...
According to the press release, these little units only have a 1500 hour lifetime too.
If you then throw it away and buy another it's bad. If you unscrew a few bolts and swap in an inexpensive fresh membrane module it's no big deal. Do it every Nth gas cylinder change.
Also: That may be a guaranteed minimum time before output has dropped 10% or so, rather than "it suddenly dies". Or it could be how long they've tested the prototypes, so far. B-) We'll just have to wait and see.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Actually Hydrogen is lighter then helium. It was the preferred gas for Blimps.... and why the Hindenburgh made such a BIG ball of fire when it went up.
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!
Actually... that is mostly false. The main reason the Hindenburgh made such a huge flame so quickly was its skin. It was highly flamable (far more so than the hydrogen), and when combined with the wires (carrying static electricity) which ran all over, a small spark ignited the skin and cause the disaster. This misconception is one of the reasons hydrogen has had so much trouble being made a viable fuel - the fear factor made it too hard to market.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
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.
read further down the page about Powerballs
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
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.
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.
Plants can't breathe oxygen either. They breathe carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. And some arboreal plants do indeed rely on the water in the air to survive.
I have no numbers to hand, but a fuel cell is much more efficient than any internal combustion engine currently available, and mole for mole uses half as much oxygen as hydrogen. I'd say it won't make much of an impact, expecially compared to IC engines, which also use plenty of oxygen but spew toxic fumes.
You don't have to produce your hydrogen as you're describing, and carbon dioxide is not necessarily going to be the byproduct even if you use hydrocarbons. You can also get your hydrogen via electrolysis of water, which produces oxygen as a byproduct. This process uses electricity, but it seems to me a well-designed system would use tidal flows to produce the power. You need to add an electrolyte to water for electrolysis to work, so sea water would be ideal, which means you might as well locate your hydrogen plants along the coast. A further byproduct would be the minerals originally dissolved in the water, which could then be put to good use. Such plants could be small and discreet, and need not place any strain to speak of on the local environment.
Come to think of it, such a system could be a boon for poor countries with a coastline and good tides but few other resources. They would become energy and mineral exporters.
I'd love it if someone could give this idea a good critique.
And the brethren went away edified.
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.
Back to thermodynamics class for you! No process is going to have a net energy gain from start to finish. All you can hope to do is tap into an energy source that's going to waste, like falling water, radioactive decay, or sunlight.
Remember the 3 laws of thermogoddamics:
1. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't even come close.
On the wasted energy thing, though... Perhaps if we took a gym full of stationary bicycles + generators, and an equivelant number of five-year-olds... and told them not to touch the bikes on pain of death
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
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
"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.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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").
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").
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").
"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
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!
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.
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.
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.
and can be switched up and down with demand.
Solar, doesn't work at night.
Wind, doesn't work when becarmed.
Geothermal is only available in volcanic regions.
Hydroelectric is only available near major rivers.
Biomass fails with bad harvests.
Thus nuclear power remains an essential part of
a post fossil fuel worlds, energy policy. Not
all of a its, but say 10-20%.
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.
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?
Found this while looking up parts for my Mini...looks like BMW is headed somewhere.
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
It would be a bit dubious if I used that to defend that I had said "beg the question", yes.
Unfortunately, you haven't looked at the poster names, and I'm not the one who said that.
However, "beg the question" is changing meaning from "makes a circular argument" to mean "raises the question" because lots of people use it that way, and if that weren't the case there wouldn't need to be people on slashdot who complain whenever they read "beg the question". I personally don't use it for either meaning, because I think the phrase sounds dumb, but I'm sick of all these comments along the lines of "Stop it! You're using my pet phrase wrong!"
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota