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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.
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)
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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If you really wanna know, their advice (from this fascinating page is:
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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
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(); }
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.
Wow... good to know that eEye is protecting innocent IIS users from the horrors of the Slashdot Effect!! ;-)
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