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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?"
Yes, hydrogen is explosive. Yes, it can be used safely. No, there is no chance in a properly engineer application for hydrogen to make this house go BOOOM! like the Hindenburg. Give up, Dick Cheney is not paying attention.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I recall seeing "the house of the future" once, built by Nasa engineers. Solar-powered, thermally efficient, geo-thermal power, yada yada yada yada.
All protected by a security system, whose password was "1978".
The year the house was designed, built and shown to the public. The same year I saw it.
I'm still waiting for all this great technology to hit mass market.
And you know why it won't? It's too damned expensive.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
There is no way to have 100% effecency in transforming energy from one from to the other - so we have a loss from transforming sunlight to electricity, and then a loss transforming the electricity to a storable chemical (hydrogen), and then yet another loss as it's transfered back to electricity to run the house. Sounds like they are wasting power by having unnecesary steps here...
Now, I'm not a rocketscientist, and I dont research fuelscells and batteries - but would it not been just as efficient, or even more efficient, to just store the electricity in a batterybank? Unlike in a car, weight and to a certain degree volume isn't a limiting factor in a house.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
It seems like a great idea for Malaysia, but lets consider North Dakota:
1. Heat: Its a high plains desert in a northern climate. If I need electric heat I'm going to burn a lot more hydrogen. Winters get down around -30F
2. Entertainment: Nights last longer up here, so I can't live without my 500w sound system, my Sun Lamps and outdoor lighting.
3. Oh yeah, water for Hydrogen production is in short supply.
It may be a few more years before technology catches up with us, right about the time the local theatre starts showing Phantom Menace.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
What sort of fire hazard is this place? Assuming the hydrogen is stored in a combustible state (which is very likely), and that a very large volume will be stored.
Plenty of people store large tanks of propane outside their house which they use for the stove, water and even lighting. It is very common in mountain and beach houses.
Btw, welcome back.
He probably meant most abundant in the universe, which would have been a correct, if useless, point.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
So that you can have power at night. Why not use normal batteries? Because power from hydrogen (whether through combustion or using a fuel cell) is cooler!
I don't think we give near enough thought to the way that we are ravaging our planet. Don't get me wrong, I love tech. But I am dying for a freeway safe electric car. Even then though, we use dirty tech to make electricity. It can't last, but we are addicted to it.
I hope someone does come up with a way to make clean technologies widely available.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
I assume the hydrogen is being used to store the energy from the solar cells. This way, there is still a source of energy when the solar cells are not functioning (night, cloudy day) However, i'm sure it would be more efficient, as you said, to use the electricity directly from the cells during the day.
It is an interesting project, but, I fear, taps into the hydrogen-mania that seems to have gripped the world lately.
I don't believe there is a major reason to be concerned about the safety of the hydrogen. I don't believe it is actually much, if any, more dangerous than other things that we live with every day (methane, gasoline, diesel, batteries) for reasons that vary by what particular thing we are comparing it to.
I would wonder, though, if by powering the house from a fuel cell run from a hydrolizer, are they doing seriously better than if they had used a battery bank? For the hot water and the air conditioner, they might be doing better by running them directly from hydrogen, but what about the household electrical supply?
Also, might better efficiency be realized by uniting the DC bus of the solar panels with that of the fuel cell, at least unidirectionally? What I'm saying is, doesn't it make sense to send electricity straight to the house from the solar panels when it is available, rather than sucking H2 into the fuel cell to get it? Yes, H2 production would drop according to household load, but H2 consumption would drop further.
Just a few random thoughts.
www.wavefront-av.com
I don't understand why people are fussing about the safety of using hydrogen. Hydrocarbon gas (ands its byproducts) can be just as dangerous. I seriously doubt that something going comercial like this would have a high risk of danger.
Malasia is very humid.
Photovoltaic cells actually take more energy to produce than they will output over their lifetime. This makes them little more than a large, wasteful battery. The most efficient form of solar energy that we've been able to harness is hydroelectric, but that's not exactly easy to use on a residential scale.
The most promising technology I've seen for residential solar power goes back to our tried-and-true method of electrical generation: Heat water into steam, spin a turbine. Numerous mirrors focus a large amount of light onto a very small area, to boil water and spin a turbine. It's not nearly as "fire and forget" as PV cells, but it's much more environmentally friendly.
I'm not sure this is true. While Hydrogen was not the cause of the disaster -- as in the substance that first caught fire -- it is not clear to me that the fact the Hindenburg was filled with Hydrogen didn't make the disaster much worse. Would the disaster have been as bad had the Hindenburg been filled with Helium? Would it have been consumed by fire so quickly? Is there any chance that more people could have survived?
I honestly don't know, but I think the above are legitimate questions.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I presume that he's shocked that the house could be custom designed by a real architect for 4 months and still cost only ~$70k. The architect fees alone would be a fortune here in the US.
Who modded this as interesting? My gods, a basic understanding of the water cycle debunks this. Water vapor has one of the shortest lifetimes of any stable molecule in the atmosphere. We're talking weeks, at best, here, folks. Yes, water vapor is actually MORE potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to IR radiation trapping, but it's also a little more potent in reflecting solar radiation (ever hear of clouds?). In fact, the water vapor feedback is a problem that has no definite answers. To say that a rise in water vapor concentrations raises global temperatures is using linear theory on a completely nonlinear problem (or, in layman's terms, using a mitre saw to hammer in a nail).
Besides, more water vapor is evaporated into the air every day than we could EVER hope to put out with our energy. Need proof? Recall that a hurricane gains much of its energy from the latent heat release of water vapor as it condenses (which means that it must be evaporated first). Recall that the kinetic energy in a decent hurricane is multiple orders of magnitude above what nuclear bombs put out. We're talking terawatts over the spans of days. And that's for one very small hurricane, not counting all the global budget. A back of the envelope calculation puts the latent heat of all the water vapor in the atmosphere around 10^23 Joules, whereas a 20-kiloton bomb releases about 10^14 Joules. Ancedotal, yes, but true. Drop in the bucket.
With such small quantities and such a short atmospheric lifetime, the climatological impacts of this would be like trying to quantify the impacts of a flu outbreak that's occuring only in your office building on the global economy. Anyone who has suggested this has obviously not done their homework.
-Jellisky
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Still, using hydrogen tanks as a storage medium for unused electricity is a nice touch.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The fire went on for something like 20 minutes and burned very hot. A bag full of hydrogen simply CANNOT sit on the ground and burn for 20 minutes unless the fuel is something other than hydrogen.
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
While you're correct that hydrogen isn't much more combustible than conventional fuels, the fact remains that it is a difficult fuel to store safely.
If you want to store molecular hydrogen in liquid form, you have to do so cryogenically since its boiling point is 20 Kelvins (-253C, -423F). Needless to say that's impractical for most applications.
If you store it at room temperature, very high pressures (over 5000 psi) are necessary to achieve an energy density comparable to conventional fuels. Storing anything at high pressure is dangerous, whether it's combustible or not (drop any scuba tanks lately?).
To make matters worse, molecular hydrogen is small -- at the molecular level nothing is "solid" and so hydrogen will pass through most conventional materials! Even hydrogen stored in steel tanks will leak away through the "solid" walls in a matter of days. It is also very reactive -- it will corrode and embrittle materials it is in contact with (especially metal). Not a good situation for something stored at high pressure!
While there are promising technologies on the horizon such as metal hydrides and carbon nanotubes, there is no economical means of storing hydrogen as of yet. For now it remains in the domain of niche applications.
I own a solar powered business and a solar powered house, and I think this thing is retarded and overpriced. The numbers quoted seemed like they had to be just for the solar part, not the whole thing. 42 panels? We use 16 for the business, and 10 for the house, and either system can back the other up. Why waste energy converting to and from hydrogen (it's nowhere near 100%) when you can just use the electricity as it comes in, saving only a little for nightime use in whatever sort of batteries you favor? PV panels are EXPENSIVE, but worth it if you don't waste the power. This design was obviously motivated by where the designer works. He's got a hammer, and now everything looks like a nail. I wouldn't want to be around when that hydrogen-embrittled storage tank goes up. A better choice of battery for lots of reasons will be the redox Vanadium Pentoxide cells. These store energy in the electolyte, which can be stored in tanks for "infinte" capacity, and they cost a lot less than fuel cells, because they don't need a fancy precious metal catylist. These are already being used as factory-wide UPS systems in Japan.
"the house has been constructed primarily from steel and concrete, which are hardly sustainable materials" That's an intresting way of looking at it, considering that those building materials last practically forever, where as wood most certinally does not. Would you propose that we build all of our houses out of paper and replace tehm every couple of years?
Why do you think that it requires more energy to make concrete than to make masonry? They're essentially the same thing (except that a few chemicals go into concrete), and masonry has to be fired in a furnace, so that probably makes up any energy differece there. As far as steel goes, yes it does take a lot of energy to produce it, but it lasts a LONG time, a lot longer than wood and masonry.
I hardly think it's fair to say that a house made of steel and concrete can't be eco-firendly. Personally, I'd rather see people start designing and using perminant structures and stop using wood alltogether.
P.S. I have some major problems with that first article you linked. It pretends to be all green and shit, but then it basically says that we sould use our forrests as though they were a gigantic tree farm. Am I the only environmentalists who thinks our natural forrests sould remain natural? Second of all right after it says steel and aluminum cost a lot to recycle, it says we'll run out of aluminum in 200 years, hello? aluminum and steel completly and endlessly recyclable, we'll never run out of them. Finally, I really object to them saying that wood siding is better than aluminum recycling. Basically aluminum siding lasts forever, wood siding starts looking really shitty and needs to be replavced every decade or so. And when you do, you can't recycle it because of all the paint and oil put into it over the years. Which is really better for thin environment? This site is jsut a bunch of loggers trying to tell you that they're going to turn the natural forrests into a farm, and it'll be good for the environment. A good clue that this is propaganda is that they list the R-values of metals to tell you that they're not energy efficient (metals are structural, you'd never use them for insulation).