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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
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!
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.
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?
You mean as oppposed to having natural gas piped into their home that would fill the house with gas if the pilot light just happened to go out while you on vacation? Tens of millions of families are living with this every day.
It's really not bad, certainly less dangerous and less explosive than the propane tanks and natural gas we have learned to accept. Much less so than tanks full of gasoline.
The most famous evidence of the unacceptable dangers of hydrogen was the Hindenburg explosion. A close look at the film shows some interesting results. The hydrogen went up (literally). The huge fire was caused by the diesel from the engines burning.
Then too, you have to consider "normal accidents" as well as the flashier exceptional ones. Burning hydrocarbons produce things link carbon monoxide. Not good. Very poisonous. Very insidious. Burning hydrogen produces water vapor. Much less nasty.
Of course, if you get your hydrogen by electrolyzing water and use electricity from burning fossil fuels you are still producing unpleasant stuff. But smokestacks are easier to track down and fit with scrubbers and other anti-pollution devices.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Here is another link about how hydrogen full cells work. http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/stia/studen ts/osgood.htm
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The 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?
The short-term question is where are people going to get the hydrogen from? That infrastructure's not in place yet.
I think one scenario that would make this thing particularly kick-ass right away is this: if the generator is to be used just for backup and emergencies - i.e. it will be idle most of the time - then you could slowly generate your own hydrogen at home from tap water and a solar-powered hydrolysis rig. FREE! Take that, Exxon.
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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.
Arguably it wasn't, but GM used one of its own prototype electric cars as a political lever on the technological readiness issue -- claiming it couldn't manage even a hundred miles on a charge, etc. They'd contracted Ballard to build the cells; Ballard built a battery pack that could manage more than twice what GM was claiming to Congress (around 200mi), but GM's contract allowed GM to suppress the information, ultimately forcing California to roll back state legislation on ZEVs (10% of all sales by the early 2000s, IIRC).
Source: Taken for a Ride, by Jack Doyle. Sorry if I've misremembered the details, but that's the general picture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"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
"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"?
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.