Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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.
All right! I *knew* someone would trot out the "solar panels take more energy" schtick! This is great; it's practically the only time I get to get modded up to insightful. Ahem.
They just updated this peer-reviewed survey study: (PDF) from the national laboratories. Short version? Worst case payback is 3.75 years from a system that will last 30 years. (A coal or natural gas combined cycle power plant, by the way, has about the same energy payback - they don't spring fully formed from the soil.)
This is not to denigrate the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies you spoke of; they're promising central station power. Check DOE's CSP page for more info there. But read up before you dismiss photovoltaics out of hand.
Still, using hydrogen tanks as a storage medium for unused electricity is a nice touch.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
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).