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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."
I've been hearing about hydrogen fuel cells for so long now, I'm glad to finally see some progress. What I've heard, though, about it is that "battery-ifying" the hydrogen (turning it into fuel cells) makes up for the pollution your saving by using the fuel cells. Is this still the case, does anyone know? Or is it actually environmentally friendly now from creation to use?
P.S. What's been up with Slashdot lately? It's been really weird.
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
of getting some hydrogen! Surely it would be more efficient to use the electricity from the wave power and send it to people's homes rather than using it to electrolyse the water into hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen?
Video Game cheats, hints a
you do not save energy because of that. The point is that you can do waves->electricity->hydrogen->transport-& gt;electricity->consumer device you don't have to plug in.
This is bullshit. Cuba has been hydrogen-fuel-cell powered for decades.
I don't know if it was your meant to troll, but troll you did.
Cuba may have made some efforts to use clean, renewable energy sources (wind, wave, solar) but it's also made considerable effort to use dirty, finite sources as well, including nuclear power.
The nuclear power plant at Juragua has been under construction since 1983. It's not yet been completed, so it's not up and running, but Cuba is still trying to get the plant productive.
Unsurprisingly, for what it calls "safety concerns", the US isn't too keen to see that happen - apparently, it's OK for the US to have nuclear power plants all over the country, nuclear powered ships and submarines and even to launch nuclear powered satellites but God forbid that some communists 200 miles off the coast of Florida should want to use nuclear power too.
It's true that these concerns aren't totally unfounded as the type of reactor that the plant uses (the Soviet-designed VVER-440) doesn't have an exemplorary track record but let's remember that while the USSR had Chernobyl, the US had Three Mile Island.
By withholding its funding to the International Atomic Energy Agency - an overly-aggressive and short-sighted attempt to pressurise that body into abandoning all assistance that its giving Cuba to safely complete and operate the plant - the US is effectively shooting itself in the foot. By doing everything it can to make sure that the Cuban plant isn't built, the US is only ensuring that cost-effectiveness and completion at any cost are the paramount in Cuba's considerations, at the expense of safety.
Yet elsewhere, the US is spending millions to make sure that similar Soviet-designed plants are as safe as possible. Overall, a rather naive approach by US legislators - not the first time and it won't be the last either.
(So, in a way, there is a capitalist conspiracy, but not where you were looking.)
But I digress. Cuba obviously isn't 100 percent wave powered and, frankly, it's never likely to be. Wave power stations cost money too and, if you've got chronic power shortage problems like Cuba has, they're far less cost-effective than the alternatives.
On the other hand, Islay is hoping that its wave power station may soon provide all the energy that it ever needs - a noble goal, well worthy of our praise and good wishes.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This development of alternative fuels powering large areas is indeed quite encourageing...
OK, I know you're trying to pass yourself off as CmdrTaco but can you spare us the obvious atrocious spelling mistakes please?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I think if you re-read the original article you will see that hydrolysis is powered by wave energy, you know, ocean waves, not light waves.
Also, may I point you at a simple explanation of how fuel cells work? It has this cool animated gif, displaying the process. Note: no turbines.
There is this really cool tool on the web, called google, it is a search engine. You can use it to look things up, before you post stuff, preventing you from looking like a complete dope. You should try it out!
Actually, I believe you get liquid water, not water vapor. It's pure and potable, although you'd probably want to add some minerals for taste. It may not be practical for vehicles to dump their exhaust into the public water supply, so you could either dribble it out behind as you go, or tank it to be dumped when you refuel. Or perhaps some clever engineer can come up with some other use for it.
Plus since from what I've been told the vapor comes from the hydrogen mixing with oxygen in the air. Won't this also lower the oxygen content of the air?
At a guess, not more than the internal combustion engine already does. All combustion draws oxygen out of the air. But if you look at the whole process from end to end, you see that oxygen is necessarily produced from the seawater along with the hydrogen. Assuming that oxygen eventually makes its way back into the atmosphere, either through being released on the spot or used in some application where it wasn't a reactant, there's no net loss.
But that leads to a good question: electrolysis produces hydrogen and oxygen in exactly the proportions needed for a fuel cell. Why don't they bottle the oxygen as well, and use that to feed the fuel cells' cathode? It would result in a significant boost in efficiency.
And the brethren went away edified.
According to the article, the plant produces 500 kilowatts.
Btw, even if these answers aren't so great, it's still a cool experiment - but you have to cite more details than the article does to reasonably brag that you'd save the world except that the evil oil companies won't let you. :(
Good question. Your're right about the efficiency, and it could be done that way. The only problems aren't really problems as much as they are things we're too lazy to go out of our way to deal with.
First problem: you've got another thing to tank up and cart around. You think it's hard trying to get stations to carry H, try getting them to carry H and O.
Second problem: Oxygen is dangerous, more volitile than Hydrogen which, contrary to common belief, isn't the most explosive thing in the world.
Third problem: Maybe there is one, but I haven't heard of it...
Like I said neither of these are real problems. For instance, looking a number 2, oxygen probably isn't any more dangerous than carrying around gallons of something like, say, gasoline. The real issue is more about implementation and the "why bother" attitude about packaging and transporting something that's 20 percent of the air around us.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?