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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...!
I will be encouraged to pass gas?
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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...
Where's all this hydrogen in a form we can easily get?
If you can find some, I'm game.
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?
Stored up, from cracking water apart into hydrogen and oxygen.
With tiny little chisels.
we should use methane to store. god knows after a good mexican meal i could power half my neighborhood
First of all, hydrogen burns clean. It'a an abundant source of energy, and once again, BURNS CLEAN.
Yea, but so does natural gas and the energy value of what is burned off in the Gulf of Mexico, anually, is greater than the entire energy consumption of the US in 1,000 years.
But, I am way ahead of all of you.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
.. 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 hydrogen wasn't the problem, it was the fact that the skin was made of solid rocket fuel. It was actually the skin that was burning, since hydrogen burns so hot you can't see the flames.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
"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
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.
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
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?
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
No.
Right now, houses have natural gas lines, propane tanks and tons of spray cans and other explosive items. A hydrogen tank is no more dangerous.
I'm sorry, but the above poster is a moron. Hydrogen is not plentiful as an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage system.
Now - some basic physics: you get hydrogen from water. Then you burn hydrogen with air, and get water back. The amount of energy it took to get the hydrogen from the water is equal to the amount you got, minus the loss from inefficiency (which is substantial).
Therefore, using hydrogen as an energy source is like changing money to two different fixed currencies as a revenue source - you don't make anything, and you end up losing things to the middlemen conversion industries.
Unless you can find pure, elemental hydrogen naturally, the hydrogen/water power system is a storage vessel only - a well-compressed but inefficient energy storage system.
Anyone who believes otherwise either has not taken basic science (grade 10 should cover it) or hasn't thought it through and is just a loudmouthed idiot. Either way, shouldn't be discussing issues they have no knowledge of.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
When hydrogen approaches levels of 4% concentration in the atmosphere, the possibility of it igniting increases greatly. A concentration level of 4% for hydrogen does not seem that high, but when compared to gasoline, which is 1%, hydrogen offers a significantly lower risk of explosion. Gasoline becomes volatile at a concentration 4 times lower than that of hydrogen.
The offshore oil rigs "burn off" the "waste" natural gas that comes out with the oil. You might have noticed the "eternal flames" on almost every offshore oil rig in the world, other than Baharain(sp?).
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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!!!!
Why doesn't Baharain do this? Do they capture the natural gas insted of venting it?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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!
A energy storage is an energy source. Coal plant? Coal stores energy. This is true of nuclear reaction and oil as well; you're playing a school-yard game of semantics.
Hydrogen in a pure form isn't found in abundance (or really in any usable quantity), however the energy it takes to create a mobile storage at a fixed location may surely be much higher than the energy actually stored which can be used at a variable location. What I mean by this is even if it takes the energy storable in a hundred batteries to make one battery, it doesn't mean it isn't worth making. You're vastly increasing the flexibility of use of that energy.
Or I'm an idiot and you have a nuclear reactor in your backpack.
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
It is their primary export. They capture, liquify and ship it by tanker all over the world.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
And don't forget that hydrogen is lighter than air and tends to dissipate into the atmosphere quicker than other gaseous feuls. I'd rather be around a leaky hydrogen tank than a leaky propane tank.
...that just happened to be made out of the same or similar compounds that the current Space Shuttle solid rockets use as fuel. It wasn't intential. I forgot the properties they were looking for in the paint (stiffness, lightweight?), but it was difficult for them to replace that paint with something else when the designers discovered the "problem".
Some quick links to a description of the real cause of Hindenburg:
ucla.edu
clean-air.org
hydrogenus.com
Enjoy.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
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.
Worse, it doesn't burn completely in the rig flares; a lot escapes through the center, and CH4 is about 16x as effective per molecule as CO2 in terms of greenhouse effects.
I should mention here just for the sake of redundancy that CH4 in a fuel cell does "burn" almost completely clean, and without NOx or SOx, because at no point in the process is anything actually being blown up or set on fire.
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.
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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.
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,
- 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
That statement is patently absurd. Think about what you're saying: Every 8 hours, a few oil rigs in the gulf of mexico are burning an amount of natural gas to equal to the entire U.S. annual energy consumption.
Let's do the math: The US uses about 100 exajoules per year, or 10e20 joules. That would be about 2.7e15 grams of oil, or 2700 megatons. This amount of energy would be burned off by, (let's assume), 200 oil rigs every 8 hours. That would mean that each rig would be burning 39 megatons of waste gas per day, or 450 tons per second. That's as much as 30 Saturn V rockets going full bore for each oil rig.
That little pipe sticking out the side of a rig is simply not burning that much gas.
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.
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
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
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
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/
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.