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Solar-Hydrogen Eco-House
Cymage writes "An architect in Malaysia has built a Solar-Hydrogen Eco-house, the first in the world that is fully self-sustainable and runs entirely on hydrogen. The house has an electrolyser to generate hydrogen that runs off of solar panels, then that hydrogen is used for heat and electricity for the house. Pretty cool stuff. I wonder how long before a kit is ready to convert regular houses?"
250000RM is $65,800 US. I would guess it would cost more in the US though.
http://www.narvakitchens.com/Solar.pdf
How is this any different than the 2 gigantic natural gas tanks I have sitting out in my back yard?
Lots of people use natural gas for heating, and you don't hear about their houses blowing up.
I imagine in a commercial unit, they would add trace amounts of mercaptans so you can smell a leak, if there is one.
Battery banks require replacement more often causing eco-waste.
Great way to kill an eco-house... add in some lead & acid batteries.
The hydrogen would not run out and be a reusable container, far less maintenance.
Indeed! Hydrogen being one of the lighter elements does not have a long lifetime on the surface of the earth. On the contrary, hydrogen is one of the less abundant elements in the atmosphere.
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
Although we're not too hot (pun intended) on the soal power issue, the scandinavian houses seem to be quite energy efficient with good insualtion and a good deal of us use thermal power. The thermal power is simply water heated in the crust of the earth, so you save some of the energy otherwise wasted on heating it to that point. A friend of mine lives in a thermally heated, very thouroughly insulated house (with good ventilation), and they spend a tiny, tiny amount of dough on heat. He recons the thermal system would be paid off in six years, making it a total of ten years in investment. He also applied for a grant from SINTEF for repairs, and got it. Not a bad deal.
Hydrogen (gaseous that is, not liquid) is actually a reasonably safe fuel. As far as explosiveness, it's roughly equivalent to, say, natural gas, and much less explosive than acedalene.
Keeping hydrogen in a tank (outside of a house or in a vehicle) is fairly safe. If the tank is ruptured, the hydrogen is so light that it leaks into the air and floats up and away very quickly. (Unlike, say, gasoline, which tends to sit on the ground, mix with air, and cause explosions). (The article said that the H2 tank was _outside_; having it inside _would_ be dangerous.)
By the way, the reason that the Hindenburg was such a horrific accident wasn't primarily because it was filled with Hydrogen. It was because the body of the blimp was painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
I'm sure many /.'ers are aware of this, but the fact that the Hindenburg was filled with Hydrogen had very little to do with the disaster. The problem was the coating of the balloon, which was highly flammable and susceptible to static buildup (someone provide more details if possible). Add in the metal frame, and as soon as a small spark erupted it arced across the whole balloon and the rest is history.
Hydrogen is pretty safe, if you know what you're doing. But a good point the Hindenburg can teach us is that all elements of a system must be inspected with respect to each other, in order for something to be truly safe.
Storage?
If you are not using the electricity from the solar panels, conventionally, it is stored in huge battery arrays. With this setup, it is converted to hydrogen and can be stored more easily in a big tank, or, if the tank is filled, that electricity is then fed back into the grid directly. That hydrogen tank probably doesn't need to be maintained like a battery array, and, if you'd like to upgrade, a bigger tank, or another auxilliary tank is probably cheaper than the equivalent batteries.
HERE is a link concerning safety issues and applications for hydrogen when used as a fuel source. The site is by the International Association for Hydrogen Energy. This site may need to be taken with a grain of salt though.
Being abundant has nothing to do with being the fuel of the future.
Despite what the fuel cell lobby would like you to believe, Hydrogen is not an energy source, as there is no ample supply of usable hydrogen fuel. As in this case, the Hydrogen has to be produced, which consumes energy. This is done using the most abundant energy source in the universe [and the atmosphere ;)], the SUN!
Solar is the key.
First off, storing volitile gases in tanks outside of the house is a common, and noramlly safe practice. Granted, when the fire swept through Oak Hills here in Southern California last year, there were some big booms, but that is a very rare occurance. Second, hydrogen is safer to store than propane is. Hydrogen, when release from a tank, tends to spread out, or mostly up, too fast to create a good explosion, unless you are storing the hydrogen mixed with oxygen, and I doubt that they would be that dumb. Overall, I'd much rather have a huge tank of hydrogen outside my house, than a huge tank of propane. And (insert diety here) forbid that I would end up driving around sitting on a very volitile liquid for hours on end, oh wait, I do, and its considered safe.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The designers should be commended for the power self-sufficiency of the house.
But I notice from the photo that the house has been constructed primarily from steel and concrete, which are hardly sustainable materials. The amount of energy that goes into extracting and processing steel or concrete is thousands of times more than that for wood or masonry. The net energy balance from both the construction and long-term operation of this house is likely to be very negative.
For reference: stats, stats and more stats
See http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm - hydrogen did NOT cause the Hindenburg to burn, it was the fact that it was painted with rocket fuel, basically.
One of the more advanced energy efficient, solar power homes in the country is under construction in Ohio: http://www.solterra.info
It uses 5 alternative energy sources.
O=='=++
It is fairly ineffecient to use electricity to make hydrogen. I'm guessing that the reason he's doing it is to use hydrogen as a fuel for the stove and such. That being said I'm not sure why he isn't just using an electric stove - anyone have any idea what the effecieny differences are between cooking with gas vs. cooking with electric? The best info I found regarding this says "The electrochemical efficiency of electrolysis is fairly high. As the graph below illustrates, PEM electrolyzer stacks exhibit an inverse relationship between efficiency and "current density" (or amps per square foot). When low levels of current are applied to the stack, resulting in lower output of hydrogen, the efficiency of the process can exceed 85%. That is, more than 85% of the BTUs of electrical energy are converted to BTUs of hydrogen chemical energy." article - This article is about using a "reverse" fuel cell to create the hydrogen. It goes on to include an analysis of cost/mile that frankly is a bit suprising(ie using this reverse fuel cell technology could lead to .07$/mile as opposed to a $1.70/gal .085$/mile - car performance being variable)
Something tells me that this guy isn't using this tech. though.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
Actually, there is quite a science to tropical architechture, or there was before the invention of air-conditioning. I have an uncle who was trained as an architect in Vietnam and he learned all this stuff about how to design buildings to be self-cooling. Now, living in the U.S. where every building of any size has its own air-conditioner, his skills are completely outdated.
I'm not really trying to defend the term "bio-climatic" but there is something to be said for climate-appropriate architecture. It's not even a matter of being an "eco-freak": if you need to get by in a climate that has 100% humiditity and 110 degree temeratures in the shade, you need to put some real thought and effort into your architecture. Folks in tropical climates have understood this for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
One of the attractions of Hydrogen is its storage potential, as that allows us to make full use of 'alternative' energy sources such as solar, wind etc. Whether it's in a garage that needs less frequent tanker visits because of the solar cells on it roof, or in a car that refuels itself and runs the air conditioning while parked on a hot day, or in a house like the one mentioned, hydrogen's best feature is not its cleanliness, but its ability to smooth the link between supply and demand that allows us to use these cleaner alternatives.
On a larger scale industrial installations would allow us to do the same thing, so that we could have fewer power stations running at 100% day and night, rather than having inefficient spinning reserve. And of course we could get by with less still if we all had a power station in the basement. There are alternatives such as using superconducting magnets, or compressed air, but the ubiquity and relative safety of hydrogen makes it a real enabler of such change. Assuming the political/economic will is there of course.
Here in Halifax, they're using biodiesel using waste fish oil as an additive to run (some of) the buses. The fish oil waste would otherwise have to be disposed of as garbage. So far, the buses run fine and no one is objecting to the smells. It is intended to expand the use of this.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
In a proper storage system even fire would have zero impact.
I've seen test footage from the late 70's, when LNG (Liqefied Natural Gas)/LPG (Propane) was first being put into cars and trucks. The Department Of Transportation, of course required much testing, and damned if these tanks aren't tough. They're aluminum, wrapped with a fibreglass mesh composite.
They dropped cars with these tanks in the trunk from cranes (equivalent to 80Mph crashes), shot them with pistol rounds, shot them with M16's, burned them on top of stacks of skids, and even tried to explode them with dynamite (no effect).
The only thing that had any effect at all on the tanks were the armor piercing rifle round, and extremely hot fires. The rifle round penetrated, but it didn't cause a fire, or any explosion. The tank just sat there and vented.
The fire increased the pressure inside of the tank to it's bypass pressure, and some gas vented (but didn't ignite, despite being surrounded by a huge fire...because there was no oxygen to make it burn).
Just try any of that with a regular automotive fuel tank.
People all excited about hydrogen and LNG/LPG are idiots, plain and simple. Gasoline is a far more hazardous fuel than any of those. Ask the Army. It's no wonder all (most?) US military vehicles use diesel fuel (besides some of it's more obvious benefits).
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Actually, the hydrogen did not burn until it had escaped and mixed with air.
At this point it did little to effect the actual incident.
It would not have made any differance what was inside the gas bags.
This is a myth ... American Solar Energy Society FAQ on energy payback.
O=='=++
Can do, but in large part, it depends where you live - contact info@seia.org for a run-through.
Hard to imagine people are still spreading this dis-information. Modern solar panels start producing more energy than they consumed for their manufacture within 2-4 years depending on where they are installed.
Solar Myths
My gut feeling is that the difference would have been minimal to having Helium vs Hydrogen as far as that accident. (assuming the design changes needed for Helium would not have worsened the situation.)
That's an interesting point. Using Helium would have required a much larger surface area, which would have required much more paint. So there'd have been more of that stuff to burn.
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Check out New Jersey's renewable energy program - http://www.njcleanenergy.com
State will GIVE you back 70% of what you spend on all hardware and labor.
What's even more exciting, is the venture capital fund that will give your business 5 to 500k recoverable grant to expand your renewable energy business development. This money could help you buy installation equipment, trucks, warehouse space, help hire additional staff,etc. Unfortunately, this fund is only 5 million is size. If a lot of companies apply, there won't be enough for everyone.
I think any experienced roofer would be crazy not to at least consider doing solar installations. I mean if they are already ripping an entire roof and replacing shingles, why not offer to install some solar panels or tile south side of the roof with solar shingles?
Natural gas is flammable too, that's the whole point of fuel. There isn't that much difference between using natural gas and hydrogen gas (except the hydrogen molecules are smaller and therefore need other materials to make the pipes and tanks gas tight, but this hardly new. Hydrogen has been used for decades in the industry).
Such a tank isn't very likely to blow up (unless you live in a Hollywood movie). Except when you happen to live in forest that decides to start burning big time. If the fire heats the tank, you can imagine what happens, assuming you're familiar with the ideal gas law pV=nRT, the volume V of the tank and the amount of gas n inside remains the same (And so does the constant R), The temperature T rises, So the pressure p doesn't have much choice than to rise as well.
p will rise until the tank bursts and some of the gas combusts.
If the same tank was filled with natural gas, the same thing would have happened. Even if it was filled with helium it would have burst (but it wouldn't have burned ofcourse).
oh and IANYAE (I'm not yet an engineer)
Puh, another self-sustaining house. No, not in the Sahara, neither in Texas or South California:
Freiburg, Germany, 1992, running with solar power and hydrogen(PDF), (and a picture of it)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
....that the natural air-conditioning method described in the article was discovered in the 1930's by R. Buckminster Fuller, during the development of his Dymaxion House.
I belong to the ______ generation.
In fact only a year or so previous to the Hindenberg disaster, a similar event took place in California though fewer lives were lost. That blimp was full of helium and it still went up in a great ball of flames - because like the Hindenberg it was coated with cellulose acetate (I think to keep water off it). Not sure if it had the aluminium paint as well though.
So yeah, I think the gas used for bouyancy makes little difference to the hazard.
Now if we could produce some kinda field that stabilises positive muons by an order of, say, many trillions, we could have muonium lofted blimps that make do with 10% the volume. But. Alas...
Really? Because the Department of energy's report claims "Biodiesel yields 3.2 units of fuel product energy for every unit of fossil energy consumed in its life cycle." That's from 1995. A similar report came out in 1998.
I'd like to know what numbers you know of that are different, maybe based on more modern numbers and not some study produced during the invention of bioethanol in the 1970s. Because processes in general become more efficient over time -- it's hard to believe that a 6 or 9 year old report was SO wrong that the 3.2 units they claim were actually negative.
I'm not doubting you (well, okay, I am). I just would like to see this counterreport. Back in 1995, I still trusted government scientists.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You might have misread what the original poster was probably saying.
He said:
The only mention of an 04 Accord is when discussing the size; "bigger", "faster", and "more efficient" probably refer to an '04 Prius compared with the previous version of the Prius - according to this review, relative to the original Prius the '04 is 6.9 inches longer in wheelbase, 6.3 inches longer overall, and taller and wider (and heavier) as well, has a bit more horsepower (and I've seen claims that it's faster 0-60mph), and has higher EPA fuel economy.
The V6 EX does accelerate much faster - according to an edmunds.com comparison site, it's 7.5s 0-60mph vs. 10.37 for the Prius. The site doesn't give the acceleration for the 4-cylinder EX. The interior sizes are a mixed bag - the Prius wins on front and rear headroom, rear leg room, and luggage capacity, and the Accord wins on front and rear shoulder and hip room and front leg room. (The Prius, not surprisingly, wins on fuel economy.)
I think friction would cause problems for such a device on a small scale. The mechanical conversion of energy from a slow-moving heavy weight to fast moving rotating axle is too complicated. They do, however, do something similar on a macro scale with the power grid as a whole. During non-peak hours, the excess generating capacity is often used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Later, when demand increases, they use the reservoir to generate power hydroelectrically.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
umn I have seen some home wind turbines for less than 10k. They are not 1MW, but are enough to power a house if the engery is stored. The wind in amny places blows 24 hours a day. Small wind turbines produce more per dollar of capital in many areas AND are cheaper to maintain than solar systems. Installing wind power to a rural house( new construction OR not yet on grid) can be cheaper than running the wires to get it in grid. Sadly there are problems with wind for most urban or sub urban homes.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Water is not a strong absorber at all wavelengths. Take a look
Water is, for all intents, *transparent* in the visible wavelengths both as a gas and as a liquid. It's a good thing too, because the "visible" light (the light that goes through all that water vapor in the atmosphere and reaches the surface) happens to be the light that we humans evolved to see with. It also "just so happens" that the sun (as a near-black body emitter at about 5000 K) emits most of its energy at the visible wavelengths (coincidence?). . .
So, water vapor is not absorbing most of the energy that comes from the sun (even if it is a strong absorber at most infrared and UV wavelengths); it is, in fact, transparent to most of that energy until it condenses into clouds, which makes it reflect a lot of the visible wavelengths.
First of all, they don't actually ignore water. The tend not to trust atmospheric models that have globally averaged water vapor. The surface water (oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.) are important energy transport mechanisms that are much better understood than the greenhouse gas, water vapor. Read chapter 8 of the IPCC. . .
You also simply cannot ignore the fact that concentration is not the only variable when it comes to global warming. How efficeint is water vapor at absorbing in the visible and UV and re-emitting in the infrared? how does its non-even spatial distribution affect its efficeincy as a greenhouse gas? Compare that with CO2 and, say SF6, whose lifetimes in the atmosphere are much, much greater than water.
Go back and read the IPCC again. . . The atmospheric lifetime of CO2 is on the order of 50-200 years. The atmospheric lifetime of H2O is much shorter than that of CO2 (nobody is really sure by how much shorter). However, the biggest thing about water vapor is that as the concentration in the atmosphere increases, it does trap more energy from the sun, but it also increases the likelyhood that the vapor will condense to form clouds, thus increasing the "albedo" of the atmosphere, lowering the amount of energy that stays on the earth. It's difficult to model and thus is usually ignored when other gases like CO2 (which only *increase* the amount of heat retained) are increasing in concentration.
Another problem with water vapor is that it isn't evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere, either "horizontally", vertically, or temporally, mostly because its atmospheric lifetime is so short. CO2 and other strong, long lived gases are much more evenly distributed, so it's relatively simple to create a mathematical model of the effects CO2 et al. have on the energy budget of the Earth. It's not so simple with a patchy gas like water vapor.
The jury is NOT out on the matter of the increase of the average temperature of the earth. It IS increasing. The jury is ou
This is why I asked for someone to dig up a link.
Unfortunately, you probably won't find a link - I've never seen more than passing references to catalytic photolysis outside research journals.
So where can I get a water photolysis system that yields more energy out than a $15-20k photovoltaic system? Does this exist outside of research labs and plant leaves?
Again, you can't. Despite readily-reproduceable results, I know of no commercial systems that work by this method. I agree, holy grail indeed! Sure, the catalysts don't come cheap, but compared to $20k+ for PV?
I apologize for the scarcity of info on this topic... Believe me, I wish I could tell you more, but I have only recently come across this concept myself, and it looks truly staggering in the implications. It also looks like one of those areas of research that people keep very quiet about, either in the hopes of someday marketing it, or for fear of incurring the wrath of our oil-baron leaders.