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A Fully Distributed Power Grid?
rleyton writes "There's an interesting and topical black-out article on an "internet inspired" hydrogen powered energy network. The premise is homes, cars, factories and offices store up hydrogen when energy is available, and supply it into the new energy network when it's not. Certainly an intriguing idea, with some interesting comments on future power management. Feasible in the next "three decades"? Perhaps."
Oh, the humanity...!
First of all, hydrogen burns clean. It'a an abundant source of energy, and once again, BURNS CLEAN. How ever are there any problems we might have, isn't it more explosive then gasoline? I forget. If someone can answer this for me I'll give em a cookie.
I am full of goo... black evil goo
I will be encouraged to pass gas?
Best Windows Freeware
Computers moved from mainframes to LANs long ago... I guess the power grid is finally catching up with the times?
Why does it seem like a Nationally distributed pipeline system would be harder/more costly to create and maintain then large electrical wires to transfer energy.
Hmmm... Pie...
Ok, with these power stories, knock it off with the "how timely" references. We know there was a blackout last week. Most of these stories popping up are BECAUSE of what happened last week. Pointing that out through EVERY SINGLE POWER RELATED SUBMISSION is getting old.
It was amusing last week when on the day of the power outage there were stories from several days before talking about the power grid and problems with it. It's a week later, everyone knows it happened, everyone has a theory on how to fix it. The timeliness is gone, just tell us the theory of the day.
Wasn't the Hindenberg a hydrogen blimp?
Yeah, that sounds safe to me.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I am wondering if people will want to store hydrogen at their house.
I have always thought that this stuff is highly explosive.
Who took my tinfoil hat?
Expect repair cost to go up if electricians have to repair a 'hot' grid. Repairing that main transmission line with everyone and thier solar powered doghouse feeding back to the grid should be fun.
Are people sharing the hydrogen, or just the electrical energy? If it's hydrogen, who's going to install the infrastructure? If it's electrical, how will the phases of the 20 gazillion AC sources be matched so they don't all cancel each other out?
What we need is a infrastructure for hydrogen i.e. all the equipment that is needed. Then we will have hydrogen all over the place.
we should use methane to store. god knows after a good mexican meal i could power half my neighborhood
It would be a scary thing in the case of fires. Each house with its own little hydrogen-based explosive cannister. A little dangerous, perhaps?
.. to the matrix.
This sounds suspiciously like people "sharing" their power!
Better watch your ass for the RIAA and MPAA.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
"The consequences of connecting every owner of a fuel-cell micro-power plant with every other owner in an energy-sharing network will be as profound and far-reaching as was the development of the world wide web in the 1990s"
Does the RIAA know about this yet?
LIVE, Love, die
Of course its communist. Its Red, isn't it? Marx invented that color.
We live in wood frame houses. We have natural gas appliances, propane barbecue grills, and cars with 20 gallon gasoline fuel tanks. I don't think a compressed hydrogen tank would be any more dangerous.
Just wait until some terrorist starts pumping oxygen into there.
so power flows all over the place, often causing congestion, energy loss and blackouts
Hmm, the same reasons the city department gave us not to eat the wild mushrooms growing down by the creek...
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
I'm not sure where this came from or what the point of this message is; but it's resulted in my hardest laugh in several weeks.
We are all living through the nightmares of security problems brought in by the internet, do we take that along too?
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Which works great until the RIAA, um I mean Power Companies, start suing us for sharing on our P2P energy network.
Can I bum a sig?
wtf are you babbling about. this topic is about gas, so start talkin about it
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/geni/rh2000ge.htm
on fuller's global energy grid:
Some countries are at war with each other or internally. What happens when a war causes damage to the grid, hurting an uninvolved country, or a whole region? Who is financially responsible? But the world faces such questions regularly anyway -- it is not a good reason not to build for the future. Ideally, the grid will have many transmission paths, and many entry and exit-points, and it will be virtually impossible to "cut the grid", just as, nowadays, it is nearly impossible to completely cut off phone service or the Internet, because there are many paths which can take the place of the ones that have been cut.
and he thought this stuff up in the 50's and 60's...
2 1337 4 u!
Hydrogen molecules are pretty small... h2 (two hydrogen atoms) i think... Hydrogen can go through metals and is probably far more susceptible to leaks then natural gas.
Hmmm... Pie...
Ah, yes, the old Hindenburg chestnut. Are we cursed forever to avoid using the single most commmon element in the universe, one that will burn clean, simply because someone burned a balloon with it once decades ago?
As for the distributed side of this argument, I've thought it was a good idea for years. Whether or not we do it with hydrogen, we need to do it. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...wait, let me start that again. Imagine every house's roof covered not with wood shake, or spanish tile, or what-have-you, but with photovoltaic cells. Now imagine that people's cars run on domestically-produced hydrogen. And when I say "domestic", I mean "in the household". Produced by electrolysis, in your own house, using electricity from your (and your neighbors', and everyone else's on the grid) rooftop photovoltaics plus water from your tap. Storage plants run electrolysis too, storing hydrogen for nighttime, when they burn it again and send the power back out again.
Now compare that to our current state of affairs: the vast majority of our electricity coming from coal or gas, much of it imported; our cars running on gasoline, almost all of it imported.
Now try and tell me it doesn't make sense to switch.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
A Global power grid makes a lot of sense, power requirements vary greatly during the day and distributing a grid across a large number of time zones would even things out. If you studied the power usage you would see changes in the flow as what would ordinarily be peak time moves across Asia then Europe and onto the American continents (You would get some drop of during peak time over the pacific, not a lot of people their at the moment).
Of course a fully distributed power network makes a whole lot of sense as well, anyone looking at the recent power blackout could tell you that. If a connected system is poorly designed a breakdown in one place affects everywhere. A distributed power generation and/or storage system solves this but at increased cost.
The critical facts are:
Storing power always costs and always will, it's way better to use it when you generate it.
Overly redundant generation capacity to handle peaks costs
In the aftermath of the big blackout it was inevitable we would see loads of "solutions" appear to the problem but nothing I've seen really address these underlying issues. We want power cheaper and widespread linkup of our grids is the way to do it.
There is no perfect solution, if a power station goes down someone is probably going to loose power, limiting the affect is a matter of good design, lets not rebuild the world because of a 24hr blackout.
PornStarGuru
what the fuck does this have to do with the article?
You take too long to smoke. On average, I could down 3 Marlboro Lights in 15 minutes.
So, I'd break out my cig breaks and take one 5 minute break ever hour with as many as I could get in my lungs at lunch.
At my peak, I was doing 2 packs a day.
From what I've been told CMIIAW (Correct Me If I Am Wrong), but it's only explosive in it's gasseous state when mixed with O2. If it's pure hydrogen it burns very slowly and non-violently in comparison.
So when you store this in liquid form and you get into an accident puncturing the tank, you won't get a huge explosion unlike gasoline. Rather, just get away from it. I'm not a chemist, but if it has the potential to combust in it's natural state, I'm outta there.
I think the concept of many interconnected smaller power producing facilities could be more robust than fewer isolated larger units but why focus only on H2? I mean, I like hydrogen fuel cells. In fact, I have a stock portfolio that invest in sampling of all aspects of the fuel cell industry so I'd *love* to see this happen.
...my 2 cents anyways...
Even so, each local climate has one or more aspects about it that can be the basis of power generation. From what I understand, monster wind farms aren't working out as well as we had hoped, but smaller local farms could contribute and be easier to manage. Then there is solar, water, geo-thermal, combustable waste, bio-diesel, etc.
I see a possiblity to tailor power generation to the local environment while improving robustness and even national security.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
why do we need a grid anymore?
technology exists to power individual locations.
oh, *gosh* -- that's right. if people bought solar panels, and used bio-diesel generators, that might make them.. NOT PAY FOR ELECTRICITY!!@#$ MAD!@#$
can't have that, can we?
An American company, Sage Systems, for example, has created a software program that allows utilities to "shed load instantly" if the system is at its peak and stressed to the limit, by "setting back a few thousand customers' thermostats by 2 degrees ... [with] a single command over the internet". Another new product, Aladyn, allows users to monitor and make changes in the energy used by home appliances, lights and air conditioning, all from a browser.
Would I really want to give the electric company the power to control my appliances? I understand the benefit of lowering the demand; but it is possible this system could be abused... by anyone with a browser.
(No I'm not paranoid... but my thermostat is my thermostat :) )
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
There are hotels and NOC running natural gas powered turbines, http://www.microturbine.com/ hell there are electrical co-ops running fuel cells DOE has tons of research dedicated to this. http://www.eere.energy.gov/ I suppose their not pervasive yet, but I am trying to install a microturbine with co generation (exhaust heats water/boiler/absorbtion chiller) here at work
Mod this dumbass down
You need high pressure and thick pipes to keep hydrogen in a container. Hydrogen molecules are also so small they can even go through some metals. This makes them far more susceptible to leaks.
Hmmm... Pie...
And this is more dangerous than massive stores of radioactive material, crude oil, gasoline and natural gas how?
You can do this now, with a big battery (or store the energy by pumping water up a slope, heating up a rock, or however you like to store your energy)
You then pump electricity back into the electrical grid, making your meter spin backwards. People out in windy / sunny country have been doing this for a while, I thought, using the network as a battery: this allows you to buy a wind generator just big enough to power your AVERAGE consumption, because you suck your peak from the net, but sell your overflow back offpeak.
I really don't see where the hydrogen comes into the picture. *actually reads article* Oh, I get it now. Nobody's suggesting to DISTRIBUTE hydrogen, merely use it as a convenient storage device.
whatever. why not just give HUGE taxbreaks on home generators, to allow people to overbackup their houses, so that the overflow can be pumped into the net?
It is not too difficult to build a normal electric distribution system. Take a Germany as an example. The unlimited greed of the capitalists is what really need to be changed. World Revolution Now!
This, of course, ignores the facts that
I don't smoke and
Smokers cost a fortune in extra health-benefit payouts.
too lazy to login .. but read your buckminster fuller books. A shared grid is no news .. hydrogen powered or coal powered.
/don
regards,
Feasibility is not the question. It was feasible 5 years ago. The problem is that all the big companies, oil, car, etc., are unwilling to make the shift from a gasoline industry to a hydrogen industry. If I recall correctly, Iceland was planning to start converting their entire economy to hydrogen power somewhere around last year, but I'm not sure if it ever went through...
In any case, it will probably take another 20 or so years for the US of A to see the light and move away from oil/gasoline powered vehicles (and vehicles are the starting point for hydrogen power). If only we would sign the damned Kyoto...
To debunk the metaphysicist, one needs only to take him outside and throw a rock at his head. If he ducks, he's a liar.
Convertors are attached to either the gas line or the electricity line coming into the home, office or factory
If a decentralised model for storing energy is desirable, why not go the extra mile and advocate the generation of power locally using sustainable methods? Solar, wind, hydro etc aren't available 24 hours a day, but when they are, (sunny/windy day, whatever) the energy could be used to split water. Hydrogen could then be stored for use by your fuel cell when needed.
This would reduce dependence on the grid, and help reduce CO2 emissions.
It is not too effective to store energy in the burning medium, beacuse of the 2nd law of the thermodynamics. The total efficiency of "store and burn" method will be awfully low. It's much better to invent a "cold" or even "hot" fusion reactor and to use hydrogen for what it was meant to: syntesizing matter and energy.
For this to work in a free market, the system has to prevent unscrupulous corporate entities from swooping in and sucking up all the (supposedly free of cost) excess power made available to the community then selling it back at ridiculously high prices in times of need. I'm guessing an auction system would be attached to it so each cell could sell their excess power to the highest bidder in times of excess, then in times of need buy power from the lowest sellers... I hope I not describing Enron's business plan (their public business plan that is, not their off-the-balance-sheet business plan).
This ignores all the tricky bits about multiple power sources.
First of all, current power distribution depends on AC current to make long distance transmission possible. This means that all power generators must always be syncronized. The power surges that caused the blackout may have been caused by a loss of syncronization.
The internet is not syncronized. That's why it can scale well. There are some moves toward high voltage DC power transmission (no syncronization problem), but that has a lot more failure points.
Second, there is a huge safety issue when multiple power sources are involved. You don't want to zap the guy trying to fix a downed line. This is why many perfectly good power sources go offline. They intentionally disconnect because provide voltage could be un-safe (not to mention the loss of syncronization).
Finally, skip hydrogen. Solar power rocks!
-Dan
off topic as hell..
Actaully, it sounds a lot like the Open Source community...
Notice a connection?
To debunk the metaphysicist, one needs only to take him outside and throw a rock at his head. If he ducks, he's a liar.
In the event of a grid failure, the house would draw power from the flywheel until the grid could come back up. The flywheel could also be used to regulate the power entering the house eliminating surges and brownouts.
Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.
OK, so hydrogen burns clean. Yay. Now tell me where you plan to get it? The only way to get it in any quantities, is to make it...by using energy. Electrolysis of water is most common, but no matter how you're going to do it, you have to spend energy to break the hydrogen away from whatever it's attached to.You aren't going to get more energy by burning it (turning it back into H2O) than you spent in getting it (by taking it out of H2O). All you're doing is making that energy portable.
The article mentions "a powerplant in every home" or noises to that effect. This is effectively the same thing we have today; anyone can buy a gas-powered generator and stick it in the back yard. Yes, fuel cells might be a way to go for some things, but distributed backup power isn't one of them. How many people are going to want a tank of hydrogen hanging around? Yes, it can be stored safely. Yes, it's no more dangerous than, say, gasoline or propane. But, it also doesn't give any benefit that those fuels do not.
The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement - biofuels, wind, solar...that's where independance is, not in going from one type of fuel to another that has the same or worse problems.
Hydrogen may be a really interesting technology for some things, but this isn't one of them.
Why use hydrogen? With the agriculture in this country just toss the left overs in a still and we have fuel out of what used to be waste products.
Smokers cost a fortune in extra health-benefit payouts.
Non-smokers cost a fortune in extra pension payouts.
Iceland is already doing this.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
If you don't have natural gas, then electricity would be taken from the grid and used to drive electrolysis. Hydrogen produced by this process could be stored for loading into your fuelcell-powered car or used to run fuelcells to contribute power back to the grid.
The important idea is that the consumer has an energy buffer in their garage that presumably would be smart enough to sell energy back to the system at times of peak demand. Obviously energy will be lost with all these phase changes, but electrolysis is pretty efficient, and the benefits of having energy available on demand would be significant. I would imagine dynamic demand-based pricing would be introduced, so the system could buy energy to store when there's a surplus and power is cheap. Who knows -- maybe the overclocking crowd could buy personal power plants with hackable BIOSes and set their power purchasing thresholds lower, then throw a couple solar panels on the roof to compensate. It'd be nice to direct their boundless energies toward something that benefits society instead of just stimulating the CPU cooler and blue LED industries.
Others have brought up the safety issue -- it's my understanding that in applications like this (where weight doesn't matter), H2 safety is not as much of a concern -- saturated metal storage units are heavy but pretty safe for H2 storage; besides, the tech is being developed for automobiles right now, and most people don't get loaded and pilot their garages into phone poles with any regularity.
Even better, odds are that as cars transition to electric/hybrid/fuel cell technology, with some forward thinking a lot of this tech could be under your hood or in your garage for automotive uses already, obviating the need for heavy subsidies. Without that fact, I doubt this would be a real possibility.
In that sense it seems a decent idea. Think everyone who has a power source for there house could use it to power their own needs (like your processor powers your applications), and if you had any extra power you could push it back onto the grid, just like using the idle time of the processor. Only this seems like it would make more sense for somethign like solar, wind or other fueless sources of energy, because with hyrdogen you would need to constantly buy fuel (unless its sucking it out of the air or some crazy scheme). Im not EE, and really have no idea of the logistics behind this, but I would think that the closer the power source is to where the power is being consumed, the smaller the amount of energy lost (through heating the wires).
... but no one these days thinks twice about filling up and driving to work.
"Hydrogen can go through metals and is probably far more susceptible to leaks then natural gas."
Really? Then NASA must be miracle workers then, because they bottle it in metal containers all the time. So do a lot of other people.
Well, that depends on how you define 'extra'.
Who cares, the Russians will have a nuclear plant on Mars by then, we won't have to store energy. If they can figure out how to build a nuclear plant on Mars, surely they can solve our energy problems.
We already have the beginning of a distributed power system where industrial customers cogenerate their power. Nevermind hydrogen. It's a red herring. It's just another way to store energy, with advantages and disadvantages just like all the others.
I don't think it will take 30 years to scale cogenerating down to home use. IIRC, GE introduced some cogenerating appliances for home use a couple years ago. There's was no big push on it, but the tech isn't lacking to get these things in the home.
What's needed (as usual) is the right kind of marketing. It's a bit more expensive at the outset to set up cogenerating from your house, and there's some red tape with the electric company, but solar people have been selling back to the grid for years. At optimal times, some solar homes actually get credits on their bills.
In our area, I think the best way to sell this would be "if the power goes out, you've got a clean, quiet natural gas powered backup generator in your basement".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
" I am wondering if people will want to store hydrogen at their house.
I have always thought that this stuff is highly explosive. "
"Honey! What are we having for dinner?"
"Pork and Beans."
"Ah, crap!".
Felix Kramer of calcars.org has some interesting ideas. In particular, pushing hybrid cars with more batteries than a typical hybrid but less than a full blown electric.
And while most people think one advantage of a hybrid car is you don't have to plug it in, his idea is that you would plug it in, to charge the batteries at night, and, conversely during a period of high-power need during the day, running the generator to provide extra power for your house and for the grid.
Now with gasoline that would be more polluting, but it still has a lot of merit in that power plant contruction is all about hitting that peak load, and it may be OK to pollute a bit more just at those very peak load times if it cuts grid usage and power production at other times -- nukes, hydro etc.
I would combine the ideas as follows. If you had hydrogen hybrid cars you could use them as generators to take the peak load off the grid as well, with no pollution.
And another Idea I have not seen much talk of is putting Stirling engines in hybrid cars. Sterlings are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, but nobody puts them in cars because they take several minutes to come up to boil, and people don't want a car that won't go until several minutes after you start it.
With a hybrid car with a 10-mile battery, you can go right away while waiting for the Stirling to heat up. Plus any energy put into the engine goes into battery charging so it is not wasted.
The forces that have been renting the reins of power (that's political graft power) lately will not allow a broad distribution of energy generation and the consequent loss of their ability to control how decisions are made. This is as important to the wielders of influence as media consolidation, and for similar reasons.
parent may be flamebait, but it's also accurate. especially considering the bit about the Internet being used to quickly lower loads by remotely throttling my air conditioner or heater. that's quite communistic. whether or not that is good or bad is another story...
I admit it. It is just me. But I've read "A Fully Distributable Power Girl". :(
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Thanks a lot. I now have a mental image of a bunch of people hooked up ass first to a huge contraption, Matrix style.
i thought queer eye for the straight guy did?
For some reason people often talk about hydrogen as an alternative to coal, nuclear, or hydro power. It isn't. Hydrogen Fuel Cells are alternatives to batteries, but they usually need some other method to initially generate the hydrogen eg solar panels, windmills etc.
The article touches on this:
Pie in the Sky 'the Hydrogen Economy' Jeremy Rifkin talked about this.
He missed the whole point about PRIMARY energy sources. At this point in time, solar is WAY too expensive. The current method of producing hydrogen is to make it out of natural gas. Thats DUMB because you waste 1/2 the energy of the gas by effectively burning off the carbon.
As he correctly pointed out, however, 20-30 years from now it'll be a different picture when we're running out of oil. Natural gas won't be far behind.
Hydrogen as a storage medium sucks because:
gaseous is low density and leaks very quickly (how about parking your hydrogen car for 2 weeks and losing 1/2 your tank?)
liquid / cryogenic takes huge amounts of energy to compress and is a bitch to handle
solid / hydrogen injected borax doesn't work so good - slow to extract energy, slow to re-add it, and its a pain to cart around tons of borax everywhere. They're not even sure if there is enough borax in the world to cover the demand...
Nuclear will be cheaper. Hydro is all around better. Coal sucks but will cheap for the next 100 years. Thats back to big single generation plants. Ethanol as a fuel source for automobiles is superior in almost every way except current price and the extra heat that current engines aren't really designed for. But we have infrastructure that would work easily on ethanol.
Hydrogen, like solar is a REALLY NICE IDEA. That doesn't pan out in the real world.
Thank you, I'll get off my soapbox now.
There is no shortage of "small generator" capacity. The problem is with the local power grids.
We have three megawatts of power generation capacity, but we don't need all of it (our power needs are less than 1.5 megawatts; two generators are present for N+1 reliability). So we wanted to sell power back to the grid, and the power company wanted to buy it. But it couldn't happen, because the local grid in this area is not capable of accepting a backfeed. This is the problem in most places. There are probably tens of thousands of places with local backup generators that would be capable of supplying power to the grid, but until the local grid is upgraded to handle backfeeds, it simply can't happen.
What does happen, though, is that on days of very high demand, the utility will provide cash incentives to companies with their own generators, to voluntarily get off the grid and run on their own power. We did this for a couple of years. But ever since "deregulation" put utility prices through the roof, it's actually been cheaper to just run the generators 24/7. Diesel fuel is less expensive than the utility, which IMHO is proof that deregulation doesn't work... at least not when the White House is inhabited by someone who cares more about the welfare of energy companies than about the citizens.
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I think the idea is you take the electricity from the grid and use it to split water and make hydrogen. You store the hydrogen in a fuel cell, and when the grid gets overloaded the electricity flows back into it.
It's basically about making everyone store some reserve power in big batteries then share it with everyone else in times of need. Hydrogen is just a buzzword to attract the attention of halfwits like michael. It could be a stack of car batteries for the same effect.
Of course, this is silly, how many people would rewire their batteries so that in blackout times, their power stays in their home? Sure, you could outlaw "electricity hoarding", but whos going to police that?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And there is the flaw. Distributed means Con Edd can't be the sole provider of the east coast. Will our power then come with pop-up ads?
There is no reason to restructure the electrical infrastructure to the level suggested by the article. It would be akin to fitting all homes with their own natural gas turbines to produce electrical energy for themselves. And the natural gas infrastructure itself would need to be upgraded to deal with the massive increase in usage. The analogy fails even more when you consider how creating power differs from ARPAnet and the Internet in general because the physical cost of wiring is so much cheaper and easier to deal with than something potentially deadly such as natural gas or hydrogen.
The better solution is to improve the current infrastructure rather than create an unnecessary secondary infrastructure in order to have distributed power creation.
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
However, basically they are just saying get a big battery (and trying to convince us that a hydrogen fuel cell system would be the right kind of battery)
Every time you load and unload the battery their are efficiancy losses and of course there is the price of the battery, including service/repair/eventual replacement.
They did not address those issues, and so were not very convincing to me.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
THINK! Where do you get the energy to hyrdrolize that water? hmmmmmmm?....
The best reason, though, is that presumably you'll have a hydrogen powered car in your garage, so you don't need to buy two separate pieces of power generating equipment. You just plug your car into cracked H2 reservoir to fill its tank, and it generates the electricity to pump back into the grid.
I for one welcome our new hydrogen overlords!
The idea being presented here is exactly what you are talking about. It's not using hydrogen as the source, just as a storage mechanism. So, when the big generator is working, you can electrolyze water and fill your hydrogen tank. When the big generator dies, you and all your neighbors power yourselves, or even pump power into the grid.
The hydrogen you use could also come from catalyzing natural gas at your end, or by using non-grid power to crack water.
The advantage over gasoline and propane is that you can make it yourself. Just TRY to find an easy way to refill your gasoline tank using only electricity (or for extra credit, sunlight or wind) and water. With hydrogen, you're off and running.
To sum it all up-- hydrogen is best thought of as a storage method, not a fuel. And the processes by which you can get it are simple enough to perform in your house, using the two most common power sources already present, natural gas and electricity.
Of course, I don't see anything like this happening nationwide any time soon, either. But it's the sort of thing I'd like to have around the house. A huge UPS for everything!
Actually I think the best part of such a distributed power network would be the opportunity for anonymous e-cash. Want to anonymous pay someone across the country $10 without involving a central banking agency? Just send them $10 in power.
Do not be the first to try this! There have been 2 TwilightZone episodes that show the problems of being the ONLY house on the block to have power.
Additional:do not be a minority with the only power on the block.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Check out Bob Vila for a little bit of insight, or even here for a little bit of information on photovoltaic shingles. You can easily patch them into your power grid via a grid interactive controller, or run them off of car batteries
http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/EETD -microgrids.html has an article about microgrids.
If one wants to get pendant. There's really only one energy source. Everything else is energy storage. Of course people aren't use to thinking about such large scales. That's why we all think fossil fuels are an energy source.
The technologies you list are great ways to produce power, but the point of the at-home power generation is to store energy for use at times of peak demand.
Just to repeat this... hydrogen in a setup like this is NOT A POWER SOURCE. What they are describing is essentially a great big UPS for your house that uses hydrogen as a battery. When your power is running, you crack water and fill your tank. When your power dies, you use your fuel cell and your hydrogen tank to run your house.
Other sources for "charging your hydrogen battery" are catalyzing natural gas, or using your SuperHippie 3000 Solar Panel Array to do it without having to mess with the grid.
One more time, and I will also exhort you to THINK!... the power still comes from where it does now. Hydrogen is the storage mechanism not the power source.
And why hydrogen over, say, gasoline or propane? Because you can't make gasoline out of water and sunlight.
The short answers: Because the grid can't store the overflow and it makes no economic sense. Steven Den Beste debunks a similar proposal in great detail here
with a follow-up here.
Big deal
More importantly, there are side benefits. Those that have the battery system can "buy" energy form Con-Ed during off-peak times (night), store it in their battery, and use up some of it during Peak times (daytime) when it is more expensive to generate and more likely to cause problems. This is why the idea has some merit. But they really need to convince us why the battery should be "Hydrogen fuel-cell based" instead of other types.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Jane, you ignorant slut! You are missing the point of the concept. Yes, hydrodgen is derived from tap water, and ultimately returns to water when burned, but the energy comes from your rooftop solar panels. Duh! It's a simple concept.
PS-I'm buying a solar setup the next time I re-do my roof (within 5 years). I get tax breaks, I save dough, and I get to keep my Beowulf cluster going all day without worry of rolling blackouts...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/030710/030710 -3.html. Registration is required. Long story short, it takes more energy to extract the hydrogen from its source than is actually recovered.
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In this modern age, most workers' retirement is self-funded in a combination of Social Security taxes and 401k accounts. Both of which are being assraped by unfavorable demographics, corporate greed and the current kleptocracy in Washington.
80% is a peak theoretical figure for electrolysis efficiency. Real world numbers are currently significantly lower.
"Which works great until the RIAA, um I mean Power Companies, start suing us for sharing on our P2P energy network."
You know this joke is starting to get stupid. If it's yours (legal definition, not some made up one), then you can do what you want with it (within the boundaries of common sense. We still have that, don't we?). If it's not, then either play by the rules, or legally change them. It's that simple.
This article is not talking about using the hydrogen as the power source. They *intend* to keep right on using the grid for power. All this does is (like you suggest) give you a way to store that power up at your house as hydrogen for when the grid isn't working. It's like a big UPS. For your whole house.
Watch out for script kiddies and popups...
The article says (roughly) that "each person with their computer is a producer and consumer of information". This is no longer true. Perhaps in the heady mid-90s, when ISPs didn't block ports, proxy you, or have onerous ToSes, each person was potentially a producer of information. For the vasy majority of people, the Internet is morphing into a 'portal' onto the WWW, and their ability to create content restricted to populating ISP portals (viz. the blog phenomenon, or even Slashdot) instead of their own nodes.
The Internet is not a giant distributed network of content, it's becoming a giant cable TV network. The driving factors for this are FUD, Microsoft vulnerabilities, and refusal or inability of actual content producers (music groups, software companies) to pursue and prosecute actual thieves, warez sites, kiddie porn sites ( stuff that's illegal with existing laws ).
As more and more 'security' issues arise (MS_BLASTER virus, spam), today's socialist consumer will instinctively turn to the government or big ISPs to 'do something about it', and accept ever increasing restrictions on their Internet access. They can comfort themselves with the fact that their kids, who they wouldn't let go into a strip club IRL, are prevented from doing it online.
Wake up people, take some responsibility, and take your power back. Otherwise, some day your grandchildren will ask 'Grandma, were you there when the Internet got sold?'
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
H2 will be useful in cars because it does not pollute like an internal combustion engine. It will help effeciencies and polution which is a step in the right direction. Of course we will probably use the current gasoline infrastructure, and hopefully be weaned off it.
The small steps are necessary for change to take place. If we always go for the home run, we will strike out much more often.
for my home, pour some hydrocarbons into it and let it run for 3 days....hell, I could get a propain service for my home and have enough propain for a month. nice quiet power generation.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Has come a long way...
"1 solar electric module: UNBREAKABLE EFFICIENT SHADOW PROTECTED AND LOW COST UL and CUL listed, NEW 20 year warranty."
Just imagine if a fraction of Uncle Sam's money that's being spent on hydrogen power research was used as incentives to builders and homeowners to use these shingles.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Ok, so you propose to install a big rechargeable battery in my home, so that when the grid goes down I won't lose power. And if I think I can spare it, maybe sell a little back to the grid in times of crisis. (Note: The fact that the battery is a hydrogen fuel cell is totally irrelevant -- to me it's just a battery.)
This might have utility as a competitor to the current technology (gas-powered backup generators), although as a homeowner I like the fact that a generator can run indefinitely. However, it's just silly as a solution to global power problems:
Hydrogen advocates just can't build a compelling case for anything. As a favor, please don't bother us any more until you can make a usable replacement for these crappy cell phone and laptop batteries.
Sweet! Flamable gas building up in my house! That should conserve electricity too, everyone would be afraid to turn on their lights.
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
Ignited by a rocket, sure, but it wasn't the rocket that exploded, it was the hydrogen fuel tank.
No solutions are feasible. Not if we can't agree on them.
First I think we must to convince half the population that we have a problem to begin with.
Its just like Microsoft. You can say they're a monopoly. You can say they're insecure. You can even offer a free alternative that is 80-90% compatible. But nothing you do will ever be good enough.
Because you are not the authority. And right now everyone believes that the authorities know what's best. This stuff is just too difficult for a none-Ph.D. carrying professional to think about. I mean, are people without a Ph.D. even considered a professional?
The problem is human nature, and the only way to solve it is communication, education, and many things we just don't want to do.
There are 2 problems with a distributed grid, irrespective of the power systems used.
The first problem is synchronization - the power you feed back into the grid has to be at the same phase as the grid. Get out of phase with the grid, and things start to smoke. So, whatever your generator makes has to be turned into 60 Hz (US) or 50 Hz (Europe) sine waves IN PHASE with the power company - this requires more equipment.
The second problem is cut-off. Consider this scenario - a storm-blown limb brings down the power line for your neighborhood. Charley from the Power Company comes out to fix it. Now, Charley KNOWS that the end on the upstream side is hot, so he is careful about it. Charley figures your side is dead and grabs it. Now Charely is dead.
Your system has to shut down, and stop feeding the grid, if it detects that the grid is down. Still more complexity.
Now, whatever you buy MUST meet those requirements. THEN, your electric company has to provide you with a power meter that can record power flowing in BOTH directions. Then you can hook up your (biomass|solar|Mr. Fusion|Cowboy Neil).
www.eFax.com are spammers
20 Hydrogen Myths (pdf) pretty much explains the whole "hydrogen economy" thing, including debunking pretty much all of the common objections.
It covers where do you get the hydrogen (natural gas at first, renewables later), why bother (electric motors are very efficient compared to combustion engines and renewables like wind can make your total supply cheaper) and what technologies need to be developed for it all to work.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I think in telecommunication the computing infrastructure technology have a reached a level where you dont need economies of scale for setting up a computing node in the network. I mean you dont need to buy a mainframe or supercomputer- you can buy an inexpensive PC. So information generation is cheap at nodes. Couple that with well established transport networks connecting all points and the transport of data unaffected by the distance traversed, makes for a vastly distributed telecom data network. Also the billing capabilities (technically with things like usage data records, business-wise by having revenue sharing agreements, legally by having a framework to impose these agreements across national boundaries) are sophisticated to an extent where this can be done. Moreover, data/information is not "primary resource constrained meaning", there is no dearth of the commodity (most of the data is commodity) being exchanged. Power on the other hand, needs to have technology where generation can be done by small units. Transportation/transmission losses should be so low that distance traversed doesnt deplete small power by much. Power exchange standards like voltage frequency etc. need to be standardised across all users. The power exchange network needs to be meshed as against hub and spoke today. How will billing happen? I mean whom do I pay for my power bill? I think 3 decades are needed for this to work out.
how does Linux or Apple factor into this?
This "clean and free energy everywhere" echos the hype of nuclear energy in the late 1940s. Until they started to build electric power reactors. then it turned out to be more costly and dirty than most people had imagined.
Hydrogen is not as dirty as nuclear, but it may have unforseen problems. It burns explosively. It leaks out things easily. It is a greenhouse gas.
- Current production is almost entirely non-renewable. Signatories to the Kyoto treaty will not be able to make their targets by "switching" to hydrogen if they make it from natural gas (or, heaven forbid, coal).
- Production is highly inefficient. Whether it's made from hydrocarbons, carbohydrates (polysaccharides such as wood) or electricity, the hydrogen only embodies a relatively small fraction of the energy which goes into the process. This further increases the cost, as well as CO2 production if the raw material is any kind of carbon-based fuel.
- Production is costly, relatively speaking. Storing energy as hydrogen appears to cost several times as much as gasoline.
For these reasons, it looks like not such a good idea to plan an economy around this. AAMOF, it looks like a diversion by enemies of change; they can point to hydrogen as the panacea, but use all the very real difficulties as excuses for the glacial pace of achievement. Oh, it does.... but not to hydrogen. Batteries (such as lithium-ion) are far more efficient and have much lower costs already. If you want to power a transportation system, using a Calcars-style system of grid-feeding hybrid vehicles would do a much better job, for less, using today's technology. Such vehicles would have no problem stabilizing the grid.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but not here on our home planet.
In fact it is locked up in many elements, and to get at it requires a lot of energy.
Guess where that energy will come from to provide everyone with enough hydrogen to run all their appliances and cars? (all the existing powerplants using fossile fuels and/or atomic energy!)
Sorry, until there suddenly appears that breathtaking breakthrough that gives us nearly free hydrogen from water or the air, we will never be able to afford it for everyday use.
As for the storage issues and transportation problems with hydrogen, those are easy to solve, compared to large scale production of that element.
Roger Born
writing.borngraphics.com
Apparently the author hasn't heard of it. This system will waste energy because of all the conversion losses.
I actually think the future has the electric grid going away. Instead, each building will have its own fuel cell electric generator supplied at first by natural gas, with the natural gas infrastructure transitioned over time to hydrogen.
One advantage I see is that if people are doing their own generating, they're far more likely to augment with alternative technologies like wind or solar.
Just wait until you start getting cease and desist letters from the Power Producing Association of America. Apparently your son Johnny's been sharing someone else's hydrogen over your lines.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
There have been a number of postings in the last couple of days about alternative power and revamping the network. Much of it is disturbingly socialist, including the idea of nationalizing power companies and even a "shared" energy network. Remember, no collectivist economic systems have survived the test of time.
A few scientific notes related to the idea of hyrogen storage:
1. Hydrogen is not a wonderful means of storing energy. It's molecules are very small, small enough to penetrate the walls of an ordinary metallic holding tank and escape slowly over time. Also, it's energy density is not as high as currently used fuels. (There are more hydrogen atoms in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.) Go back to your organic chemistry textbook and look it up.
2. Stop mentioning the energy loss over transmission lines. It is not significant. The reason we use transformers is to increase the AC line voltage to an extreme level, thereby reducing the current to a very low level. Since loss in a line is equal to the resistance times the current squared, this lowering of current serves to virtually eliminate loss from transmission. Go back to your energy conversion textbook and look it up.
3. Last and most important, the idea of decentralized power production ignores one of the cornerstone concepts of economics: economies of scale. It is far cheaper to build one massive generator to power 10,000 households than to build 10,000 small generators to power 1 household each. This is the problem with the hydrogen storage system. You still must burn it in your own generator. The thermal efficiency of our coal and oil powered plants is very good, and costs of centralized energy production are much easier to control. Go back to your macroeconomics textbook and look up the chapter on economies of scale.
We could all also start making our own clothes and growing our own food too, in case the supply ever runs out. In fact, we could build our own computers, hand-soldering a few million transistors together..... But we dont. We don't because in modern civilized societies, people profit by the exchange of goods, something which would not be possible without economies of scale.
So be prepared for another Bush administration gift to the energy industry on the backs of the people. In reality the blackout is a call for a rollback of deregulation, the effects of which have caused this mess.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
a 30 year program is gov't speak for "we don't have a clue how long it'll take, but give us some money anyway, cause it sounds so good...". Far enough into the future that no accountability is required, but not so far as to sound ridiculous
Case in point--fusion has been 3 decades from practicallity for about 5 decades now...
Anytime somebody proposes a 30 year R&D program--run the other way, and check your wallet as you go.
Since he learned that there are no hydrogen wells, Bush is likely to announce a project to send spaceships to the sun to bring back hydrogen. OTOH, the sun burns the hydrogen for us just fine at a safe distance and ships the energy to us, so why don't we just make better use of it? The Republicans will probably get around to announcing plans to privatize the sun sometime during the Giuliani Administration.
An American company, Sage Systems, for example, has created a software program that allows utilities to "shed load instantly" if the system is at its peak and stressed to the limit, by "setting back a few thousand customers' thermostats by 2 degrees ... [with] a single command over the internet"
This type of solution would manage long-term demand, but wouldn't address the typical cause of wide-scale outages -- demand spikes from sudden equipment failures that then propagate through the system.
One idea would be to have two grades of electricity available. Some outlets would be "high availability" and others would be "best effort" (I could see plugging a refrigerator and electronics into the former, and everything else into the latter). Each type would be metered separately, with the latter somewhat less expensive. When the power company needs to shed demand quickly, they cut the "best effort" power to a particular neighborhood.
I know some large businesses have this kind of tiered service with power companies (here in California anyway).
The premise is homes, cars, factories and offices store up hydrogen when energy is available, and supply it into the new energy network when it's not.
So does that mean the electric company will pay me when I generate power and put it into the grid? I believe that is the case now with solar and wind. In the distributed model, is there even an electric company other than someone who maintains the power lines? "In Soviet Russia electric company pays YOU!" I guess not.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Hydrogen doesn't burn hot, just fast. When welding aluminum, you use oxy-hydrogen because it has a colder flame.
I assume that's why the flame is harder to see, because it's "cold" burning.
Because solar needs a storage system, too, and hydrogen seems far better than big blocks of batteries. Or did you mean for your solar "backup" system to only work during daylight?
A solar power system that functions around the clock and through extended loss of the power grid is every bit as complicated as this "half-baked" storage idea, and without something like hydrogen, it requires something like a battery array. Which is "quarter-baked" at best-- pitching a ton or two of big toxic batteries every few years is a lousy idea whether you're an environmental nut or just a normal person who hates large recurring costs.
Searching for Micropower on Google brings up many links.
The highly-modded comments so far mostly discuss viability of hydrogen as an energy source. The more interesting line of thought this article provokes is simply that if people were largely responsible for generating their own power, or power was generated on a smaller scale, many of the issues we see now could be alleviated. Localized power sources avoid long-run power lines, high-voltage transmission systems (expensive!), market manipulation like Enron's, and more. Such a system is more flexible and upgradeable, and can be built up gradually. It's also impossible to "crash" it, because essentially there is no system. We're talking separate power sources for square miles of city, or housing developments, or even individual properties.
Obviously, there needs to be a revolution in power generation before something like this can happen. Nuke plants don't scale down so well. :-) But whether or not hydrogen fuel cells are the answer, this is what we should be reaching for.
A world which uses H2 heavily might not be quite as much of the eco-paradise as some paint it.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
peer to peer power sharing?
I will clarify, since I made some assumptions in my statement. Clearly, what you suggest is workable, and is only slightly removed from where gasoline comes from in the first place. AND we probably should be doing it in the practical locations (near sewage treatment plants) However, I was assuming we were talking about doing this in the average person's home or apartment-- something that requires a relatively simple, clean process that does not involve large quantities of sewage and a bunch of soggy bottomland.
You're absolutely right, but there's more than a small difference in the practicality of these two production methods.
The same idea, storing energy in cars, houses etc. could work without hydrogen as well. The guys at AC Propulsion have been working on a "Vehicle-to-Grid" energy system for a long time now.
-6d
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
on Al Jazeera TV:
"It was brough to our attention that due to recent developments in the power distribution accross the US all buildings now store important quantities of Hydrogen. Blowing stuff up has just become a whole new experience!
Allah is great!"
So you are throwing hydrogen bombs everywhere, well, not exactly H-bombs.
Cringely wrote an article along the same line over two years ago, during the California energy "crisis". His idea is to cache energy generated at night into cells stored at people's houses for use during peak demand in the daytime.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
With all the privitization of electricity going on around the world, I can't imagine the corporations that stand to make a mint from it are going to happy with an idea that cuts into profits and lowers revenue.
Excellent discussion of this idea on den beste's blog. More indepth than your average slashdot commentary (pretty graphs and everything)...
Summing it up, there seem to be all sort of issues (that i mostly don't understand) about letting large quantities of people spin the dials backwards...
http://metapundit.net
I was just on a 'rant' about Hydrogen. However as has been pointed out in other posts, using Hydrogen as a energy storage medium is inefficient. I was just bringing up that it has become the magic bullet for fixing "the energy crisis" or whatever one wants to call it.
so does this mean that we will have random explosions countrywide as the new Electricity Grid falls victim to computer viruses too? ;P
-Kevin
About the time that California was a big fat rolling blackout someone suggesting using Electric Vehicles to store energy in their batteries and then discharge them into the power grid during the peak hours, about 3pm to 5pm.
It seems there was enough power stored during the day/night that they could drive home and provide AC for the peak hours.
It's not true that you'd burn excess power. This wasn't a PC-based solution - it was a microprocessor-based solution that would be part of a thermostat that was ALADN(r)-enabled (if I remember the marketing tag correctly). It would consume a trival amount of power (milliwatts). The idea was to produce these chips as something that could be a part of any product, and thermostats were the first market. Total home automation was the goal.
I actually worked as a consultant at Sage and wrote most of the kernel. We got the design done, and the prototypes worked great. Sadly, the company went looking for production money... in late 2000. No money anywhere, and last I saw they were busy going belly-up. They weren't particularly well-run, but had a great idea. And (if I say so myself) a pretty slick implementation.
One of my favorite points about energy is to consider the "cycle" the energy takes.
For example, coal/oil/etc. starts as solar energy being consumed by plants which are then eaten by animals which die (or the plants die themselves), then buried for millions of years with possibly geothermal and graviational energy cooking it a bit more, then pumped up, refined, and burned. Eventually the spent elemnts may work themselves back into another plant or animal.
Now consider the home-brewed hydrogen the parent mentioned. Soloar power turned into electricity used to split water into Hydrogen (captured) and Oxygen (released). Then, recombine them to form water which may rain down again to be used again for this same cycle.
Instead of millions of years, we're talking days or weeks worth of energy storage and a much simpler process of capturing and releasing that energy.
Now, does it cost more? Yes, right now. But imagine how much it will cost when we have to build our own artificial hydrocarbon-energy system after we deplete the millions of years of work that nature did for us in only a few hundred years.
As I see it, the problem is not generating, but managing the transmission of energy. I fail to see how massively distributed power generators will make that any simpler or more reliable. Plus, now storage of excess energy could be a big problem since no one is controlling generation.
66greenwood.com - outside of Kingman, Arizona.
I've seen it done in Japan, but never the US - great timing as far as this article goes. 487 home housing development, not connected to the grid...
First of all, hydrogen gas is not an energy source as it must be separated from water using electrolosis, which is not very efficient and must be powered by another source of energy.
While hydrogen may burn cleanly the large oil and power corporations are expecting to use thier existing carbon monoxide (and sulfer dioxide) producing natural gas, fuel oil, and coal burning power plants to provide the electricity needed to separate the hydrogen, which will allow energy to be stored for late usage but not cut into thier profits earned from America's dependance on fossil fuels. Hydrogen energy storage is only clean if clean sources of energy are used to power the separation of hydrogen from water(such as solar, which IMHO is a good idea).
Natural gas fuel cells are a much better solution for distributed power generation. The infrastructure for providing natural gas is already existant in most urban areas and in many rural areas (such as in OH, western NY, and western PA) it is not unusual for homes to have thier own natural gas wells on the property. Natural gas can be produced from sewage and animal waste, and can also be tapped off of landfills. Fuel cells do not produce the carbon monoxide that is emitted with the incomplete burning of hydrocarbons, and are much more efficient at converting the contained energy into electricity.
As for the explosiveness of hydrogen, this is not much of a problem as hydrogen is lighter than air which allows hydrogen leaks to disperse quickly as long as they are in ventilated areas. Long chain hydrocarbon gasses (such as gasoline vapors, propane, and natural gas) are heavier than air, which allows them to pool in depressions (such as basements) and remain in one place ontil they mix sufficiently with the air to become explosive.
Read, L
While you may be correct about the parent post's exageration, your dismissal of "That little pipe" is equally misleading.
Oil refineries are also known to burn off large amounts of natural gas. It keeps the price up.
Read, L
http://www.microgen.com/
A stirling powered CHP. Add to it the 'smart power' technology (It could, based on temp data fire up to add power to grid if grid power is needed and in 1/2 hour it would turn on to warm the home anyway...or turn off early if the grid didn't need the power.)
From the web site:
MicroGen is an innovative energy system for individual homes and small businesses that generates heat (as does any conventional boiler) and at the same time produces electricity from a single compact unit.
There will be a range of models available with a heat output of up to 36kW with dimensions similar to large combination boilers.
The electrical output will be 1.1kW. Any extra demand required by the house will be taken from the national grid as usual.
The product operates as a condensing boiler and a combination boiler system will also be available.
The unit is designed to fit in the majority of homes and has been designed to wall mount with both rear and side-flueing options.
The MicroGen unit will have an optional feature allowing the system to provide heating, hot water and emergency electrical power in the event of a power cut.
This system is based on a Stirling engine - a technology that was initially developed in Scotland during the 19th century - and has been the subject of significant development in recent years.
(Now, if these ppl would only return my calls)
Could this overall decrease the use of current energy sources by that percentage?
Could that then lead to lower energy prices due to decreased demand?
Could this lead to lowering our dependacy on foreign oil?
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
At this point, our society is based on Electricity. In addition, the fuel cells are not there. Yet. So rather than trying to move us over to another form of energy, why not improve what we have. One of the real problems is not power generation capacity, but that peak capacity does not corespond with demand. So instead, we need a cheap way to extend the peak capacity. Boeing's Heat Storage systems is capable of storaging heat that was generated at night or during times of excess generation via wind/solar. The nice thing about it, is that you can create small ones and sprinkle them through out the system. Perhaps about 1-2 acres in size. These would be heated at night or during excess days. Then upon need, it could be reversed. It makes a lot of sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First off, you're unlikely to have enough flywheels to absorb more than a small part of the energy than is used during the peak usage times. But even if you did, then the solution is to not put out any extra power at night. Just balance the amount that you generate at day and at night--leave the flywheels at 70% or whatever, so you don't have to bring any extra generators online or offline.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been proposing something like this for a while now, but with an interesting bootstraping step. Quoting a bit from Natural Capitalism (full text is available online):
A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.
Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.
How Politicians Lie: http://www.factcheck.org/
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I appreciate the wishful thinking of the hydrogen folks, but ask any hazardous material team about how dangerous hydrogen is - it has an invisible flame front - is explosive over a huge range of air/H2 concentrations, rots it's metal containment system. Besides, having a volume energy density that is about 1/4th that of gasoline.
Gasoline 9000 Wh/l
LNG 7216 Wh/l
Propane 6600 Wh/l
Ethanol 6100 WH/l
Liquid H2 2600 Wh/l
Lithium 250 Wh/l
Flywheel 210 Wh/l
Liquid N2 65 Wh/l
Lead Acid 40 Wh/l
Compr Air 17 Wh/l
Hydrogen 2.7 Wh/l
It think that hydrogen is more than an energy storage medium, it is a means of encouraging efficient power usage. True, generating hydrogen from electrolysis using power generated from fossil fuel power plants is a no-win situation both thermodynamically and environmentally. However, there are other advantages to decentralised use of fuel cells. Hydrogen can be produced from power that is currently underutilised. It works well as a buffer for solar/wind power. Also, the storage problem may be remedied somewhat by reticulating hydrogen supply through modified natural gas pipelines. Generating power at the street level has other advantages; solid-oxide fule cells can also generate hot water (infact they need to be cooled). And let's not forget that we may one day be able to more efficiently convert water to hydrogen and oxygen by using sunlight directly (ie: artificial photosynthesis) - and we can use biomass to generate methane now. The main advantage from all these points is flexibility in the use of renewable energies at the local level - a good example of bioregionalism.
Combined with net metering and the investment pays for itself even quicker.
The problem with getting off the grid, or becoming decentralised, isn't one of technology. It is one of monopoly.
Much like the world dependence on oil to power cars etc, our real problem stems from one (or a few in a cartel) provider having full control over your energy supplies. This is why the US is now entrenched in Iraq - human rights issues do not enter the equation. Rather, it is the fact that oil reserves ARE running out, be it in ten, twenty or fifty years. As it runs out, America's ability to maintain military superiority will be eroded, something they cannot allow.
Imagine if there was no need for centralised energy systems to provide you with fuel, electricity etc. Imagine if you could generate enough electricity merely to serve your own home, perhaps storing excess for yourself if you wanted to. Not sending it back to the grid, because there would be no grid. Imagine being able to generate enough fuel to power your car/transportation device from home. No dependence on fuel stations dotted around the country (you still may want to buy extra on a long journey etc, but you might also be able to get extra fuel from those who want to give away excess energy of their own because you aren't paying for it anyway, being self-generated).
Enabling technology questions aside, who is the biggest obstacle to this system? Old money energy companies of course. They NEED you on their grid, they NEED to supply you with fuel through only THEIR suppliers, or they lose their entire business. And they absolutely, positively, will NOT let that happen. Hence our stupid reliance on centralised power.
Visceral Psyche Films
Storage as H2 is pretty suck-poor anyway, with todays best technology you are lucky if you get back out half of the energy you put in.
Much better is pumping water uphill to a pool of some sort, then letting it run back down trough generators to release power. If it rains you even get energy for free this way. If not, efficiency is typically over 80%. Most practical in hilly terrain ofcourse.
As a storage medium it has a ways to go yet - and remember, this is for direct conversion of H2. Reformer fuel cells are worse. In other words, you still have to generate the energy. A fuel cell approach just makes it feasible to do it locally and a little at a time.
Still, I think the overall concept is sound.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
any reasonable person knows that if the US government backed a domestic energy program, two things would hapen. 1 - the oil and gas companies would gradually become involved out of a sense of survival needs. 2 - the public would be benefited by the compounded ROI of recycling the infinite petrodollarimport funds back into the local economy, not the rest of the world, each year. oh, there is another point! 3 - after a while, people would get better at managing hydrogen. i mean, somehow, most people can safely handle 10 - 20 gallons of high test gasoline in close proximity to their abodes. survival of the fittest.
and not a bit to electrolyze. It would take me a good long time to figure out exactly how much water we're talking about being turned into hydrogen to keep a day or two's worth of backup power in every house, but you are probabaly right that it's not an insignificant amount.
Depending on your location, this could be a serious issue. It's not a big deal where I live in Indiana, but in the middle of Nevada it may not be feasible. When it becomes an issue, it's entirely possible to switch to catalyzed natural gas as your hydrogen source, and it's worth noting that any water "sidelined" by converting to hydrogen can be made into water again quickly by just "burning" the hydrogen in your fuel cell.
Nonetheless, you make a very good point, indeed.
That was my understanding of the way he explained it to me, at least. It looks like you're right; most landfills don't currently purchase natural gas to run flares. I don't know why I thought that, because it sounds stupid now that I think about it.
What they're doing is even dumber than I thought, though; they already have collection systems in place and burn the landfill gas in flares instead of putting it to better use.
what is wrong with people who own oil selling it to the folks who wish to purchase it?
Absolutely nothing. In this case, though, they don't just own oil. They also seem to own lots of natural gas that they waste because it gets in the way of their search for oil.
I've generally noticed that businesses waste a *lot* of resources because of their insistence on specializing in one particular area of expertise. This just seems to be a perfect example: natural gas is useless to an oil company, so they burn it. Landfill gas is useless to a landfill, so they burn it also.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"