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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."
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.
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.
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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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
- 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
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...
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.
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