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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.
You should check out my methane-powered nightmare house on nacho night.
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.
I wonder how long before a kit is ready to convert regular houses?
They already exist. They're called matches. They will convert any regular house into carbon dioxide and water vapor. You will have to figure how to control the rate of reaction and store all the excess heat that is released in one go. The rate at which you must supply new houses may also be cost prohibitive.
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.
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
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.