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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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we should use methane to store. god knows after a good mexican meal i could power half my neighborhood
This sounds suspiciously like people "sharing" their power!
Better watch your ass for the RIAA and MPAA.
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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.
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"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?
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Transmission lines are typically ~10k-100kV AC. The substation drops that down to ~1kV for distribution, and the local transformers drop that to 220 into houses.
The primary reasons for using AC rather than DC is that transformers are cheaper and more efficient for AC. As a bonus, AC is actually safer if you get shocked by it, as your muscles aren't locked into a single direction...they have a chance to relax and let you disengange contact.
No, I don't think they would have everyone supplying DC. The best idea I can come up with is for there to be one synchronizing signal on the lines, and the distributed sources have to match phase with that...but what if someone's gets out of phase? What if someone tries to jam that signal?
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?).
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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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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!
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
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.
- 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.
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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