Slashdot Mirror
Coleman To Sell Portable Fuel Cell Generator
HobbySpacer writes "
Popular Science reports that
Coleman Powermate
will soon start selling a small portable fuel cell power supply.
The AirGen Fuel Cell Generator provides 1.2kW for up to 10 hours
on a bottle of pure hydrogen. Interestingly, the company had to
set up its own distribution system to insure it could deliver a
refill anyplace in the US within 2 days. The unit, built by
Ballard, goes for a pricey $8k but perhaps worth it if an indoor emergency backup is needed. Fuel cells can also be found for sale at the
Fuel Cell Store and Greenvolt.
Perhaps the hydrogen economy is closer than most people thought."
Moderators should be allowed to moderate articles as (-1) Duplicate. :-)
Ross
Sure, at the beginning they are $8,000. I can't imagine this price will stay long once competition enters the field. It's similar to the way Apple does technology. Look at the flat-panel monitor for example. Prices have already begun to drop due to their exclusive distribution by Apple.
I'm glad to see that Coleman is entering this market. A bit pricy for most of us now, but at least this will start the ball rolling on clean-fuel generators.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/09/044421 6&mode=nested
Doesn't anyone bother to do a simple search before posting front page stories?!
I just entered "Coleman" into the search box and got the above link, same story, move along, nothing to see here...
Picture of the device can be seen on the Popular Science's website here.
You know, normally I wouldn't be thinking this way, but I suppose its the natural reaction.
If the world fuel "economy" switches to hydrogen, what happens to the countries which sole income is provided by oil and fossil fuels? Won't these places be absolutely devestated and ruined by the collapse of their energy-demand? Hydrogen power is an amazing thing, but it'd be something like suddenly replacing the staple foods in the world with chemical products - it dents a rather secure and stable part of our lifestyle and global economy.
I just hope something can be worked out before the "dream" of hydrogen power can be achieved... it's scary stuff, when you think about it.
Quietly wiping away a tear for Al Gore....
Dirk
My dad used to work for a Coleman related company (basically just licensing their products and producing them under a different name.) He had mentioned something like this quite a while ago, it's cool to see it made it farther than the development stage. The image of the Coleman Powermate looks quite familiar, and unchanged from what I had seen quite awhile ago. As the article mentions, the price tag is quite steep, but may prove useful to the medical industry, although I would think at this point it would be a 3rd stage (or 4th, or 5th..) power supply backup. It also seems quite useful for a military use, as it is quite portable, although I'm sure a military version would be a bit more durable and have a better useful life (in terms of backup power and actual physical durability). The fact that it requires pure, bottled hydrogen seems like it's biggest downfall though. I hope Coleman or other manufacturers help to bridge the gap to something more useful for the home consumer.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
8k for the equipment but how much does a bottle of hydrogen cost? I can't find that information anywhere.
Sig is taking a break!
Although, fuel cells are a door into a world of cleaner, more abundant energy, it must be said that with every great inovation and evolution in technology comes with an even greater responsibility. If the hydrogen economy is here, then we have to consider where that hydrogen is coming from. Is it going to come from hydrocarbons like oil? Is all that hydrogen going to be generated from the electrolysis of water? Are we going to use bimass? If its oil, then we may be in just as bad a situation. The refinement of oil leaves a tremendouos number of nasty by products, not to mention our continued dependance on a non-renewable resource. If we get it from water, then what generates t he electricity? Solar and wind are options, but will require tremendous investement to fulfill the requirements to generate the amount of hydrogen necessary to replace the internal combustion engine. If its biomass, I havent seen the numbers to indicate the amount of byproducts to make harvesting economical, although I know it had been done on a limited scale. There is a give and a take. There are no free lunches. I want to know if we are going to decrease the amount of pollution we are dumping into the environment, or make the situation worse. Fuel cells, and hydrogen power in general, have proved themselves efficient and clean on a small scale, but untested on a large scale. I still see the same unanswered questions of production, distribution, maintenance and disposal.
...to get the "hydrogen economy" rolling are european conditions on the fuel/oil market. A gallon, for.... hmm say $3.50. You would still be well of compared to most of europe, but people would start scouting alternatives.
And just imagine the budget money saved from not having to wage a war for oil every 5 to 8 years...
+++ath0
Not nearly as explosive as the bigass tank of gasoline you drive around every day.
The Hindenburg's problems were caused not by the H2, but by the chemical in the paint on the fabric.
--
grep "xercist"
Hydrogen needs to react with plenty of oxygen to explode. There won't be nearly enough oxygen getting to the hydrogen molecules to cause much of an explosion. A canister of gun powder would be more explosive since oxygen is included in the mixture.
The Hindenburg blew up not because of the hydrogen, but because of the paint used. It was a mixture that very closely resembled aircraft fuel and was highly explosive. The hydrogen would not have exploded anyways. If ignite hydrogen it goes up almost like a puff and then its gone. Very limited reaction. More on this here http://www.ttcorp.com/nha/advocate/ad22zepp.htm. Yeah the site is done by the National Hydrogen Association, but this a very well excepted explination of what happened.
m l
Here is another link from PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/html/e3-menu.ht
you can get a 10kw deisel for that price new or 30kw for that price used. Power your block for 8k or barely push your 650w enermax powersupply'd dualie Athlon watercooled raid 5 scsi server.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it takes a lot more energy to produce and store than it generates. Electrolysis is especially inefficient and you end up polluting anyway (power plant) so it's not clean energy. The story also left out an important detail:
. . . the company is confident a $100 refill could be delivered anywhere in the United States within two days.
And I thought laptop batteries were expensive. At $8,000 + $100 for each 10 hours to power just a few pieces of equipment we'll all be riding Segways long before this is practical for every day use.
How explosive would a "bottle of pure hydrogen" be that could "provide 1.2kW for up to 10 hours"?
Not a definate answer, but an (educated?) guess. I think it would safer than the equivalent amount of fuel/diesel needed to power an traditional internal combustion generator. Why? Storage. Hydrogen comes in sturdy metal canisters with safety valves. Fuel/diesel is usually stored in plastic or sheet metal containers with an pretty insecure screw-on lid.
Also, I am not sure about the circumstances under which hydrogen becomes explosive. I think it needs a special atmospheric ratio to be dangerous (i.e. mixed with oxygen). I faintly remember some test tube popping in chemistry classes and it involved a mixture of gases instead of pure hydrogen.
+++ath0
Great idea. This could power a house, and as the distribution system for hydro gets more developed, the price will drop, as will the cost of use.
One of the reasons the damned things are so expensive (but cheaper per kw that solar iirc) is the catalyst used is usually platinum, which is horribly expensive and rare. People aren't certain if they can get the amount of platinum to do mass production of larger units. Luckily, other alloys can do the job, but with some lost efficiency.
Fuel cells are highly efficient, and farily cost efficient (not like, say, *coal* is). It' s main problems is the hydrogen. But this is more of a factor that limits their use in vehicles then for home use.
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Hydrogen in bottled form is, of course, fairly common and fairly safe, but it may simply be too inconvenient for this application. For something that heavy and big, maybe it would be more better if it could run on alcohol ("a bottle of vodka"), bottled gas, or some solid hydride that is activated with water and later recycled.
Pure hydrogen? Medical equipment?
You certainly wouldn't want to use them near any oxygen tanks. Why, if the two were to combine they would form the (very deadly) dihydrogen monoxide!
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
The Greenvolt units mentioned in the article require a special, dry anode and cathode, which are activated by adding salt water. The by-product of this, aside from electricity, is pure hydrogen.
:)
I wonder, how many Greenvolt units would be required to produce the fuel needed for the Coleman unit? That would be so cool, running one off of the "waste" of the other
Lemon curry?
If the world fuel "economy" switches to hydrogen, what happens to the countries which sole income is provided by oil and fossil fuels? Won't these places be absolutely devestated and ruined by the collapse of their energy-demand?
Not really. The cheapest way to make bulk hydrogen is to use a reformer with a petroleum based feedstock. If they could build a reformer into the fuel cell and use Coleman's lantern fuel, then they'd have the next Big Thing(tm). Coleman's lantern fuel is a highly purified white gasoline. Which is more expensive than motor gasoline. Coleman? Big oil? Ya listening?
"Coleman To Sell Portable Fuel Cell Generator"?
What, was he inspired by George Foreman's barbeque grill?
And whilst we're at it, we can ban fertilizer, bleach, washing powder, flour, all petrol byproducts, potassium salt, water (electricity = fun oxygen/hydrogen mix) since all of these can be turned into explosives. ... errm well virtually everything if abused.
Whilst we're at it, paracetamol is dangerous, so is
Slippery slope, banning things 'because they might be dangerous' is a dangerously daft political attitude.
There are hazards, but the gas is not basically explosive. The main hazards are:
1. A slow leak, resulting in soem hydrogen being mixed with the air, followed by a spark which could set off a very violent explosion indeed
2. A fracture of the bottle, which must be under fairly high pressure.
Why not just buy a big cylinder of hydrogen from an industrial gas supplier? I'm assuming that this device can run off bottled hydrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This would be great. I wonder what effect this will have on automobile power as well?
$100 per fillup...for the generator...the gas equivelant of about 3 gallons of gasoline... Not much effect.
Give this one many years before the plant is cheap enough, the fuel affordable etc. The fuel will not be affordable until gasoline becomes less affordable. In a free market society, green choices are often rejected due to the large increase in operating expense. You can be green if money is no object. (Getes may use one to recharge his pocket PC) For the rest of us, it needs to be price competetive.
The truth shall set you free!
I still prefer Doctor Brown's Mr. Fusion, that appeared in Back to the Future III. It runs with banana peels, cans, whatever. Plus it can get you back in time.
It has a major drawback, though. It only runs on a Delorean like this or this .
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Actualy I can give a shot at answering this one. You are correct in assuming hydrogen is difficult to store. The lighter a gas is, the faster it can seep through a fault in a container or a gas permiable material. A container that can contain CO2 for years, may lose all it's hydrogen in a very short time. Heilum is much heavier than hydrogen and much safer (I know it's not a fuel. It's used for leak detection because it's inhert) even though heavier than Hydrogen. Heilum is used for rapid "leak detection" in high vac systems because it can quickly find it's way in the smallest and slowest of leaks. Presence of the gas is sensed at the vac pump and almost gives a leak indication in real time when some heilum is blowen onto a faulty joint or seal. Many materials pass hydrogen readly like many plastic bottles pass water and many household chemicals. You can tell these older bottles on the shelf in the store as they start to collapse due to the product passing out through the plastic container. Seals and gaskets for hydrogen use are special. This is why soda pop and bottled water is put in Poly Ethylene Terephthalate PET plastic containers instead of regular Poly Ethelene PE, High Density Poly Ethylene HDPE, or Poly Propolene PPE plastic containers. The other plastics will not hold the CO2 very long. The PET container is designed to not pass CO2 so your favorite soft drink does not go flat on the shelf. This is why your heilum balloons will go flat much sooner than the same ones filled with air or CO2. Mylar is even better.
The truth shall set you free!
Fat Fucking Chance. If we called the Saudi's this afternoon and said "Hey, King Fahd. Know all of that oil you've got? Well, keep it. We got hydrogen power." You think that would stop the terrorists? No way. This would only force them to find a different premise under which to attack the US.
I envision that in the beginning, we'll use regular power plants, and that will be not quite dandy.
However, consider miniature hydro-power installed in your local creeks. It will go around the clock, and store the hydrogen when demand is low, spending it when demand is high. Heck - I can even see almost free fuel for our cars - a windmill and some solar cells on our roofs might go a long way in producing enough hydrogen.
The challenge is convincing Joe Average that investing in some solar cells is a good thing. Joe Farmer might have a creek through his property that he can get some power out of, but he also needs to be convinced.
Relating to the header, if you have a renewable energy source for the electrolysis, then you can also expend energy on transportation. The question is whether the energy loss would be greater if you transported by fuel cell powered trucks, or by the power grid. If we're lucky, we might find ourselves independent of the power grid. That's one less vulnerability in our society.
And, in the long run, we'll eventually have cold fusion. That will certainly along with hydrogen tech enable a virtually combustion-less society in the long run.
Then again, we just have to ask ourselves if big oil is going to see this as a business opportunity, or a business model threat.
Stop the brainwash
Accidental DHMO(dihydrogen monoxide) inhalation statistics. Source.
* There are more than 6,000 DHMO inhalation fatalities per year in the U.S.
* It takes only 20 to 60 seconds to die from DHMO inhalation.
Another source reports worldwide fatalities at 140,000 per year and that most victims are CHILDREN!
We must protect the CHILDREN! Ban DHMO!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Heh. I'd much rather read about paint drying than the new Star Wars movie, and perhaps even pre-dried paint than a 3-month old movie. Horses for courses...
Sorry to disappoint, but it seems that most scientific progress is not Big-Bang style, but incremental. You could have the same complaint about processor speeds, digital paper, graphics cards, storage density, quantum computing, optical switching or pretty much any other field. Over time, things get 'better'.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
In my opinion, Ballard's residential 1-kW Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells are far more interesting. These units allow you to eliminate the electrical utility completely. Gas is used for heating and generating all the power the house needs.
As a bonus, this would also eliminate the need to have that mess of power lines on most streets in North America (although the cable companies and telcos might have something to say about this). I think this would (maybe) also help lay the infrastructure for the Hydrogen economy.
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
There's far too many areas where solar power just isn't going to work. If you live in New Mexico and Arizona it'd be fine as you're getting a ton of sunlight all year. If you live in Washington or Maine you'd be wasting your money. Solar panels are a cool idea for SOME areas to ease their electrical burden on a power grid but aren't for everybody. It'd be more efficient to use the Sun to produce more hydrogen for use in fuel cells that are making more water. Except for the energy coming in from the Sun it is a closed loop system that will work as long as light is shining down onto the ground.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The $100 within 2 days anywhere in US is a premium service. There is nothing to stop you buying an electrolysis kit, some solar panels, and generating your own. Or find a local supplier that will provide cheap bottles of hydrogen. After all, any local business can buy a hydrogen generator. Alternatively you can buy an all-in-one solution the regenerative fuel cell.
Interesting items from the DOE hydrogen faq:
How much energy is required to produce hydrogen via electrolysis of water?
"The energy required to produce hydrogen via electrolysis (assuming 1.23 V) is about 32.9 kW-hr/kg. [...] For commercial electrolysis systems that operate at about 1 A/cm2, a voltage of 1.75 V is required. This translates into about 46.8 kW-hr/kg, which corresponds to an energy efficiency of 70%.
"Most of the hydrogen produced today is consumed on site, such as at an oil refinery, and is not sold on the market. From large-scale production, hydrogen costs $0.32/lb if it is consumed on site. When hydrogen is sold on the market, the cost of liquefying the hydrogen and transporting it to the user must be added to the production cost. This can increase the selling price to $1.00-1.40/lb for delivered liquid hydrogen. Some users who require relatively small amounts of very pure hydrogen (such as the electronics industry) may use electrolyzers to produce high-purity hydrogen at their facilities. The cost of this hydrogen, which depends on the cost of the electricity used to split the water, is typically $1.00-$2.00/lb."
My fuel cell Segway will leave your old battery model at the lights.
Phillip.
http://www.FutureEnergies.com/
Property for sale in Nice, France
A bit like progressively converting foreign text to English and vice versa through Google/Babelfish to see how good the translator is by measuring the rate of deterioration, you could couple a generator and fuel cell together and measure how long they last. Current electrolysis is around 70% efficient so this would quickly become biased towards generators that can still operate efficiently under low power, which is *not* the same as being the most efficient generator. Still an amusing idea though.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The cost of switching wouldn't be much of a consideration, because the easiest way to switch is attrition. Just require hydrogen burners on all new cars, and in a decade most of the cars on the road are hydrogen powered (think about those eye-level brake lights to see how attrition works). The real issue is switching things that don't turn over as fast as cars, like trucks (which burn a big percentage of the fossil fuels burned), planes, ships and power plants (which don't generally burn gas/oil but coal is a fossil fuel, after all). That's where the real costs involved in switching will pop up. So, even if cars all went to hydrogen, there would still be a large market for crude oil for a very long time (several decades at least).
Virg
Cool but...why not use a hydrocarbon fuel rather than pure hydrogen? Hydrogen is for the most part merely an energy transfer device not an energy storage device. Any time you talk about the energy stores in X amount of hydrogen you're REALLY talking about X amount of energy the hydrogen is transporting from one place to another.
To get hydrogen out of somewhere it is happy being requires energy, putting it somewhere it doesn't feel like going requires energy, and finally getting it out of the last place to stuck it because you're being finicky requires energy. Thus the energy you originally put into it to get it out of where it was happy being eventually ends up going into some eletrical thingamajig. The only way to close that loop (to make it efficient) is to get that original energy from Mr.Sun. However that part costs money AND energy because the second law of thermodynamics is not "solar panels will form out of random bits of silicon for your enjoyment".
In the case of hydrocarbons some unsuspecting group of organisms has for millions of years toiled away to put energy in the form of hydrogen into a substance. Said hydrogen is pretty happy there so it is cheaper to just move the hydrogen's home (the hydrocarbon) and evict it later when you have it near the site of energy conversion. Since the toiling is already done (in true open source fashion pun intended) why not use that pent up energy in the hydrocarbon to produce some emergency energy. It'd be much more marketable. You go to a gas station, fill up a propane tank, hook it to your fuel cell unit and energy issues forth as the liquified propane decides without the stopcock in the way it is free to expand to limits never before sought by propane molecules. Hydrogen's energy loop is much shorter than that of hydrocarbons meaning it costs you the user more per unit of energy to use some form of pure extracted hydrogen until solar power systems reach efficiencies and prices that can be more easily marginalized.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The Hindenburg was an aluminum frame, covered with painted fabric, and with gas bags of fabric with rubber or some other sealant. To get it nicely reflective they put aluminum chips in the paint, but the base pigment (to absorb light that got between the chips) was iron oxide (as in barn paint). The chemists should have known better -- Al + FeO2 is thermite, used in incendiary bombs. When heated, the Fe releases it's oxygen to the Al, with considerable heat released, and no way to put it out until the Al fuel is used up.
Being just a thin layer of paint, the energy wasn't concentrated and probably wasn't all that dangerous in itself. But once it lit, it spread all over quickly and burned through the fabrics, so most of the zeppelin suddenly became a big hydrogen leak. H2 went out and mostly up until it mixed with air to get oxygen, then it burned. That wasn't exactly an explosion, but it was one hell of a fire -- and the few percent of heat that radiated down into the cabin was enough to get the wood fittings, fabrics, and diesel fuel burning pretty soon. The people had to leave damned fast; judging by the pictures they were at least 50 feet up, at least until the gondola burned loose from the gasbags and crashed down. Still, the majority somehow managed to get to the ground alive and get clear of the wreck. Train crashes were worse.
I don't know if the He people had anything to do with the rather misleading publicity about this. They _couldn't_ sell He to the Germans, because of laws passed when we were afraid the Germans would bomb us from fire-proof Zeppelins. (They did bomb England from hydrogen filled Zeppelins in WWI, but this must have stopped as soon as any defense was organized.) And, BTW there is no such thing as He2; He atoms do not chemically combine.
For a better picture of H2 safety, look at the "illuminating gas" used in every city in the late 19th century. This was formed by passing steam through hot coal, giving a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It was explosive _and_ poisonous. In spite of the rather primitive plumbing fittings available at that time, dangerous leaks were pretty rare. Yes, H2 can kill you if you screw up; so can electricity, cars, and kitchen knives.
I actually saw a legitimate proposal for this type of energy recovery that involved dirigibles which makes sense in a weird sort of way. The concept is to use Aleutian windmills to generate electricity to separate hydrogen (and, of course, oxygen) from seawater. Then, they would use the hydrogen to inflate large dirigibles that would carry suspended tanks of compressed oxygen south to the U.S. When the dirigible arrives, the envelope is deflated into capture tanks and the dirigible is packed on a ship for the return trip to Alaska. Safety is not such a concern as it was with the Hindenburg because the oxygen is in suspended tanks that can be dropped in the ocean in the event of a fire so they don't cause an explosion, the envelope won't be nearly as flammable as dirigibles were when the Hindenburg went down, and for the biggest safety boost they can be flown by remote with no human crew, over the Pacific until they're near their landing zone so the risk of collateral damage from a crash is minimized.
I can imagine that getting this whole thing to be cost-effective would be tough, but technically it's doable.
Virg
Thats right! Someone in the Slashdot audience can win a shiny new dollar (Yeah! AUDIENCE GOES- Ohhhh! Aaaaaahhh!) from "El Camino SS" when they can guess the closest date (without going over, of course) to when the first US Senator says some total irrelevency like...
"Hey, we need to regulate this, after all, we don't want another Hindenburgh on our hands!"
-or-
"The last thing we need is someone turning this into a bomb, I mean, you know, its got hydrogen in it, so I'd say we don't exactly want any hydrogen bombs around here.... that would be devastating."
Good Luck! (INSERT TV GAME SHOW THEME HERE)
You make some good points, but regenerative fuel cells aren't relevent to this discussion. By definition, regenerative systems do not make hydrogen fuel available. They just use hydrogen to store electrical power. This is a useful technology -- it could help make solar power commercially viable -- but it's not something your neighborhood hydrogen vendor could use.
And what, if anything, happens to the container that's holding that compressed hydrogen?
There's so many points to contend here that I can only begin to cover them all, but I'll try.
First, OPEC doesn't comprise only Middle Eastern countries, unless you consider Indonesia and Venezuela to be a part of the Middle East. Second, there are member nations in the Middle East (like Kuwait, for example) that don't exactly promote anti-American sentiment. Third, disallowing anti-American sentiment (or anti-anything sentiment, for that matter) is unamerican in nature, since it involves governmental suppression of free speech. Fourth, we would have more problems in the region if it was destabilized than not. Do you really think that wiping out the economies of these countries is likely to foster a more democratic or equitable society in any of them, or is it more likely to cause even more powermongering (in which it has been historically proven that the more extreme factions get control than the more moderate)?
Maybe you should spend more time considering why these countries have such large constituencies of anti-American people, and you'll get a clearer idea as to realistic ways to change that sentiment. Reducing our reliance on foreign (and domestic) petroleum is a laudable goal, but not for the purpose of damaging OPEC.
I have been looking into this for some time. The previous poster is wrong. solar cells will work in Main and
Washington. Even with clouds you still get plenty of sun, If anything the clouds filter the unused portions of the light.
The problem with solar cells and wind mills is that the average cost per KWH is well over 1.00$ (Compared to the $.40
I pay the electric company. I fear that fuel cells will be along the same lines. Quoting from the fuel cell stores FAQ
"If I install a residential fuel cell, what kind of reduction in my utility bill can I anticipate?
Many factors enter into what your actual savings will be. These factors include; individual electricity consumption,
geographic location, the particular utility, if utilizing a reformer the price of natural gas or propane, the avoided costs
of installing lines to your residence when located in an off-grid area, etc. "
There is no clear answer as to whether you will save money by going to fuel cells. I fear that the cost will be the
deciding factor as to how quickly fuel cells are adopted. If they can produce a renewable, low cost energy source (The
optimum words being LOW COST) they will be adopted quickly. If they think everyone will buy one just because it
will benefit the environment, they are in for a shock!
I am still looking for a LOW COST alternate electrical source for my home computer room. Currently it is using
around 2000KWH per month.
Why, if the two were to combine they would form the (very deadly) dihydrogen monoxide!
Worse yet, if the reaction happens properly, it'll form hydronium hydroxide!
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
of my electric car?? ANd jsut plug the car into it?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Electric cars have been around for over 20 years and now that excellent hybrid gasoline/electric cars are hitting the market, the oil industry bought the rights to the NiMH battery technology and is using the courts to stop or slow down one of the big hybrid auto manufacturers.
Do you really think the oil industry would allow fuel cells to undermine their business? I think they will stall it until they figure out how to make oil burning fuel cells dominant.
I do hope you are correct but we'd be lucky if 5 years from now more then 1% of new homes are built with fuel cell heating/power systems. What ever happened to GE's fuelcell home power systems?????
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
According to the article the price per KWH for this Coleman thing is arount $10/KWH!!! (A refill costs $100 for 1.2KW for 8-10 hours) That's insanely expensive. It does seem that a methanol system would be considerable cheaper.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Score: -1, Loss of Credibility (for referring to anything by Noam Chomsky)
Actually, if you tune out the CNN carping, and read something intelligible about the region--I recommend Noam Chomsky--you would see that it is exactly oil that causes the hatred.
These people have been hating each other for millenia. The petrochemical industry and its associated economy is barely a century old.
> In the beginning, it was obligatory in the US, but _illegal_ in many european countries (illegal to install _any_ additional lights inside/on cars...)
Not exactly the same thing, though. In Europe, it was (and in some places, still is) illegal to add aftermarket lights. The restriction doesn't apply to automakers themselves, who can design them in and always could.
Virg
Yes hydrogen is difficult and a bit dirty to 'manufacture' now. It's really being isolated, not manufactured. But on a universal level, it is the single most common element. If you're looking for a resource that won't run out, you have to eventually move to hydrogen. Natural gas is largely found above deposits of oil. When the oilfields are gone, so is 'natural' gas.
I think you're also underestimating the rate of change in the next 50 years. 50 years from now tech won't be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1950's tech - it will be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1850's tech. Picking the long-term solution now seems sensible when you look at the ultimate cost of re-tooling all machinery for a new power source - do you want to do that once, or several times? Hydrogen production will become cheaper and cleaner and easier, and the benefits are more if the machines are already set up to run on (currently dirty) hydrogen.
Solar power and hydrogen power will not run out in the lifespan of the human species. They will becom cheaper and cheaper and cleaner and cleaner. Picture floating factories refining hydrogen from the oceans using solar power - how ultimately efficient can that become? Natural gas is cleaner than hydrogen now but it is a limited resource. I have nothing against using it now, but it will run out while most of the mega-corps of today are still alive (much more important than nations), so they will have to re-tool eventually. Basically do you build your infrastructure around the fiber optic system of 10 years from now, or the 56k reality of today? Short-term, long-term, it's a complex balance, not a black and white question.
"Haven't you ever wondered why oil cost about the same amount as bottled water?"
When do you think we've ever been under free market forces? Capitalism suffers the same problems as communism did, it's central tenets are never truly enacted. Pure free market capitalism, which I'm starting to think is as big a fantasy as pure brotherly love communism, would not see us with rising gas prices when the supply is unaffected. Only colluding mega-corp oligarchies can and do give us that.
By the way, don't count on water staying cheap. Water is the oil of the 21st century. The mega-corps are already acting to privatize all sources of drinkable water around the world.
It is only isolated for use in fuel cells. It could also be used in fusion plants. It is the most abundant element in the universe by far. If we run out of hydrogen, we've run out of universe. It is the element most used in stars to produce energy. Maybe we should take a hint.
It is the technology that will take us to other worlds, if we ever get that far. It is the fuel that will be scooped by our ram-scoop ships as they fly to other stars. It can be mined and burned/reacted/whatever in asteroids and the power beamed to earth. The possibilities are endless.
We are children afraid to start walking because we know how to crawl very well and we tend to fall down every time we stand up. But the world cannot survive us staying children much longer. The first steps are hard, and are less efficient than crawling. But the eventual potential is so much greater.
Is ultimately solar power. We just need to up the efficiency in our solar cells a few orders of magnitude. Then solar energy in large isolated plants (say the whole Gobi desert) can be used directly to disassociate hydrogen from oxygen in water to produce shippable hydrogen which can be used at the place where it's needed.
Unless we have fusion plants before the above scenario. I don't think anyone will be arguing that hydrogen is a bad fuel supply then.
> Nobody's talking about putting a muzzle on ANYBODY. Your freedom of speech does NOT mean that I have to pay you to defamate my character! I guess it doesn't bother you that the Iraqi goverment will take the vast profits from the oil we buy from them and support groups like Al-Qaida to blow up our buildings and terrorize our population. Or would you qualify the destruction of the WTC as "freedom of expression"?
Sorry, but it doesn't follow. We're not paying them to defame us, we're paying them to give us crude oil. What bothers me is that U.S. companies buy oil from Iraq in the first place. If we don't like the way they do things, why are we buying their oil? And, Al-Queda was supported by the Afghani government, from which we don't buy anything. So your example of the destruction of the WTC is simple infammatory rhetoric.
> I have no problem with bringing any country into the civilized world. However, groups that sponsor terrorism and governments that either sponsor or tolerate them are the enemies of the civilized world, in no uncertain terms.
I'm sure that most would agree with you. However, where your argument hits a wall is in the definition of "terrorism". By most definitions, the Israeli government sponsors and supports terrorism. So does China. And Russia. And, the good ole' U.S. of A. Unless you consider putting out assassination orders on foreign government officials not to be terrorism. Or killing civilians? How about forcible overthrow of governments? You'd be hard pressed to find any government in the first world that didn't suffer some of these faults, and recently the U.S. has been doing worse on them than most. Whether or not it's justified depends on which side you're on.
> What's worse is that many moderates in Islam don't condone these activities, but they don't condemn them, either.
This is flat-out inaccurate. Most moderates strongly condemn such activities. The problem is that in many Middle Eastern countries, active protest by the population is suppressed and the governments of these countries are afraid of getting too involved with the U.S. for fear of inflaming the zealots in their own nations. This is one of the main reasons for Saudi Arabia all but asking us to remove our military forces.
> However, we also have to recognize that OPEC nations have more influence over us than we have over them.
You've got to be kidding me. Which one of them could change our foreign or domestic policy? Which of them could cause us (as a nation) to do something we didn't want to do? The answer is none of them. The only thing OPEC can control is the cost of crude oil. That has fairly strong economic repercussions, but if you think that means that they wield more influence over us than we do over them, you're delusional. If you think that they can lord an oil embargo over us to get us over a barrel (pun intended), you need to reread your economics (and history) books more closely.
> If they want our money, they need to find out how to get on our good side.
Apparently not.
> Remember, in the 1980's we FERVENTLY worked to make Iraq an ally. See what it got us? Nothing.
Nice try, but we didn't do anything of the sort. The only reason we wanted ties with Iraq in the '80s was that we wanted them to kick the hell out of Iran for us, so we wouldn't have to go to war. We never tried to establish any diplomatic ties with them, and as soon as we got our hostages back, all talks with Saddam Hussein stopped. It got us nothing because we never wanted anything from them. Except oil, that is, and we're still getting that despite huge economic sanctions against Iraq (that strangely don't include crude oil).
Virg
I wonder if hydrogen power lines could one day replace the lossy electrical ones. Power generating companies could simply separate hydrogen from water through electrolysis and pump it to customers, kind of like the way natural gas is now distributed to homes and businesses. During slow demand hours, they could store hydrogen and release it later during peak hours.
Would this be safer and more efficient than convention power distribution? Any power engineers out there care to chime in on this?
At least for cars anyway. Check out this MSNBC news article
There's a real market for something that runs on natural gas, produces 1KW or so, and is priced around $1K, as an emergency power source.
Well, actually, the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to form dihydrogen monoxide often occurs at high temperatures, producing a vaporous form of dihydrogen monoxide. This reaction is used to good effect in applications such as liquid fuel rockets.
I wouldn't want to be near that, even without all the other dangerous effects of dihydrogen monoxide.
I hear it's the universal solvent; I wonder if I can get high from sniffing it?
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Maybe one order of magnitude, correctly. Plants are about 30% efficient. Solar cells are about 3% efficient. C'mon. I know we can do as well as grass. Ideally we'd do a couple times better.
In interstellar space. In interstellar space it's about all there is. The idea of a ram scoop ship is to extend large magnetic fields which collect hydrogen (which is just out there) and funnel it into the fusion reactors we admittedly don't know how to build yet. So you can collect fuel as you travel. The chemical bonds would be irrelevant to the fusion reactor. That to me is the ultimate dream of hydrogen as a fuel, not for use in a fuel cell but for use in a fusion reactor.
I'm a 27 year old programmer with a B.S. in Architecture. I make good money. I'm not a 12 year old kid. But I have seen half the things that were wild sci-fi when I read them at 12 become reality.
You don't get the idea of a singularity, I won't spend time explaining it to you, look it up. "except for the Internet, and computers" is the understatement of this admittedly rather new millenium. Computers are helping to produce a qualitative change in the rate of change itself. Look at genomics, weather modelling, rapid prototyping, etc. The change just hasn't been what we expected. No jetpacks, no rocket cars. But a global encyclopedia of all human knowledge?
Moore's law will not hit any significant barriers until it hits ultimate physical limits, by which time quantuum computing and bio-computers will be near commercial viability. Doesn't really matter if you believe it, it'll happen anyway.
Is an indirect source of solar power, winds are driven by the energy incoming from the sun. Even hydro-electric power is driven by the evaporation/cooling cycle that occurs because of the sun. There are many ways to tap the power of the sun, but dams built for hydroelectric projects have had negative environmental impacts, and I'm afraid really large scale wind power could too.
Except for nuclear reactions (fission or fusion) all the energy we use has solar as an ultimate origin. Petrochemicals are decayed remnants of plants that grew from the sun and animals that ate those plants.
I guess geothermal is an exception, pure heat energy we can tap that doesn't come from the sun. But I think living off the energy that enters the system (solar) is a good goal for any kind of sustainable growth.
Plants are the main source in the ecosystem where energy enters the system. Energy enters from the sun, stored in sugars by the plant thru photosynthesis. I'm not sure of the breakdown of on a more granular level, the 30% referred to the plant as a system. It might be more efficient than that at storing the energy, but then lose a lot of energy moving the sugars around or redigesting them.
test
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.