World's First Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered Island

Albanach writes "According to this article in The Herald Newspaper, the island of Islay, on the West coast of Scotland is set to become the world's first Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered island. Scientests at Napier University wish to use the existing Wave Power Station to treat sea water and store the resulting hydrogen in fuel cells. The first plan is to power a building, moving on to powering the entire island in a decade."

Comments

Re:Population?

[raymondlowe]

Population if Islay is four thousand.

R.

Waste of energy!

[zandermander]

I'm supposed to use electricity generating wave turbines to crack water to generate hydrogen so that I can use the hydrogen to produce electricity?

Sounds like a Rube Goldberg method!

Just skip the electrolysis and fuel cells and store the electricity made from the wave turbines in batteries (for cars and such) and feed it into the grid (like they already do).

Other than the obvious live laboratory for the fuel cells which is great, I fail to see how this system will save energy since there is loss any time you convert energy (waves --> electricity --> hydrogen --> electricity).

Re:Waste of energy!

[DarkSkiesAhead]

You're right, it isn't perfectly efficient. But, efficiency isn't the most essential aspect of power production. Usability is.

Sadly, the consumer's use of electricity doesn't vary in proportion to the tide. If it did, and the tide always produced exactly the right amount power to keep everyone's lights on then it would be best to pipe the electricty directly from the water to your power outlet. But, that's not the case.

Fuel cells allow them to store the power and distribute it as needed. This ends up being most efficient in the long run because the water-driven power station only needs to produce power equal to the usage averaged over a period of time. It dosen't need to increase production during peak hours and won't be wasteful during off-peak hours. The fuel cells take care of that.

Re:seems a very expensive way

[josh crawley]

You've gotta understand what they are thinking. They're treating Hydrogen gas as a energy container. There's no way to feasibally hold pure energy. It disperses too quick, and cryo-torids are a ways off.

Hydrogen's fairly stable (without presence of oxygen molecules), and it takes only a wee bit of energy to start the chain reaction back to water and a ton of energy.

But to answer your question: yep, its expensive as hell.

Re:Who sponsored this? GreenPeace?

[CaptainCarrot]

OK. Let's understand what they're doing.

Yes, let's. You certainly don't.

1: Seawater is made out of Hydrogen and Oxygen (with lots of energy in the bonds)

No, the energy of a water molecule is lower than that of hydrogen and oxygen in pure form. You have to add energy to the system to break water down. It's an endothermic reaction. If there were lots of energy "in" the bonds within water, water would burn.

2: Solar panels at the sea locations provide the energy, albeit slowly, to electrolyze the water to the gaseous components. H 2 and O2.

Yes, they're electrolyzing hydrogen out of the seawater. No, they're not generating the electricity from solar panels. They're using a plant that generates electricity from the motion of the waves.

3: The H2 is stored until used in Hydrogen Fuel cells. Combining of Hydrogen gas, Oxygen gas and heat give lots of heat. This turns turbines.

No, not even partial credit for this one. The hydrogen is stored in tanks of some kind: "bottled" is the term they used. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells generate electricity directly from a reaction with the hydrogen (which is fed to the cell from the tank) and the oxygen in the air. You get electricity and heat, along with pure water for exhaust. There's not necessarily a turbine involved at all, although for maximum efficiency in a stationary installation you could conceivably capture the heat and use it to drive a turbine so as to increase your electrical output. But that's not really necessary; a fuel cell makes electricity all by itself.

No need to comment on your blather about solar cells; there aren't any involved. Nobody stores hydrogen in metal form as this requires temperatures near 0K. You could store it in liquid form cryonically, but it's more often stored as compressed gas at high pressure.