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Fuel-Cell Backup Power Under Your Desk
An Anonymous Coward writes "Just up this evening on the Coleman Powermate web site: This is the first
commercial fuel cell product that I am aware of. Who wants one under their Christmas tree?" I just wish the fuel wasn't quite so expensive.
at $7,500 for the "Starter Pack", $10K for 24 hours. A generic (Honda, or something) gasoline generator is only a hundred bucks or so, and gasoline is only about $1.25/gal here in the US now. Who does Coleman think might buy this stuff? Osama bin f-ing Ladin? (Just the thing to keep your satellite phone lit in the caves on those long winter nights in Nowhere, Afghanistan?) It's amazing that they'd even advertise this product at the prices they're quoting. Until they meet reality, they'll never sell these things.
Fuel Cell Generator
Creates computer-safe electricity from hydrogen and oxygen
Uninteruptible Power Supply
Seemless power transition keeps systems running smoothly
Surge Protector and Power Conditioner
Protects sensitive electronics from high voltage jolts and sags
MODEL NO. PMXXXXX
POWER 1000 Watts (Batteries Charged)
OVERLOAD CAPACITY 1600 VA for 2 Seconds
VOLTS 120 VAC +/-3%
FREQUENCY 60 Hertz
WAVEFORM Perfect Sine-Wave
NOISE 65 dba @ 1 Meter
FUEL CELL Ballard Nexa
FUEL 3 Hydrogen Fuel Canisters
RUN TIME @ 50% LOAD 6 Hours
SURGE PROTECTION 360 Joules
BATTERIES Sealed Lead Acid
WEIGHT (LESS CANISTERS) 101 lbs.
DIMENSIONS 27.3" x 15.8" x 19"
WARRANTY 1 Year
Really cool, but the fuel cells are expensive for only 6 hours of back up time @ 50%. I wonder what the unit itself will set you back.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
It seems not to have a serial or ethernet port.
If you are not having it under your desk but in machine room like they show on one of the pics, you will never know if it's actually in good health.
Also I did not see an indication that it could tell a computer to shutdown before it runs out of fuel.
George
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
According to the website, it is $7495.99 for the generator and three fuel bottles. For the generator and nine bottles, the price jumps to $9995.99. Doing some basic math, the cost of a fuel comes out to about $416.66 per bottle, unless I am missing something major. Also, it claims the nine-bottle pack is a 24-hour supply. If you live on a non-Bill Gates budget, nobody can afford spending $3750 a day on fuel.
Granted, this baby can supply a constant kilowatt of power. But doing the math, you are paying $156.25 per kilowatt-hour. This has to be the most ludicrisly expensive method of power generation I know. You may as well hire 10,000 hampsters to run on a wheel to supply your backup power. I'm sure they can generate just as much power, not to mention the only fuel required is cheap dried food and water. But you do have to clean up all those hampster pellets...
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Very good piece of technology. Could be a bit better: being able to swap hydrogen canisters on the fly to give unlimited life; or being able to plumb in a hydrogen supply. This gives the possibility of using solar power during the day the power a computer and generate hydrogen, and to run of the hydrogen at night in a closed cycle. This would be better than lead acid batteries as these do not have a particularly high power density.
The cost of the hydrogen is outrageous - you can buy a J cylinder (big) of hydrogen for about $100.
Despite what the article says there is no way that this is the first commercial fuel cell - see this page for a manufacturer near you - but it is a great indication that they will soon be mainstream.
This technology if amazing and I am certainly that most of us will have something like this in the folloing 5-10 years. But it is very expensive now, and as someone here pointed out it can be replaced by a common no break for a fraction of the price.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Why just hydrogen? Propane/butane or methane would be much better due to their availability. You can get butane almost everywhere. Propane is well known and there is plenty of tank technology for it and methane is for many people, now on tap, being the main component of natural gas.
See my journal, I write things there
As a UPS, this thing could probably be matched (6hr/500w) by a few more lead/acid batteries under your desk. The cool thing is that you can buy these now just like any other (very expensive) generator. Coleman has invested the capital to make clean power available, and I for one hope they find a way to make it extremely profitable. (and somewhat more affordable)
The hydrogen is actually stored in metal hydride pellets or powder. The metal hydride absorbs and desorbs the hydrogen and is non cumbustible. Gas and propane are more flammable than hydrogen and I have some propane in my basement already.
Now the trick here would be to have a system that can reinfuse the hydrogen into the pellets when power is available.
Cat
>Filling a room with hydrogen is roughly >the equivalent of filling the room with oxygen - >it will combust (see references to the >Hindenburg).
Um, except for the fact that oxygen isn't actually flammable.
why would it be safe to store hydrogen in my house?
You would be amazed at how safe hydrogen is. When I was working in reseach we had an outside gas bottle room which consisted of rows of bottles plumbed in and gas lines going to the relevent lab. Some of these were hydrogen and it was decided to fit a hydrogen sensor to detect leaks and shut it down automatically when the hydrogen concentation reached about 50% of the lower explosive limit.
Anyway, this was installed and seemed to be working. We then decided to test it by gently cracking open a hydrogen bottle under the sensor (which was on the ceiling) and watching the output. Nothing. We opened it a bit more - still nothing. Finally we opened up full and only then did the sensor start to register (but nowhere near the set point).
What was happening was that because the room was well ventilated, the hydrogen dispersed so quickly that it only just got high enough to show on the detector. Any leak apart from a catastrophic failure would be safe.
Propane, on the other hand, is a floor hugger and does not disperse very well. You also beed a lower concentration of it to go bang. So if this leaks it tends to hang about the cylinder and you quickly have a bomb waiting to go off.
Aspects of this page indicate it's not yet released. For instance, lots of stuff is XX'd out; and if you click on "Fuel Cells" in the nav bar, you get a notice implying that the product is not yet ready.
Is it possible that this is not the final pricing? It could be an early number, could be the very top (so nobody claims "false advertising" if they stumble across it later, when they set the real price), could be misinformation for competitors, whatever.
Oh, nobody's mentioned numbers yet, but to get a single data point, you can get an APC's Matrix 3000XR (which sustains 500kW for about 5:15, and is in many ways more capable-- higher peak, for instance-- but obviously-- can't be refueled during a power outage). It's listed at $3750 US.
The batteries are there to: (1) provide power for you (and the unit) while you're switching hydrogen canisters, and (2) depending upon the design, to even out the line voltage.
[Lecture Mode On]
There are two basic designs for UPSes: continuous and intermittent.
The UPSes that you buy for SOHO use are intermittent -- line voltage feeds a battery circuit (battery charger + batteries + inverter) and goes to a relay, which switches between the battery circuit and the normal line voltage. When line voltage goes off, the relay switches; when line voltage comes back, the relay switches back. While the relay is switching, there will be a short interruption in power, but most AC equipment can handle the (very short) interruption. This type of UPS will also have surge protectors built in to filter out high voltage and spikes, but can't do a lot for brownouts other than switch to batteries.
Continuous UPSes work differently -- the line voltage is used to charge the batteries, which run the inverter, which provides clean, uninterrupted power. No relays, no interruptions, no worry about power spikes or brownouts. Unfortunately, you're continuously charging and draining the batteries -- which significantly reduces the working life of the batteries. This type of UPS requires hot-swappable batteries, and is generally a lot more expensive to purchase and maintain (which explains the popularity of the intermittent UPSes).
[Lecture Mode Off]
From what I read on the site, the AirGen acts like an intermittent UPS -- when line voltage shuts off, the AirGen switches to generated power, and switches back when line voltage returns. The batteries are probably there just to provide the necessary power to start and maintain the generator, and to provide power while you're switch canisters. The AirGen *could* be a continuous UPS, with the fuel-cells supplementing line voltage for charging the batteries, but I doubt it -- everything they've posted on their site points towards the intermittent UPS design.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
Er... Check your high school economics textbook again.
High supply + low demand = surplus, which means lower prices. Assuming a constant supply, when demand goes up, prices increase. (Think about it for a minute, and it makes sense.)
To simplify to HS economics terms, we're looking at a low supply in this market. We don't know the specs of the H2 canisters, so they may be unique. Also, the users of this are probably a separate market than those who know where to get cheap H2, so it's effectively a low supply market, meaning high prices.
Of course, if demand increases, and the free market works right, then supply will increase to meet it (since H2 is not a scarce resource). That means competition, which means lower prices.
Although the Hindenburg disaster is the posterchild for the flammability and hence perceived danger of Hydrogen, you might want to read ``Hydrogen Didn't Cause Hindenburg Fire''
Hydrogen, being the lightest element, doesn't go liquid until close to absolute zero at standard pressure. Even if you make the pressure dangerously high, the refrigeration will still keep it from being worth it to force it into the liquid state. An oxygen molecule is 16 times the size, but it still takes some work to make liquid oxygen, and the pressure would once again be dangerous.
How do they not take up too much space, as you said? Fuel cells are extremely efficient because rather than producing pneumatic energy from combustion which is then converted to electrical energy, they essentially make a battery out of them that fuses hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. But they still don't usually store hydrogen or oxygen.
Fuel cells usually have a liquid forms - these are produced by dissolving or chemically combining hydrogen with less electropositive and negative elements (making an acid and a base), and then removing the hydrogen from this right before it is needed. Typically, the hydrogen is removed from an alcohol. Oxygen is just taken straight out of the air.
Here is a good summary of fuel cells, if you want to know more.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Everyone seems to be assuming that the because the price per cannister works out high the fuel is really expensive. I would have thought they would have a similar system to calor gas (bottles propane/butane) where the cannister is more expensive than the fuel _but_ is reusable, so if you want 9 you pay a lot (for the 9 bottles) after that the fuel is cheap.
I guess we'll wait and see.
It's the tanks to hold the high pressure hydrogen while being safe enough to be kept indoors that are expensive. The hydrogen is cheap...
This isn't bad for something that can be used indoors. It's also especially good for extreme environments where it's too cold outside for a gas powered generator to start in the winter.
You can put in this much solar capacity, or more, for this price. And guess what, no noise.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Suppose you have a tiny leak in the propane cylinder: the propane will accumulate in your cellar, it'll reach the explosive concentration (IIRC around 5 percent), and your house explodes when something creates a spark.
Hydrogen is lighter: it can't accumulate in the cellar, it'll leave through your roof. Therefore it won't reach the critical concentration and it can't cause a big explosion.
But that's only true if you don't have a huge leak in you hydrogen tank.
#insert picture of the exploding spaceshuttle.
According to their description they store the hydrogen bound to metal atoms.
That's the safest and most expensive way to store hydrogen. It's expensive because you need special metals, but it's absolutely safe because the metal only releases hydrogen at a very low rate - too low to create an explosive concentration.
"Perfect signwave electricity to protect sensitive electronics"
This must be so that deaf people can use the electricity, too.
forth ?love if honk then
What I think is sad is that the journalists covering this stuff and the public officials setting environmental policy are just as guilty of this energy-source-misdirection as the marketers of the technology are. How many times have we heard that electric cars are 100% environmentally friendly and will solve all of our pollution problems? Where do these people think electricity comes from?
Now if someone will merge solar power into the equation, then we'd be on to something. If Coleman provided a means to refuel those H2 canisters yourself you could hypothetically power the refueling device with a solar array. Now THAT would be environmentally friendly.
It takes a fair bit of time for a fuel cell to start making power after you start the fuel feed. The batteries are there to a) allow the unit time to come up and b) to allow the unit to respond to surges like your monitor coming up.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you really wanna know, their advice (from this fascinating page is:
Anyone remember the Bloom County strip in which the black genius kid asks his parents to ``Move away from the basement'' while he tests his nuclear experiment? When asked ``How far?'', he suggests New Jersey.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Funny you should say that. I can imagine a similar conversation just twelve years ago.
Inventory clearance, Area 53, 1989
CLERK #1 (C1): Carbon composite toilet seats, 200?
CLERK #2(C@): Ship to Lockheed.
C1: Titanium hammers with gold anodized grips?
C2: Ship to General Dynamics.
C1: Portable fuel cells, 50, with starter pack, 500?
C2: Ship to OBL via Donkey Tain.
C1: What the fuck?
C2: Who cares, here are the lables.
Sold!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
GE has been selling their fuel cell systems for over a year. Sizes from whole house residential systems to commercial building-sized units.
They use propane (or natural gas?) and extract the hydrogen from there. Still have the problem of storage, but at least propane/natural gas storage is common and suppliers abound.
-a.e.mossberg
No they're not 100% environmentally friendly, and the fact is Hydrogen *will* be obtained from fossil fuels, but it is much more environmentally friendly to burn all the fossil fuels centrally (i.e. in power stations, which have much more carefully-controlled emmission standards), than it is to ship fuel out to household generators, or whatever, which are inherently less efficient than larger power stations.
e n_ us/microgen/index.jsp/
Also, when the relevant authorites take it upon themselves to do something about greenhouse gas emmissions , the switch to alternative power is much more cost-effective and easy if it's done centrally.
On a related note, and slashdot has covered this before, GE is working on a home fuel cell which uses the methane from natural gas:
http://www.gepower.com/dhtml/distributed_power/
It's potentially much more interesting and cleaner (not to mention cheaper) than the coleman cell.
Of course, this thing is expensive, seemingly inefficient, and probably impractical... for now. But keep in mind a few things:
First of all, Ballard (the company that makes the fuel cell in this thing) has said all along that they're going to have the really practical consumer devices in the market in 2005 (I think it's in their annual report, if memory serves). I think anything you see out there earlier is going to be a test product to smooth out the edges in production.
The infrastructure to support hydrogen fuel (the price of those canisters, for example) is one of the things that needs to be smoothed out as well. The price of fuel should come WAY down with centralized production.
Ballard fuel cells can also run on other fuels (methanol, for one) but at a reduced efficiency and with a slight hydrocarbon emission (still something on the order of 3-5% of what comes out of a combustion engine, but enough that you couldn't run one in a closed room).
Yes, hydrogen fuel takes energy to produce, but so does fossil fuel extraction and then once you've got, say, gasoline, it gets burned inefficiently and with lotsa nasty waste products. I know cars seem to be getting more efficient all the time, but every car I know of requires a separate system to keep the engine cool (read: waste heat) and I wouldn't put my lips on a tailpipe. Fuel cells do their thing at 75-80 degrees F, and when hydrogen-fueled, the only output is distilled H20. That's it.
Once practical devices come to market , they'll have the potential of decentralizing power, with that huge advantage of EFFICIENCY. And aside from the abovementioned advantages, don't forget to factor in power loss from transmission through wires. A world where fuel cells are practical everyday devices is nothing less than a PC revolution for power: power plants for all! Think an power Gnutella as opposed to the power grid. After all, I'm sure some folks were saying "Two thousand dollars for 64K of RAM? These things'll never catch on" twenty years ago...
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
i did some research years ago about fuel cells. the viable solution is to buy the fuel cell generator that provides 200kwatts from UTC Fuel Cells.
this is actually a cool device that allows source from methane or natural gas.
they also have numerous installations made.
although at this time, i am not sure if there are other companies that have created generators made from fuel cells.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
It's too bad that it can't use AC to refuel itself
by cracking H2O back into hydrogen to refill its fuel tanks when the AC is on. Now this would be cool.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The URL posted above isn't correct. Try, http://www.colemanpowermate.com/fuelcell/
BTW, this site doesn't support Netscape. They don't know how to close off tables. Why is it that more then 40% of the websites I have gone to recently do that ?
until (succeed) try { again(); }
GE is not selling the home unit - they're just talking about it.
The GE unit is made by Plug Power and has been on GE's web site for close to a year now. Evidently, they've hit some snags. The fact Plug Power recently laid off almost 1/4 of their work force and their press releases talk more about financial than technology milestones doesn't bode well.
Ballard builds big systems. Their shipped product is a 250KW unit the size of a standard truck/ship container. They've been talking about a 1KW unit for a while, but their site still doesn't have photos of it.
Ballard was supposed to be the hot company in fuel cells, but they've been at Real Soon Now for a few years, and it's not clear what's wrong.
I could be wrong, but the last time I researched fuel cells, I got the impression that a properly designed cell could ingest propane, methane, etc. directly. No extra stuff required. It would produce some more nasty byproducts than a straight up hydrogen/oxygen cell. However, I think there was a bonus that you usually didn't have to humidify the input gas when you used something like methane.
(IIRC humidification was one of those things that became pretty important when you started getting out of the pure research grade fuel cell sizes and into something that could be useful. I.e. something that runs hot.)
Been a while since I looked at that stuff. Could be way wrong.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Try running an internal combustion generator in an enclosed space with you in it. They'll most likely be planting you in the ground when they find you later. Try doing that with this and you'll be around to tell the tale because it does specifically have no emissions other than water.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Here's the spec sheet from Ballard of the Nexa module used in the coleman. Some interesting differences:
1200 W, not 1000W.
Lifetime: 1500 Hours (~2 months)
Control interface: RS485
Output: 46 Amps @ 26 volts
Unit must be protected from weather, sand, dust, marine, and freezing conditions in product packaging (I assume coleman does this to some extent)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
That run off of LP or Natural Gas. They're a little largish, but produce something like 10kW of electricity and enough waste heat to act as a pre-heater for your hot water system. They've been selling them for people over on the West coast for past couple of years. Now the GE system's unique in that it's designed to run off of Methane and thereby allowing you to use biomass sources to power the unit instead of LPG/NG- which would be a pretty "green" system indeed.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This will go as long as you've got fuel and will work under conditions (like sub-zero temperatures) that would mess up the ordinary UPS.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You get this if you're coming in from thier site as well...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Wow... good to know that eEye is protecting innocent IIS users from the horrors of the Slashdot Effect!! ;-)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I checked the Coleman site for pricing on real generators, and (as consistent with my experience elsewhere) the pricing was "call us".
"Call us" generally means "If you have to ask, you can't afford it; it's not priced for residential use." It lets sellers put people on the line who are experienced in dealing with the effects of sticker shock. Once, I was looking into a library to develop installable filesystems for Windows NT/2K/XP to see if I could port ext2fs, but Microsoft's poorly documented headers cost $1,000, and the only other available package cost $100,000. Ouch.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The risk can be minimized by using valve-regulated absorbant-mat or gelled-cell batteries. They're still lead-acid, but they contain the electrolyte in either a mat or gel matrix which eliminates the spill hazard of sulfuric acid. The valve regulated feature allows the gases produced during charging to recombine instead of escaping if properly charged, via a valve-relief system.
Keep in mind, any unit with a battery in it (including the Airgen), will vent hydrogen if overcharged - that's why you spend the money to get a good charger/regulator. A car alternator or el-cheapo car-battery charger are NOT good chargers (no intelligence), and either depend on a known load, or a timed charge. You want something that monitors amperage, temprature, and voltage, and knows the profile of the batteries you're trying to charge. Good chargers are not cheap, but well worth the cost in maintaining battery life, without having to resort to "boiling" your batteries from time to time to get full charge.
Also, you might either want ventilation, or an outside installation for the units, if you really fear hydrogen that much...
Regarding the environmental hazard, lead is the most recycled material (90-99%?), and batteries are not dumped, but chopped up and recycled into new lead-acid batteries. Any place that sells lead-acid batteries here in the US is required to accept them for recycling. Compare this to all the NiCad batteries (Cadmium is quite toxic) produced for consumer devices that people end up tossing directly into the garbage.
The only other, low-cost high-capacity mass-market batteries, other than lead-acid, would NiFe, and good luck finding a supplier for those in small amounts.
http://www.nrel.gov/research/pv/cust-sited.htmla er z2001-e.html
http://www.solarserver.de/solarmagazin/artikelm
http://www.windsun.com/PV_Stuff/pv_pricing.htm
Solar panels cost about $5.00 per watt X 1000 watts =$5000.00 plus batteries, a transformer, and some wiring =approx $8-10,000. I was told by a proffessional solar installer (he does 10 or more intallations a year from Maine to the Bahamas) that it would cost about $18,000-$20,000 to do my whole house. After the install I don't have to replace fuel cells every 6 hours, at over $400 a shot, either, just a battery once in a while.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Actually, you have to run a propane generator once a month too. Generator cycling is necessary to keep the genset windings clear of moisture, not just to exercise the engine.
My neighbors sometimes tell me that the grid is down, but otherwise I'd never know.
Australia? Chicken feed. Coat the moon!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They don't actually post a price for the fuel on the site yet. They INCLUDE it with the unit. Hence the question, WTF is the price for the unit ITSELF?
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Technically, yes. But it's not the whole constituents of the gas- it's got propane, butane, ethane, etc. in it. The bulk is methane, but there's more to it than that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas