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Fuel Cells Promised For Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in today's New York Times, fuel cells for portable consumer electronic devices will start appearing next year. First for laptops, and later for smaller devices like cellphones. Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device." The article mentions the Toshiba cells demonstrated at CeBit, and -- no surprise -- Japan is likely to be the first market for these tiny fuel cells.
Fuelcell vaporware.
W00T!
When does Zippo release their laptop?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Geee, this was really lame. There are laptops
allowing you to swap batteries with no power-off.
In simplest case you put them in suspend.
Also the swapping is completely unrelated to
type of the energy source - it is just a matter
of extra electronics with some capacitors/recharable accus on-board for
keeping notebook running for 2-3 minutes needed
for swapping the battery.
Is it just me or doesn't news about fuel cells imminent arrival pop up every year and have so for some years now?
I just say no to that open source bussinessmodel!
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Listen to more bullshit about fuel cells comming real-soon-now once again.
4: Profit!
There is one other very important aspect of micro-fuel-cells which, as far as I know, no company has latched onto at least in public.
40% ethanol/60% water is a significantly less efficient fuel than methanol, but it is realily available (although heavily taxed) almost everywhere in the US as Vodka, as well as being much cheaper as denatured alcohol.
The probable ideal fuel cell would be able to operate on denatured ethanol (for lower cost) as well as straight vodka. It would be incredibly useful for one to be able to refill the fuel cell using something readily available from most airline beverage services and hotel minibars.
Improvements to allow impurities (eg, Tequila, Whisky) would be even better, as now the fuel cell can operate on a wide variety of commonly available fuels. Allowing the cell to operate over a wider range of alcohol as well (20%-80% ethanol) would now allow even more variety in fuels as well as using more dense (and more efficient) fuels.
In 10 years, my personal bet is that most portable fuel cells will be ethanol powered, specifically for the fuel-availability convenience.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Fuel cells have been mentioned as becoming mainstream power sources for about 10 years now. My patience is being tried as a consumer to the point when it really does arrive I'll be skeptical about it.
They have a long way to go in the marketing aspect of fuel cells, because we can already see the obligatory posts about fires and such. Power sources have the potential for fires and explosions, yes. I've heard ordinary computer power supplies blow up when the capacitors overheat, and we all know about lithium + water. For fuel cells it will be no different, so we'll just have to make sure that the designs are sound before welcoming them onto our laps and pockets.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device."
This isn't a specific benefit of fuel cells. Anyone can have a diode-switched dual supply with the backup powered off a much smaller lower-capacity device like a small battery.
Now for high-end applications, this would no doubt be a godsend, no matter what the fuel cartridges would cost...but for general consumer use, even if they DO last 30 times as long as batteries, it's still going to be costing more, since chances are you won't be able to recharge them yourself. And as for standards...if they're going to replace As Cs and Ds, sure. But the article mainly talks about applications where the batteries people are already using are non-standard. We might end up seeing something akin to the ink/toner market, with something being made non-standard just so that it can be priced at some ungodly margin.
Also, I'm no expert, and I don't even follow this topic very closely...but every article I'd read previously about fuel cells mentioned that they get pretty hot. I mean like broil a roast hot. How hot are these tiny little fuel cells going to get, and would that worsen the already tricky problem of heat dissipation in notebooks?
...please insert liquor
AMERICANS may have to wait 20 years, if not longer, for cars powered by fuel cells to become a familiar sight. But much smaller forms of fuel cell technology may well power electronic devices like laptop computers, video cameras and cellphones by the end of this decade.
Prototypes of long-lasting fuel cells that can replace batteries are being tested in laboratories in the United States and overseas. "Every big electronics company in the world is working on fuel cells in one way or another," said Jerry Hallmark, manager of Motorola's Energy Technology Lab in Phoenix. Some, like Intel, are going a step further and investing millions of dollars in start-up companies like PolyFuel and Neah Power Systems to accelerate development.
"There are some applications that are getting very close to commercialization," said Mike Lynn, head of a unit at the 3M Company that makes fuel cell components.
Mr. Lynn declined to be more specific, but many analysts expect fuel cells for consumer electronic devices to begin appearing next year in Japan. The betting is that the first to reach the market will be Toshiba, which is demonstrating a prototype of a methanol-powered cell this week at a trade show in Hanover, Germany. Toshiba says the cell could be sold next year with laptops.
Some 200 million to 500 million of the small cells, sometimes called microcells, might be sold annually by 2011, according to Allied Business Intelligence, a market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y., that tracks new technology. Annual revenue to the fuel cell companies could be as much as $5 billion, said Atakan Ozbek, Allied's director of energy research.
But Mr. Ozbek and others said that despite the momentum of research and development, widespread microcell commercialization is not yet a sure thing.
"People underestimate the complexity of the system, and start-up companies have been cavalier about the availability of all the components they will need," said Dr. Brian M. Barnett, director of the electromechanical systems practice at Tiax, a technology consulting and development company based in Cambridge, Mass.
Like the fuel cells for cars promoted by President Bush and the even larger units being developed to provide electric power to factories and homes, most microcells generate electricity by chemically stripping hydrogen of its electrons. The electrons form a current running outside the cell while the positively charged ions left behind move through the cell. The ions and the electrons are recombined in a reaction with oxygen to form water, the only byproduct if pure hydrogen is used.
The basic concept for fuel cells was discovered in 1839, but researchers differ on the most practical way to design them to generate the most energy in the least space.
Fuel cells run most efficiently on pure hydrogen, but storing hydrogen compactly and safely is a huge hurdle. Many designers of large and small fuel cell systems are trying to get hydrogen from solid compounds that contain hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels like methanol and ethanol, even though those fuels add other elements like carbon dioxide to the waste stream.
MICROCELLS have several economic advantages over their bigger cousins in the race to commercialization. Energy experts expect to cut the smaller cells' production costs to be competitive with those of batteries long before larger cells can be manufactured at anything close to the cost of internal combustion engines.
It should also be easier and less expensive to persuade retailers to sell fuel cells the size of battery packs than to transform the huge national infrastructure of gasoline stations.
But the biggest reason the smaller cells are expected to become popular sooner is their appeal as a convenience -- something that consumers have shown a willingness to pay for -- and not as an answer to energy and environmental problems.
Fuel cells that last far longer than do rechargeable batteries would free laptop computer users and television camera crews, for example, from the need to lug he
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
The same topic was covered by the BBC a few day's ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2847679.stm Some how I just have this feeling that this may not quite be all it's cracked up to be ;).
When can I get one to power my house? The power situation in Ontario is starting to look like California a couple of years ago.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I want a fuel cell that runs on odorized propane. About 1/2 to 3 kilowatts average, with the model in the 1/2 to 1 kilowatt range fitting in about a cubic foot. Either water or air cooled is OK.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How does the existance of hydrogen fuel cells in consumer electronics change our oil consumption at ALL in the US? Or are you just being an asshole because you know you're wrong about the war but don't want to admit it?
Um, right. Obviously we'll just switch our old oil-powered laptops to fuel cells and our dependence on oil will be gone.
Your troll would be more convincing if it made any sort of sense after reading the article summary.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Hydrogen is the obvious fuel of choice for portable fuel cells - it packs more energy than any other (non-nuclear) fuel into a given amount of mass.
The problem is finding a safe and efficient mechanism to transport the hydrogen. A fuel cell powered by a canister of highly compressed hydrogen gas could have the destructive power of a grenade if ignited... not something you'd want sitting next to you on a plane or subway. Meanwhile, the logistics of transporting liquid hydrogen (which must be kept cool at cryogenic temperatures) are such that it will probably never be used in portable fuel cells.
Considering how important viable hydrogen storage is to our future economy, it's amazing how few research dollars have been directed at the problem. One possible solution is sodium borohydride in an aqueous solution. Hydrogen is released when the NaBH4(aq) is passed through a catalyst. The solution is completely stable and nontoxic at room temperature, yet stores more hydrogen per liter than liquid H2.
Lets just hope that "the fuel" doesn't go the way of printer ink, highly over priced just for the tech market and warrently invalidating if you use a generic product.
I also wonder if the battery industry might start lobbying Congress like the oil/auto industries do. Or maybe they'll be smart and get in on the innovation themselves. Is there less profit to be made in fuel cells? You don't have to replace them often, which means, as a producer, you don't sell as many.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
You mean like my 3 year old mac laptop?
The future of power is mostly about power, not about the minutia of which energy storage device will be used. Fuel cells are good and fine, but not much use without one hell of a lot of extra electricity production. Hydrogen is expensive to make, store and use. And sure, we could spend a lot of time and money and probably crack some of those nuts, but the time and money would be much better spent on simply making more electricity.
Moving everything to hydrogen fuel cells requires that hydrogen, a product that needs to be made with lots of electricity, be pulled from the already taxed US grid. The only answer to that new problem is having to build a whole hell of a lot more power plants. And the truth is, that NIMBY (not in my back yard) will largely prevent any new nuclear reactors from being built in the US. So in order to move to fuel cells on a large scale, or even a modest percentage of the nations automotive fleet, we'll have to at least double the existing number of fossil fuel burning power plants. These will mostly be built out in the countryside where NIMBY isn't as much of a problem, pumping electricty into the cities to make all this hydrogen.
So all that's accomplished by quickly adopting hydrogen fuel cells is moving existing pollution from the cities and into the countryside, remote emissions at it's finest.
I have long suggested spending big money on fusion power research. Because once you crack the fusion nut, the little matters of localized power storage for automobiles and laptops and everything else will mostly solve themselves. Because if electricity is as cheap as air and doesn't pollute, who's going to want to pay for petrochemicals? Sure, fusion may not be quite that cheap, but compared on an environmental cost and given the benefits of near total energy self sufficiency, fusion would be so very much cheaper.
Solve the power problem and the free market will figure out the best storage devices, maybe it will be fuel cells, maybe not.
Since years (at least with Apple Notebooks) you can change the battery without powering down the device.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
Mmm...
:)
It powers nights out.
It powers madness
It powers streetcrime.
It powers cars.
It powers conception.
NOW IT POWERS YOUR PC!!!
IT POWERS EVERYTHING GOOD IN LIFE!!!
YAY!!!
Now, when are they releasing methanol powered Beowulf clusters?
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
I work for a small rural telephone company. I can't wait until fuel cells are economically feasible.
We often have to spend $10-20k to get the power company to run power to our cabinets that use less than a kW of power. It would be great to have a fuel cell generator and a 500 gallon propane tank to power sites like this.
I don't believe most of the 'digital divide' propaganda, but to the extent such a thing exists being able to have power where we need it (inexpensively) could make a difference.
And why do a lot of people in the US seem to think we are the vanguard of scientific research and development. Sure, some things apear first but many, but as I said many things are developed elsewhere first.
Is it regulation, funding (or lack of), or is the US not a good testbed for new technologies? Or is it all of them? I can see many madical things being developed or used overseas because of FDA regulations, and common sense tells me the average American needs help turning on a computer, let alone figuring out one of those newfangled (read: oldfangled :]) 3-G cell phones.
You just invented the best expense-report loophole in history! Huzzah!
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Perhaps these fuel cells will power my freakish dual-headed laptop for more than 18 minutes.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
A small pressurised canister of explosive liquid... I wonder what the FAA will say about taking these things on airplanes.
There's a key brokenon my laptop. I'm sure you can figure out which one.
It powers^H^H^H^H^H^H is the reason for nights out.
:)
because
It powers conception^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lets geeks have sex.
NOW IT POWERS YOUR PC!!!
IT POWERS^H^H^H^H^H^H LETS YOU DO EVERYTHING GOOD IN LIFE!!!
Geee, I am really lame. My laptop
allows me to swap batteries after I turn the power-off. In simplest case you put them in suspend.
Also the swapping is completely unrelated to
type of the energy source - it is just a matter
of extra Li-Ion batteries with some inductors/recharable accus on-board for
keeping notebook running for 2-5 hours needed
for swapping the battery.
Now I have to worrry about my laptop exploding when I drop it...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Swapping cells is useless. You need to be able to refill them in place.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Somewhere in Arlen, Texas, a bespectacled man rubs his hands with glee...
You must think in Russian.
Fuel cells powered by the same oil used to cool down 802.11 infrastructures?
Yet another prime example of the automotive industry being paid to ignore a new technology. Who could possibly believe that we can get battery-sized fuel cells with all their issues (power-to-weight, sufficient storage, complex systems for byproduct management, power management for spike loading) but not get car-sized engines for another decade?
Really, is there no one in the industrial world with the brass balls to just say no to oil money? - or is it a case that if you say no then they just pay the government, and the regulators stomp on it instead?
Last good report I saw was MIT students (I think) producing a fuel-cell powered electric scooter....I wonder how long that lasted before the lab's financial sponsors got 'leaned on' and told the lab to kill it.
How will this affect the, already determined, radiation levels that the cell phones give off? After all, they are claiming if fuel cell were to be used in a car right now.. if the car were to be in some sort of a devastating accident, the explosion would expand to a distant radius..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I want too see little nuclear reacters in mobile devices. then you would never have to replace it.
And as for standards...if they're going to replace As Cs and Ds, sure.
Total non sequitur, but... whatever happened to "B" cells? Was there ever such a thing?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
The results so far? Phfft. More energy in than out.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
--the "state of the art" now in mobile computing reminds me of that late 60's horsepower wars. There's the same basic mistake. Instead of making the engine more efficient, they basically increased the displacement to ridiculous levels. sure they started having fuel injection, but that's about it, it was just "bigger", less efficient, necessitating "more fuel" to accomplish the same tasks of basically transportation.
The better bet (maybe, this is my general question really) right now with fuel cells versus batteries is actually back to where the power is needed and what for and why exactly. Bigger and bigger chips (engine displacement) using more and power, more and more RAM needed, necesitated by apps that really are just huge, just humongous. How much of it is really necessary as opposed to "because we can" and it's easier to code to that inefficient set of standards?
Perhaps-just a thought, but perhaps, if there was a revolution on coding going back to small,mean fast and efficient, then maybe we wouldn't need bigger and bigger chips and more RAM to run everything? And the batteries that exist now would work adequately, last longer, not wear out as quick and we wouldn't have this "computer energy problem" as much? Is there a legit link between code bloat and energy useage that could be addressed? If programs were really written with "energy conservation" in mind, would this help? I dunno but I got a suspicion that coders knowing that the CPUs are bigger and faster and that there's a lot more RAM avaialable might make them skip little bits of code that would improve efficiency, and thereby borking energy conservation.
I don't know, not a coder, but I am more or less doing the same general computing stuff I did years ago, but it takes "more" of everything hardware-wise and including more electricity to do this stuff. The real only change I can see is occassionaly I look at some streaming video, but besides that it's the same, I browse, email, listen to the net radio, do IRC and etc, same stuff I did years ago, but now I need a bigger everything to do this. I know there's any number of immediate exceptions to the rule now someone can drop, 'I run super 4-d magnum quantum compiler, I need all I can get' and etc, that ain't my point. Does code bloat lead to hardware bloat that causes code bloat and back and forth that is responsible for batteries falling so far behind we have to screw around with fuel cells?
If I had to refill something just to run my laptop i would be VERY resistant to it! My laptop is not a bloody car. If the duration of the 'charge' (fuel? or what would you call that in relation to a fuel cell?) is a very long time such as a week or two of continuous operation then it wouldn't be nearly as bad (assuming you didn't have to pay an arm and a leg - btw, how much does it cost to refill a standard laptop battery in electricity?)
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
right now i take my segway to work, passing a few gas stations which one day might be hydrogen stations. when i get to work, i plug my laptop in which gets 4-5 hours of battery life (at least). i also plug my segway in. this cuts out a middle man, no additional things to buy, no pumping, no replacement cells. battery life will get better as it always does. my other laptop, a tablet pc gets like 6 hours of juice. i like being able to be more "free" this way. power plants get better over time, the pollution they might cause is in one controlled area. to charge my ht or laptop it's pennies, literally. it sounds like fuels cells are good for finding new $ for a market that is getting it's power from the existing infrastructure.
Will the airlines allow these fuelcells on their planes? All flammable liquids are currently banned, why wouldn't these be?
-Eric
...over at the flying car delivery service.
This should be the most interesting application, as a hub mounted motor can be quite unobtrusive and very light, but the weight of the power source is the killer. With this solve, many more trips could be handled. Remember, cars are gross polluters for short trips and overkill to haul several tons to go down the street. Not everyone can pedal all of the time (especially hills.)
... but at airports, coffee shops etc they make access to AC (and networks) a pain. It is far more efficient to run off of the power grid then to use up your precious battery through charge / discharge cycles.
Convenient outlets on planes, trains, and automobiles solve the extended power problems for most laptops. In most cases you have to bring an AC plug anyway
Heh, heh. Seriously, though, it would be easier and cheaper to use rubbing alcohol, which wouldn't be a problem.
The US is still the vanguard of research and development. Even when these things come from Japanese companies, they're most often developed in the US, by Americans.
I don't know who designs Toshiba's fuel cells specifically, or where, but almost all Toshiba's other engineering is done in Irvine, CA -- by people from all over, but usually Americans. Almost all are graduates of American univerisities, though.
kind of... Coleman has their fuel cell generators, though 'refills' are what might be termed expensive. I believe the above is actually a Coleman branded unit from Ballard Power, Vancouver B.C.
Fuel Cells will premiere next year...In Duke Nukem Forever as the new pipe bomb. We of course will never have to worry about this.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Japan and Europe lead in quality-of-life products: electronics, audio, video, appliances, home construction, etc.
The US leads in military hardware and high-end computing. When it comes to consumer products, low cost rather than high quality or innovation drives the US market.
Most fusion reactions generate radioactive waste through neutron capture. So, it's not the clean, unlimited energy supply you think.
But we do have a clean source of fusion-based energy. We don't need any new technologies to take advantage of it either--with current technologies, we could build hydrogen-generating plants in the Sahara (near the ocean) and ship the hydrogen anywhere in the world, safely. It's not quite as cheap as digging oil out of the ground if you just go by drilling costs, but it's a lot cheaper if you take environmental costs into consideration.
VERY interesting, since I live in Irvine.... hmmmm maybe a new source for laptop HDs... very interesting... UCI has been and will be very influential in all major bio/chemical industries for some time now... much like how UCSD is for bio-genetic industries... very interesting...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I found one: PolyFuel
Any others?
I'm not so naive to say that we're not ever going to need fuel cells, but there seems to be a point under the current paradigm where all-day computing will be a minimum, and battery life, like basic CPU processing power, will be assumed. Will we need fuel cells at that point?
I also understand that the market tends to use devices to and beyond their apparent potential (case in point: hard drives, which at one point were assumed to have WAY too much capacity, but now are used to store digital video).
I guess the question needs to be asked: if fuel cells become prevalent, to what uses will we put them?
Hello,
I wonder about the number of casaulties?
I mean fuel cells work with methanol / methil-alcohol, a highly poisonous substance, which cannot be distinguished from ethil-alcohol (wine) by human senses.
Drinking methanol will kill you if you are lucky, or make you permanently blind if you are unlucky.
Silly young party-goer yuppies will drink fuel cell tanks for fun, for sure. Toddlers will perish in large numbers when tasting dad's laptop. You could use dynamite to power the portables instead and still be on the safer side.
Sincerely: Tamas Feher
What we all need!
.. erm.. masturbating in public to fill up their phone!
Spunk-powered devices!
Imagine chatting to some girl on the mobile to set up at date and you have to ask her to talk dirty because you need to fill up your phone as it's getting low. Now you'll never know whether people who appear to be masturbating in public are masturbating in public or
On long-haul flights you will see tired passengers simultaneously wiggling their feet to ward off DVT and wanking into their laptops. There will probably be a flight-attendant sent round to each passenger with a laptop to "inspire" them.
Sperm banks will never suffer from black-outs! Look at all that fuel! Oh, this sperm is from an IQ 500 nobel-prize winner, look how it powers my desklamp!
And many, many more.
graspee
P.S. If you moderate this as a troll because it uses "cuss words" then fuck you, because *I* think it's funny.
10yrs ago, there was an article about how the battery makers and laptop ppl were coming together to define a battery standard. Laptops from the next year on would use these sizes. Instead of worrying how long your internal would last, or buying a spare rechargable you only use twice a year, you'd just buy a disposable like you buy AA batteries.
This was going to happen. They had just about finished the standard. 10yrs ago. Has anyone seen any?
Well I don't have the FAA directive in front of me, but REFILLABLE lighters (the ones that use the liquid lighter fluid) and self lighting matches are illegal...last I looked the little butane lighters are not illegal, because they don't spill...and the vapor doesn't escape on its own.
So if you have a fuel cell that is sealed, non spillable, there shouldn't be a problem...however if you can open the top and pour more ethanol or other flammable liquid in it, then that will be a problem, and not allowed on aircraft.
And those of you worried about that fuel cell blowing up like a gernade...your little butane lighters that you carry in your pocket next to the family jewels, has the destructive force of a stick of dynamite.
The cartridge in your HP printer doesn't just hold ink, it also contains the inkjet print head. It's actually quite a high-tech achievement to spray miniscule ink droplets quickly and controllably. The nozzles are also prone to clogging from dust and dried ink. By including the print head on the ink jet cartridge, consumers end up simple replacing the critical component rather than dealing with maintenance.
By comparison, the rest of the printer hardware is fairly simple -- load paper, scan print head back and forth, interpret Postscript. Some third party manufacturer can't simply decide to sell cheaper cartridges because the cartridge includes an expensive (and probably well-patented) print head. You can buy cheap ink refill kits to simply inject inket into your old cartridge, but the quality will suffer as the nozzles degrade.
AlpineR
What do you think will show first....Fuel cells, or Duke Nukem Forever?