New Fuel Cell Twice As Efficient As Generators

Hank Green writes "A new kind of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell has been developed that can consume any kind of fuel, from hydrogen to bio-diesel; it is over two times more efficient than traditional generators. Acumentrics is attempting to market the technology to off-grid applications (like National Parks) and also for home use as personal Combined Heat and Power plants that are extremely efficient (half as carbon-intensive as grid power.)"

Comments

The Product Page

[Evets]

Here's a direct link to the fuel cells: http://www.acumentrics.com/products-power-generato rs.htm

Re:The Product Page

[samkass]

"This revolutionary power system contains an array of solid-state tubes"

Remember: it's a bunch of tubes, not a big truck!

I don't see a price on that page, by the way...

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

How much does a system cost?
List price for a 5 kW unit is $175,000. Present systems are still demonstration units and carry the cost associated with not only the system itself but some custom engineering which typically results from each customer's intended installation. Acumentrics normally provides site installation support and monitoring which is also provided in the quotation.

Re:The Product Page

[WED Fan]

5 kW unit is $175,000

Wow, and at HomeDepot, I can get a 7kW Generator with a 12 hour run-time @ half usage, for around $550. Sure, it produces carbons, but, I'm willing to bet that if the price of gasoline doubled, I still wouldn't be able to off-lay the cost of the fuel cell in this lifetime.

The trick to getting the American public to switch to greener alternative power systems is:

• Make it cheaper than the current system
• Demonstrate that it screws OPEC and Oil and Power Corporations
• Make it tax exempt for the first 10 years (thus demonstrating you are screwing the Government, as well
• Make it the next entreup...entr...next great business to break into. In otherwords, make it so Joe Bluecollar can install the powerplant into a home, turn it into a business of taking Bob Whitecollar off the grid, thus, allowing early to market Joe Bluecollars to become the next set of millionaires.

Oh, did I mention that it should demonstrate the ability to SCREW over OPEC, Government, and Corporations?

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

now that's a damn funny post.

It's wrong, but still funny.

Re:The Product Page

[morgan_greywolf]

Oh, did I mention that it should demonstrate the ability to SCREW over OPEC, Government, and Corporations?

Ya know, this fuel-cell thingy has an Ethernet port on it. So if someone could find a way to add a really slick, totally anonymous P2P client on the thing, and it could demonstrate the ability to also SCREW over the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, all makers of DRM, and maybe some spammers, too, we would just be ALL set, now wouldn't we?

Re:The Product Page

[Retric]

There is a huge difference between 12 hour run-time @ half usage and a 24/7 workhorse for remote locations that may see 1 person every 6 months. Assuming this is significantly more reliable than a system with far more moving parts you might be able to replace 2 30k generators with this and get more fuel efficiency.

So where 175k may be way over the top at 50k these could sell like hot cakes.

Re:The Product Page

[Aladrin]

Your assumption about the price of gasoline doubling... I think that's pretty much a given. We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world. We think we know about how much. We know we use more every year than the previous year.

At some point, gasoline is going to be too expensive to use as common fuel. It maybe in 10 years, like they've predicted for the last 15 or 20 years, or it maybe in in 30 or 40... But I expect to live that long. If the price hasn't doubled again in the next 10 years, I'll be very surprised.

You said 'lifetime', and I assume you meant yours. But let's assume you meant 'lifetime of the generator', because they won't last forever. At current prices, it definitely makes sense to buy the gas generator, as it's unlikely they'll both last more than 10 or 15 years.

But the price of a brand new product is always inflated to make back R&D costs quickly, then drops for sale to the less affluent folk in the world. Better production technology helps bring the cost down, too. I seriously doubt the hardware itself actually costs $175k... At a guess, let's say it comes down to 1/100th of that, $17.5k... It won't be long until it's a lot cheaper than the gas version.

In short, comparing the price of a newly-announced product to the price of a product that's been common for years doesn't work well in the long run.

I definitely agree with the 'screw over opec/etc', though... Even if it costs more, many people will be willing to adopt it for just that purpose.

Re:The Product Page

[Belacgod]

And what with startup costs, the initial unit of any complex technology will never be cheaper than the established alternatives. If people had applied this reasoning to the first computers, which were hugely more expensive than typewriters, we'd never have gotten any of the subsequent ones.

Re:The Product Page

[itlurksbeneath]

OPEC and Oil and Power Corporations And where are you going to get that propane or LPG from? Where do you think that stuff comes from anyway? Hell, even most of the hydrogen that's made today is pulled out of natural gas and who do you think gets that stuff out of the ground?

Re:The Product Page

[houghi]

In short: Screw Haliburton!

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

But the price of a brand new product is always inflated to make back R&D costs quickly, then drops for sale to the less affluent folk in the world. Better production technology helps bring the cost down, too. I seriously doubt the hardware itself actually costs $175k... At a guess, let's say it comes down to 1/100th of that, $17.5k... It won't be long until it's a lot cheaper than the gas version.

Last I checked, 1/100 of $175,000 was $1,750...

Re:The Product Page

[drix]

You prefer the carrot. I'll opt for the stick. I'll bet that if we priced in all the externalities associated with those carbon-spewing generators, in addition to looking at the PDV of the stream of fuel payments needed to feed each, the prices would be a lot more competitive. Not necessarily no-brainer competitive--$175k is still a lot to pay for 5kW--but all of these new technologies will some day come down in price, and when they do we need to level the playing field with a carbon tax. This problem of ignoring emissions is the classic, canonical example of where markets fail.

Re: The Product Page

[JustNilt]

A quote from your link: " Cell towers, remote installations, and mobile facilities are forced to use noisy, inefficient diesel generators. We invite you to try our solution." The reason this is so expensive is they're directly targeting customers with deep pockets and fewer choices.

Someone else below also pointed out that the home version is in development (meaningless without details, of course). It's important to keep in mind the target audience of a product such as this; there may well be code issues with installing the linked items in a residential environment.

Eventually we'll probably see something along these lines become available for home use. Who knows what technology they'll really use, of course, but it'll happen since demand seems to be growing. What's exciting to me is the energy market right now appears comparable to the automobile industry of the early 20th century where there are many options opening up that weren't heard of even 5 years ago.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world.

Then you *know* wrong. Worst case, we can make petroleum from carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide plus water and energy, via Fisher-Tropsh or Sabatier synthesis. You require that there be a concept of "peak energy", not "peak oil", which is something that few are arguing for. Technically, sure, there will be peak energy eventually. There's a few hundred years of coal in known reserves (coal exploration hasn't been done all that widely since reserves are so well known, but power usage will continue to grow). If you consider the use of breeder reactors, thorium, and seawater fuel extraction, at current energy consumption there's ~10k years of nuclear fuel at current consumption rates (hard to predict how our usage needs will be that far out). Deuterium-based fusion (we sure have a long time to get it right...), hundreds of thousands to millions of years at current rates. Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and proton-proton fusion, billions of years.

Of course, you don't have to resort to using H2O as your hydrogen feedstock for Fischer-Tropsh or Sabatier synthesis as long as we have coal for coal liquifaction, tar sands, methane hydrates/clathrates, TDP, possibly shale, biofuels for replacements, and so on. Many of these are nasty for the environment, but that doesn't change the fact that they are indeed fuel options.

What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

Oh, also:

I seriously doubt the hardware itself actually costs $175k.

Seriously doubt all you want, and of course there's a profit margin in there, but selective membranes can be quite expensive because your tolerances for error are so tiny. Mass production would lower prices, but if this is your base price, it's not going to go down enough, and you'll never have enough purchases to justify any sort of real mass production. Have you priced, for example, reverse osmosis membranes lately? They're pretty well mass produced, and they're still darned expensive (a little home RO system will cost several hundred dollars; never mind one designed for, say, commercial desalinization). Yet, a RO membrane is positively swiss cheese compared to the sorts of membranes used in fuel cells; it lets whole *molecules* through.

Re:The Product Page

[somersault]

I think you mean word processors, as I doubt the first computers had qwerty keyboards.. but your general premise is correct... not really fair to compare the cost of a brand new technology with well established ones..

Re:The Product Page

[vtcodger]

***At some point, gasoline is going to be too expensive to use as common fuel...***

Gasoline is just a mix of liquid hydrocarbons. Tiday, it's generally made from crude oil, but it could be made from coal, wood chips,or -- I suppose -- fermented grass clippings. At some point, it becomes cost effective to make the stuff from one of the alternative materials.

It's not a bad fuel -- reasonable energy density, easy to store and transport, not all that hazardous, not too toxic, easy to convert to mechanical motion. It can even, with enough hardware, be burnt in a fashion that yields few products other than Carbon Dioxide and Water. I wouldn't be suprised if 'gasoline' powered vehicles are around for a much longer time than anyone anticipates. The actual liquid may be closer to kerosene or diesel, and it may be made with carbon extracted from the atmosphere. But don't be too suprised if the hearse that eventually hauls your body off after a long and productive life runs on "gasoline".

(But you're right. The cost in current dollars is likely going to be lots more than $3.00 a gallon)

Re:The Product Page

[Locutus]

Yikes! The one thing that's never brought up about fuel cell technology when it's being pushed at the public as 'the next big thing' is that it is incredibly expensive technology. I've never heard anybody say it didn't work and this is one of the first times I heard any mention of efficiency. And you hardly ever hear it mentioned that the technology was invented in the early 1800s yet it's still hugely expensive. So much so that any real application for it is pie-in-the-sky-thinking until the price comes down by a factor of 100.

At $175,000 for only a 5KWh system...it would have to generate not only 5KW of electric power but also produce 5 gallons/hour of fuel before anybody would take one. And for crying out loud, Bush created this hydrogen/fuel cell hype six years ago and still there's not even progress enough for small scale use? Are we talking promises of the Holy Grail here or what? I wonder what other pie-in-the-sky hack he'll propose to the public before leaving office to prevent any movement toward fuel efficiency technologies based on fossil fuels? This hydrogen/fuel cell plan has worked great for he, Cheney, and gang. IMO.

LoB

Re:The Product Page

[dokhebi]

I'd be happy if it was inexspenive and would screw OPEC. Maybe screwing some of the big corporations is OK too.

Remember, if you remove the goverment you remove the shield between you and the guys who want you dead. (Mainly the guys that OPEC feed.)

Just my $0.02 worth.

Re:The Product Page

[Locutus]

FYI, fuel cells have been around since the early 1800s. They have been widely used by NASA since the 1960s in the space programs and only became a household word in 2001 when George W Bush/Dick Cheney saw Japanese hybrid vehicles as a threat to US oil industry profits. At which time, they terminated the 7 year old US hybrid vehicle program and created a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle program and offered a few billion to the US auto industry to play their game.

We're six years into that program and we still have million dollar prototype vehicles and $175,000 5KWh generators. Not sure if should be called "new technology" or snake oil since there seems to be only nano steps being made to get this 1800s based technology productized here in the 21st century. IMO.

LoB

Re:The Product Page

[uradu]

> Demonstrate that it screws OPEC and Oil and Power Corporations

Itching to meet Guido The Protector, are you?

> Make it tax exempt for the first 10 years (thus demonstrating you are screwing the Government, as well

Oh, forget Guido, you're going straight to Guantanamo for that one, boy! They're just putting the finishing touches on the new cage blocks.

Re:The Product Page

[drix]

You could have written a very similar story about the internal combustion engine. Working prototypes existed as early as the first decade of the 19th century, but still it took them 100 years to really catch on. And look where we are today.

Awareness of the coming energy crisis and our pernicious dependence on foreign oil has sparked an increase in R&D and general interest in alternative energy that is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever witnessed before. As this page demonstrates, yes, there has been sporadic research on SOFCs dating back to the 1930s, but all of it pales in comparison to the infusion of human and financial capital we're now seeing. The capitalist incentive to develop alternative energy never existed so long as oil was basically free, and of course miniscule amounts of government funding would never amount to much. But that was yesterday. This is the tipping point.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

As I pointed out, if you consider the "entire universe has a finite amount of mass/energy", then yes, it is finite. Unless you're being that pedantic, no, it is not limited. The same "fuel" can be burned an infinite amount of times as long as you have energy to convert the exhaust CO2/H2O back into hydrocarbons plus O2.

Re:The Product Page

[BlueItalian]

What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline.
] If you take out of the equation the USA, that era never started for anyone else.

Re:The Product Page

[Aliriza]

Yes but the price has to be reduced ,but there is a dilemma here cause the price drops with mass production.We need an advantage to pass on it or we have to be forced.

Re:The Product Page

[Doug Merritt]

"What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline."

If you take out of the equation the USA, that era never started for anyone else.

Apparently you like snide soundbites without regard for accuracy. Skipping the history of prices over the last century, a single counterexample suffices to disprove your point: In Iran, gas recently rose to 38 cents per gallon.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070528/ap_on_bi_ge/ir an_economy

Re:The Product Page

[Courageous]

We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world.

It not so much the fixed supply as the astronomically increasing demand... the third world is first-world-ifying... and energy use is increasing at a breakneck pace. This dramatic increase in energy demands coming from what is actually the vast majority of the world population is what to really be concerned about.

C//

Re:The Product Page

[Prune]

It cannot be burned an infinite amount of times, due to finite proton half-life (though that's upwards of 10^36 years, so it's quite far off).

Re:The Product Page

[undercanopy]

The same "fuel" can be burned an infinite amount of times as long as you have energy to convert the exhaust CO2/H2O back into hydrocarbons plus O2.

wait wait.. you can take a finite amount of fuel, burn it, recapture the waste, convert it back to a useable form, and reuse it? that's brilliant! if you could automate the process, the resulting machine could stay in motion.. perpetually!! like a... perpetual...motion.. machine!! you've solved our energy problems!!

*hands you a text on thermodynamics*

Re:The Product Page

[Chris Burke]

Then you *know* wrong. Worst case, we can make petroleum from carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide plus water and energy, via Fisher-Tropsh or Sabatier synthesis.

It was pretty obvious that he was talking about fuel that we pump up from the ground, not the end of all stored energy period (i hate when someone assumes a ludicrous position of their opponent so they can swear its wrong). This is fuel with the obvious advantage that we didn't need to spend any energy to create it, only to go get it. If we've gotten to the point that we can efficiently make enough synthetic fossil fuels to serve our daily needs, then we've also probably switched enough of our power infrastructure to new technologies that we could consider abandoning fossil fuels entirely anyway. If we're using fusion as our energy source, why would we bother creating carbon-releasing fuels instead of using the same electricity to charge fuel cells or whatever energy storage technique we come up with? Petroleum makes sense now because 1) it's a huge energy density for something we didn't even put most of the energy into making and 2) any electric alternative probably comes from coal anyway so while there may be some environmental advantages due to scale they are slim.

Re:The Product Page

[overunderunderdone]

Your assumption about the price of gasoline doubling... I think that's pretty much a given. We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world. We think we know about how much. We know we use more every year than the previous year.

I don't think it's a given at all. As oil becomes more expensive alternatives will become competitive and the price stabilizes, increases more slowly than predicted, or even falls as the alternatives become more efficient. Just sticking with alternative sources of petroleum and ignoring alternatives TO petroleum there is a LOT of other recoverable oil out there not (usually) included in estimated reserves. At the new higher prices and with better extraction techniques (developed to take advantage of high prices) Canadian tar sands are already cost competitive and have recently been added to Canada's estimated reserves. This has changed their estimated reserves from 5 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels (making their reserves bigger than those of any middle eastern nation other than Saudi Arabia). It's likely that eventually Venezuela's Orinoco tar sands will also be taken into account taking them from known reserves of a little under 80 billion barrels to 350 billion barrels & making their reserves significantly larger than the Saudi's. Things really get fun if the price of oil hits a sustained price between $75-85 per barrel and Oil Shale becomes competitive. At that point the USA goes from it's current ~20 billion known reserves to 800 billion barrels(!!!) That dwarfs the entire middle east's current conventional reserves. Around that same price point (IIRC) using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to petroleum also becomes competitive further increasing the USA's (and the worlds) petroleum reserves. These are all proven resources and the known techniques to extract them. Nothing significant needs to be invented, no undiscovered resource needs to be found (though it's likely that a lot more Oil Shale exists out there to be found, because it's not yet competitive nobody has bothered too much to look for it).

The key point though is that as we start to exploit those resources we'll become more efficient at doing so. It's currently estimated that it would take a price of over $75 per barrel for Shale Oil extraction to be profitable BUT that once we do the cost per barrel would drop to less than half that... so the price of oil could initially peak and then drop as new resources entering the market at the higher price become more efficient.

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Did you think to read the sentence you quoted? You know, the bit about if you have energy you can convert it back. Or did you get to the phrase infinite and your spastic anti-perpetual-motion reflex kicked in?

Re:The Product Page

[pkarlos_76]

http://www.fuelcellstore.com/ Sells units for 50k!!! See http://www.fuelcellstore.com/cgi-bin/fuelweb/view= NavPage/cat=31

Re:The Product Page

[Linux_ho]

What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline. I think you're being unreasonably optimistic about our capacity for refine lower quality petroleum products. Over the next ten years we will certainly see $5-$10 per gallon and ridiculous price volatility as demand will far outpace the speed at which we can refine tar sands, etc into useful products.

Re:The Product Page

[ultranova]

If we're using fusion as our energy source, why would we bother creating carbon-releasing fuels instead of using the same electricity to charge fuel cells or whatever energy storage technique we come up with?

Because liquid hydrocarbons have high energy density and are very easy to handle, as well as safe, and if you use atmospheric carbon dioxide to make them they are carbon-neutral, only releasing the carbon used to make them in the first place when burned.

Oh, and you can refuel a gasoline (or diesel) car in a few minutes, while recharging batteries takes at least overnight.

Re:The Product Page

[DeadChobi]

No, you're wrong. It wouldn't be perpetual motion because the entropy for the universe would be increasing through each successive cycle. He never said no energy was input into the system. If you think what he describes is impossible, you obviously have no clue where our current fuel comes from on a fundamental level.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

No, we won't. If oil stays over $30/barrel (which it almost certainly will), Alberta's oil boom will keep growing at an exponential rate. The bitumen reserves of Alberta alone are bigger than all of Saudi Arabia's conventional reserves. Even if Alberta decides to renegotiate its sweetheart deals or global warming regulation means the steam source must be from CANDUs, not natural gas, all that changes is the cutoff point -- $40, $50 a barrel.

The only thing that could send gas prices over $5/barrel is the sudden and unexpected removal of supplies from the (currently) tight market, since it takes time for new facilities to come online. A good example would be a war with Iran. However, the spike would only be temporary. Bitumen extraction is currently quite economical (both in operating and amortized capitol costs combined versus the value of the product output); the only thing causing companies to hestitate is concerns that crude prices might *drop*.

Also, as mentioned, bitumen syncrude isn't the only source starting to come online at current prices. Even coal liquifaction is becoming economical, and our coal reserves are monstrously big.

Raise prices even higher and you'll have a veritable gold rush.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

Erm. Over $5 per *gallon*. :)

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[Goodgerster]

In Great Britain, unleaded petroleum costs 94p per litre, which is about $7.05 per gallon. You have no right to complain.

Re:The Product Page

[undercanopy]

re-reading his post, it sounds he was making an academic point. I originally read it as him making a statement about how we could proceed with fixing our energy woes.

Of course it's possible to do what he says, IF you have the energy input to do it. But that's the rub, isn't it?

anyway, my bad for mis-reading. I Do have a clue about where our fuels come from, apparently what i lack is reading comprehension skills ;)

Re:The Product Page

[Old Benjamin]

Make it cheaper than the current system... Make it tax exempt for the first 10 years (thus demonstrating you are screwing the Government, as well

NO!!! YOU FOOL!. If you suggest that then *shudder* people will lobby for subsidies. Which, of course don't make it cheaper, they just make it so people don't realize how much they have to pay. Again with tax exempt, it just means taxing somebody else instead, or reducing services. Don't fool yourself. You can't make anything cheaper than it costs to make, market, and distribute.

Re:The Product Page

[inetdavid]

However, in the US we tend to drive farther between destinations which offsets that somewhat. :-(

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[Locutus]

really, the federal government got involved in the Internal Combustion Engine( ICE ) development because a developing technology was a financial threat to partners of that administration? I had no idea. :-/

Yes, there is now an amazing awareness of the need for alternate energy systems but what I was stating was the fact that this has all happened without any foresight from the existing administration and actually happened with the administration putting forth efforts to stop such movements.

I think it's great that commercial interests are investigating fuel cell systems and hope that one day, there are the needed break-through(s) required to make it a viable replacement. I also believe the public should know that the recent interest in this fuel cell technology originated as an attempt to slow the publics adoption of technologies which immediately reduced fuel consumption( ie hybrid technology ).

LoB

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have written a very similar story about the internal combustion engine. Working prototypes existed as early as the first decade of the 19th century, but still it took them 100 years to really catch on. And look where we are today.

But that's not good reasoning. That's like saying Einstein didn't complete highschool. It's true, but most people who don't, don't become geniuses. You cannot say a prototype /only/ needs more funding to succeed. More often, projects fail.

Look at Wankel rotaries for a great "should have been". Considerable investment over forty years has made highly refined production rotaries that absolutely do not deliver more useful work for a litre of gas than piston engines. They're pretty good, but the excellent original idea was that by removing internal momentum issues, the rotary would be a distinctly more efficient engine. And, quite remarkably, it's not.

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[Linux_ho]

Yes, there's plenty of bitumen and coal. Lots and lots and lots. And like you said, the middle east still has a whole lot of oil. But we can't get it out of the ground fast enough, and refine it fast enough, to meet demand. China's demand is going through the roof, and they will pass the US as the biggest consumer of petroleum in the next year or so. Their rate of demand increase is more than double ours, and they aren't the only country that's having an industrial boom right now. The only countries in the world that HAVEN'T seen increasing demand over the past two decades are the ones that artificially limited their own markets with really high taxes, i.e. Europe. Invest in Europe, and buy urban real estate. Commuting is about to get a lot more expensive.

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[xero314]

that's brilliant! if you could automate the process, the resulting machine could stay in motion.. perpetually!! like a... perpetual...motion.. machine!! First of all the words you are looking for here are Free-Energy and Over Unity. Perpetual motion in and of itself would not be a solution to any energy problem, since without over unity the machine would use as much energy as it produces. But that doesn't matter since the problem here is actually reading comprehension and not scientific theory.

The OP stated,as you quoted (emphasis mine):

The same "fuel" can be burned an infinite amount of times as long as you have energy to convert the exhaust CO2/H2O back into hydrocarbons plus O2. The OP was not saying that this would provide perpetual motion rather conversion of energy state. This statements says that as long as we capture the waist product of fuel use and we have available energy, such as nuclear, we could convert that waste back to it's original usable state.

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is a huge difference between 12 hour run-time @ half usage and a 24/7 workhorse for remote locations that may see 1 person every 6 months."

True. And most gasoline powered generators run at a higher rpm and are generally less reliable than diesel or LP (and the like) types.

Still, I have a hard time fathoming your comparison. On a straight cost for the generating units, you'd have to have a traditional generator die ever TWO DAYS. Of course there is fuel, transport, housing, etc. to consider, but I have a hard time believing a store bought generator is going to die in even a week.

iow, great tech. Way too damn expensive. Will be forgotten or ignored by this time next week.

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[mrcaseyj]

>buy urban real estate

You might want to be careful about that. Some people say it's just a matter of time before a nuke gets set off in a large city. After that people might have a strong preference for staying away from population centers. Also, if the economies of poor counties get better birthrates may drop. With stagnant or decreasing population, real estate might be a bad investment.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even being that pedantic... I'm being more pragmatic. There's no need to talk about the Universe at large, since the WORLD (assuming here we're talking about good ol' Earth) has a finite amount of fuel. This is what the GGGP said, and that is what I was referencing. You can stretch things out an awfully long time, I'm sure.. well past the limits of what we could get from fossil fuels. But, you do not get to go on forever. Regardless of which "flavor" of end-of-the-universe scenario you favor (heat death vs. big crunch, for example), eventually you're fucked.

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[redcane]

I thought you were making a crack about the value of the $ versus the pound, and read that as "costs 94p which is about $7.05"... hahaha

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[LunaticTippy]

You're worrying about things that have never happened. People have been worrying about the bomb for 60 years, but the smart money has been on no bomb.

Re:The Product Page

[LunaticTippy]

I work for a membrane manufacturer, and I can tell you that membrane does not have to be expensive. The materials are cheap, the process is cheap, and with smart testing you can have good labor costs and yields. The reason our membranes are expensive is scale. We make about 15 systems a day, that isn't very many to spread overhead to. If we expanded to make 1500/day the cost would drop from $5k/system to a few hundred.

The market for fuel cells is vastly greater than the market for RO systems. Poor people without clean water to drink still use energy. Relatively poor people that wouldn't think of getting a water filter use tons of energy. Even among the wealthy RO units aren't common. We could use fuel cells in so many areas. If it scales down we could put one in every computer, car, and house. There is such a massive potential market the economy of scale would be huge.

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[paganizer]

$7 gas, cameras on every corner, no right to bear arms, and political correctness gone to a insane, socialist extreme. you guys really need to revolt. seriously. probably would have been easier back when you were allowed to have guns, but hindsight is 20/20, eh?

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[Fulcrum of Evil]

Hmm, do you suppose that an oil rich nation may sell their gas cheaply on the domestic market?

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[drix]

That's very true, but my only point (responding to the post) was that just because an idea has been knocking impotently around the labs for last 70 years does not mean it's a failure, or even commercially inviable. Fuel cells might be 200 years old, but the reason I'm writing this using coal-generated electricity (as opposed to hydrogen) has more to do with the cheap accessibility of fossil fuels--and, importantly, the failure to price in the cost of their emissions--than any flaw in fuel cell designs. Alter that equation slightly by making fossil fuels scarce (an inevitability) or people pay for CO2 (a damn good idea) and those advantages disappear. Fuel cells won't become magically cheaper overnight, but mass adoption, better manufacturing techniques and economies of scale will drive their price down, down, down in the long run.

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[Rei]

But we can't get it out of the ground fast enough, and refine it fast enough, to meet demand.

Yes, we can. It's all about how much infrastructure the oil companies want to buy, which is based on their forecasts as to where oil prices will be when the facilities go online. It's not like there's a shortage of tar sands surface area or anything. The same applies to coal. It's not like there's a shortage of coal mining capacity or land to build plants on. It's all about how much they want to invest in infrastructure when it'll be 5-10 years before their investments come online.

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

The world has a finite amount of fuel IFF you consider it as having a finite amount of energy. We have billions of years of energy. Talking about how we're going to run out of fuel when the time limit is "billions of years" is indeed being pedantic.

It doesn't matter how much is already in "fuel form". All that matters is how much we can *make into fuel*, and our only real limiting factor on that end is energy. For me, billions of years is close enough to "infinite".

Re:The Product Page

[Rei]

RO isn't just used in homes, but has agricultural and industrial uses as well. Tapwater just isn't pure enough for many applications. Hydroponics, for example. Sure, it's not as widespread as the fuel cell market has the potential to be, but it's pretty widespread.

When it comes to high tech, material costs are rarely the limiting factor. Do you really think that the gold and silicon that makes up a (very mass produced) new CPU cost hundreds of dollars?

Re:The Product Page

[Anonymous Coward]

From my point of view, the petrol (gas) price is good from an environmental perspective, even with petrol prices as they are, lots of people still drive to much and even drive places that would be reasonable to walk to. There aren't cameras on every corner, there may be more CCTV cameras in the UK than other places, but most of them are private ones, it is not a big deal for as long as it remains very time consuming and impractical to use them to track someones movements. I think guns being illegal is a good thing.

Political correctness can be taken too far at time, but that isn't really something to revolt about. What does concern me however, is when the government wants to do things like this.

Re:The Product Page

[Linux_ho]

So you're saying that around 2015, we won't see gasoline go over $5/gallon, or high fuel price volatility? Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I honestly hope you're right, because it will be an economic disaster for the US if it does happen. But I'll be surprised if it doesn't. China's petroleum demand is currently increasing faster than 10% per year, and they're not the only ones.

Re:The Product Page

[zolaar]

FTA (emphasis mine):

This revolutionary power system contains an array of solid-state tubes...

Speaking as a guitar player, my mind just asploded.

Re:The Product Page

[Bo'Bob'O]

$35k would get you 7kw of solar at even normal, retail rates, and still leave you with another $15k for a grid-tie inverter and installation. Sure, you wouldn't be getting that power all day, so it's not as much total power, but it's available right now with -zero- fuel costs.

Re:The Product Page

[flyingfsck]

I don't think gasoline prices will double. Even at the present price of around $60 per barrel, it is already very lucrative to produce synthetic gasoline from coal. North America has huge amounts of coal - enough for hundreds of years of use. The only reason it is not done in North America is because of the perception that the oil price will drop again.

Re:The Product Page

[mrcaseyj]

>You're worrying about things that have never happened. People have been worrying about the bomb for 60 years, but the smart money has been on no bomb.

When you're speculating on real estate, you have to do just that, speculate. Things are changing. The Soviets were atheists and thus were deterred by mutually assured destruction. On the other hand, the terrorists are suicidal. Russian security is much weaker than it used to be, and nukes are proliferating to more countries. I think terrorists probably won't be able to set off a nuke, but a smart investor should consider it a significant concern instead of just saying "don't worry about it".

We've prevented a nuclear disaster so far, but as the saying goes - Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Re:The Product Page

[funkdancer]

Being Norwegian, I have absolutely no bloody clue. :P

Re:The Product Page

[Doug Merritt]

Hmm, do you suppose that an oil rich nation may sell their gas cheaply on the domestic market?

Certainly, that is an important point (that Iran sells gasoline domestically for 38 cents per gallon because they are oil-rich and their populace is mostly poor, so it makes sense for them to subsidize their relatively-small domestic gasoline market).

But the original poster was clueless of all such points, in claiming that only the U.S. has ever had cheap gasoline. That's simply not true, and implies lots more that isn't true.

People like to (rather snidely) point out how much more expensive gasoline is in many parts of the world (e.g. all of western europe), in order to scold Americans for feeling that their gasoline is expensive.

Thing is, European gasoline is expensive for precisely one reason: taxes. European gasoline taxes account for...I forget...1/2 to 2/3 of the price per gallon (liter), something like that.

To reiterate, European gasoline is expensive because it is heavily taxed. Not because gasoline is inherently expensive. American gasoline is also taxed, but at a much lower rate.

So people who say (directly or indirectly) "Americans are whiners when they complain about the price of gasoline, because it's much more expensive in Europe" -- that's comparing apples and oranges. Europeans voted for extremely high gasoline taxes, and Americans did not.

It's a complicated subject. Most rants (on either side) ignore the complications.

Re:The Product Page

[LunaticTippy]

That's a very good point. Even though a chip fab is an expensive thing to build and operate, unit costs are quite low. Once the R&D cost is recovered, chips can be sold profitably for a few dollars each. The secret is to have a huge market. I'd say the global market for microchips is in the hundreds of millions.

Re:The Product Page

[LunaticTippy]

I think it is neurotic to worry about nukes when there are real dangers to obsess about, like getting struck by lightning or hit by a meteor. (Just in case you think those are valid concerns, I'm joking)

Why do people like to worry about things so oddly? People die in car wrecks way more than from chicken poisoning or terrorism or whatever stupid thing people worry about is.

BTW, my great-grandfather owned a lot of property in San Francisco during the fire. He lost his candy store in the fire and nearly his life. Afterwards he predicted that people wouldn't want to live in big cities after yet another big-city disaster (there were a big string of them) so he sold all of his property for a tidy profit. If he'd held on to it, my family could have been billionaires.

People like to live in cities. If fires, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and so forth don't stop them I doubt the occasional nuke will either. You're still more likely to kill yourself in a car wreck or taking a bath.

Re:The Product Page

[mrcaseyj]

>People die in car wrecks way more than from chicken poisoning or terrorism or whatever

A lot of people make that mistake when calculating the risk from terrorists. You can't just compare the number of auto deaths in the past to the number of terrorist deaths in the past. To get a useful estimate of the risk you have to factor in how many terrorist deaths there might be in the future. You have to speculate about the future, so of course your estimate is unreliable. But if you don't factor in significant future possibilities then your estimate is nearly worthless. You have to factor in the probability of nukes and the expected number of casualties, to figure out how likely you are to get killed by terrorists. And yes, nukes are a real danger if you live in a big city, though maybe not a huge danger.

Re:The Product Page

[LunaticTippy]

I disagree that the panic and overreaction about terrorists is rational. Just like the panic and overreaction about child molesters or school shootings is rational.

Nobody in charge is looking at the costs. Nobody in charge is calculating the risks. If they were, they'd realize that the occasional airliner exploding is a lot cheaper than putting hundreds of millions of people through a huge hassle day after day. Our airport security is a joke, costs a huge amount, and protects us from a very small risk.

We'd be better off with armed guards around electric fans, which injure or kill thousands of citizens each year.

I don't know what it is. People just get nuts about certain very small risks. The fact that it is terrorists, perverts, or kids with guns makes people crazy and see things wrong.

Think of the huge lost opportunity. If we invested the trillions of dollars we waste on terrorism paranoia we could really have something great. Instead of preventing a tiny risk of possible harm we could have guaranteed benefit for many more people. We could go a long way towards curing cancer, heart disease, etc. and save millions of people year after year. The terrorists, perverts, and schoolyard crazies could never keep up. It's completely irrational.

It's like spending all your discretionary income on insurance. You don't have anything to show for it after time passes. Either you threw your money away, or "best case" a catastrophe is compensated/averted. We should invest in our future, accept that life has risks, and look at them with a clear head.

If we end up quivering chicken-hearted wrecks always worrying about terrorists, spending hundreds of billions a year and giving up our liberties, the terrorists win year after year without so much as blowing up a mailbox.

I think they're missing the bigger picture:

[tiedyejeremy]

More important than efficiency and cross platform mobility is...

a good acronym.
duh.

I can't even talk about this without a decent acronym.

Re:I think they're missing the bigger picture:

[morgan_greywolf]

I got one. How about:

"American Standard Solid-FUel Cell Kickstart System" (ASS-FUCKS)?

Re:I think they're missing the bigger picture:

[Smauler]

MITEACPMI is not a good acronym.

Re:I think they're missing the bigger picture:

[Bob-taro]

I just wanted to thank you for explicitly typing the acronym at the end. Merely boldfacing and capitalizing the first letters of the individual words might have been too subtle.

Let's see..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. how long THIS enterprise and their innovation lasts before bigger fish smother it and make it disappear without a trace in benefit of their own economic interests.

Re:Let's see..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why if you invent an energy-cheapening device, DON'T PATENT IT. A patent monopoly may seem like a good idea at the time, but once you're bankrupted, the patent will be sold off as an asset to the predators, and, since a patent, by definition, is a right to prevent people making something, they can make sure the technology doesn't happen again for ~ 20 years. Not patenting means that any tom, dick or harry can make the device. Yes, you *might* get less profits (or a proportionally smaller but absolutely larger slice of a bigger pie...), but you're no longer the sole target they need to take out.

Re:Let's see..

[phoenix321]

... until Tom, Dick and Harry start patenting YOUR invention afterwards. And then battling it out in the courts with the deepest pocket winning and then preventing anyone from using that technology.

No, the only possible course is this:

Found company "Example A limited" on the cheap, stock capital 1$. You are of course owner and CEO of that company, filing your patent with the USPTO. The sole purpose of this company is licensing this single patent, the only employee is you and its only asset is your invention.

Then found company "Example B limited". Same procedure, you are owner and CEO. The purpose of this company is producing useful merchandise from your invention, which is of course only licensed (for 1$/year) from company A.

If you have 300$ to burn, you could even create a small holding structure, with "Example holding limited" as the "root" node becoming the owner of company A and B, further protecting you against liability and lawsuit risks, which always arise when dealing with start-ups in fierce competition and a 2 ton gorilla in the market.

Whatever happens to company B doesn't affect A in any way under most circumstances (except for malice and severe negligence, I think). And as company A doesn't do anything other than holding a patent and licensing it to anyone who wants, it won't go down easily.

If the worst case happens and B goes bust, you could still license your patent through A on your terms, for 1$/year for everyone except BigOil Inc., who would have to pony up, say, half a billion per month. Your patent, your terms.

Sticking it to The Man for fun and profit. Behave responsibly :)

Re:Let's see..

[Elfich47]

There are actually several fuel cell competitors out there right now. MTI comes to mind.

Re:Let's see..

[91degrees]

No. Patent it and licence it non-exclusively for a fixed fair amount per unit for the lifetime of the patent.

If you're bankrupted, the licencees will retain their rights, the asset still has value so your creditors will get some of their investment back, and you have a fair stab at making money. Meanwhile, other companies invest in improving and cheapening your device.

Re:Let's see..

[ajs318]

What about patenting it, but then dedicating the patent to the Public Domain? Then there is definitely published prior art, so nobody should be able to patent the same thing again. Anybody building one need only label it with the patent number you were originally allocated.

Re:Let's see..

[Anonymous Coward]

important:
In company A, in the incorporation papers, specify that all patents held cannot be sold, and will be released into the public domain in the event that the corporation dissolves (you die and no one else takes over).

Re:Let's see..

[phoenix321]

Addition:

if you are (even temporarily) successful, file (some) eerily similar patents and found a NEW tiny company for everyone of them. Then shift your manufacturing/moneymaking business along to using the "new" patents. Every "new" patent is a layer of armor around your initial invention and a large "I am an industrious and successful inventor"-sign above your head, attracting and safeguarding investors and partners.

(Which of course must only invest in company B, not in your patent "holding cells" and never in company A!)

If you make new or really improved inventions, use the same template: one company for one patent and let the competition wear themselves out when they try to strike them down one by one. Make a nice and thick network of companies belonging to each other without anyone other than you knowing who owns what, keeping your legal enemies in the dark about where and whom to attack, forcing them to file hundreds of requests to patent offices and company registrars.

(This model is simplified and idealized, but it's a lot better than nothing. And orders of magnitude better than just starting your company with full liability with patents and manufacturing processes together.)

Re:Let's see..

[Jarth]

Not unless it becomes open source'd

Re:Let's see..

[ronadams]

Save yourself SEC filings and more red tape fun by founding both as an S-Corporation. No stock, no Board of Directors, no public holdings.

Re:Let's see..

[AndersOSU]

Dedicating the patent to the public domain has no effect on the state of the art. The patent application is art regardless of whether the patent is granted, granted and donated to the public domain, or denied.

If the patent is broad enough to stop others from making it, but narrow enough to be granted not only will prior art will stop anyone else from patenting the same thing again, but you get paid.

If you want to be altruistic, no point in paying for a patent. Just publish the technical specifications for free (or cheep) on a website - but hey if you've solved the energy problem I'm sure Nature or Science will pick up your article - but then again getting a journal to accept your story is more work. That will stop future (similar) patents just as well as an expensive patent.

Re:Let's see..

[simpleid]

Well, I'm still crossing my fingers for Steorn to pull through. http://www.steorn.net/ ...mmm, here's hoping.

Any kind of fuel??

[brunes69]

What does that mean? Is this a Mr. Fusion type device I can run off of apple peels?

Oh wait...

"Acumentrics' 5000 Power System operates directly from natural gas, propane, biofuels, LPG or hydrogen. "

Looks like once again the Slashdot summary is overblown and misleading.

Anyway - sounds like a promising technology. I'll keep tabs on it.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Anonymous Coward]

Look what I have here, look in my right hand, I have two pieces of apple peel. You can all see that I have two pieces of apple peel, right? That is, one large, one slighly smaller one. Now focus on the two pieces of apple peel as I close my hand..
Aaaand...... Presto!

*kaboooom*

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Elfich47]

Well if you had a large enough septic tank you could used the methane that is generated in the septic tank to power your Fuel Cell. Usually this is done on farms with a couple hundred cattle where there is enough poop to go around.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[CheeseTroll]

From Acumentrics's website, "The fuel cells run on natural gas, propane, ethanol, diesel, biogas, and biodiesel --because they can disassociate fuels in the tube, via in-situ reformation."

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Kythe]

Looks like once again the Slashdot summary is overblown and misleading.

Not really -- it's a matter of semantics. The summary is using "fuel" not to mean "anything", but rather, "fuel" as we think of it currently in common parlance. And as the summary immediately follows with examples, I think it's pretty clear what's being talked about.

I'm all for criticism where it's warranted, but in this case, I think the summary is actually rather good.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Oktober Sunset]

My fuel of preference is coal. can I use that?

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This thing won't run on it, ergo coal is not a 'fuel.'

Or, to use the classic geek brush-off, "why would you want to do that?"

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[mprinkey]

Actually, it can, but you need to gasify the coal first to create syngas (steam + coal --> CO + H2). Both CO and H2 can be oxidized in a solid-oxide fuel cell. There is a lot of research being done in these areas by the USDOE. I've worked on both SOFC (wrote a CFD model for SOFCs) and gasification (writing a CFD model model for fluidized bed gasification reactors). The "Next-Gen" power plant designs basically take in coal, gasify it, run it through a fuel cell, burn the effluent gas, run it through a turbine topping cycle, and finally separate out the CO2 and sequester it. The overall system efficiencies are quite good and can produce industrial CO2. There is more information here:

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems /vision21/

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[jcr]

Well, if you chew the coal very throughly before putting it in the fuel cell, sure!

-jcr

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably, and why not? I run my car off the tormented souls of the fallen nonbelievers.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[brunes69]

I think most would agree gasoline is a type of fuel... in fact if I say the word 'fuel' without any other context I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of people would assume I was talking about gasoline. Yet no mention of supporting gasoline or oil.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Kythe]

The type of fuels mentioned seem to be petroleum-based, so I would imagine gasoline and oil would work. The article doesn't seem to provide an exhaustive list, but since it says "bio-diesel", I would bet ordinary gasoline would be one of the things that could be used.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Actually you don't even need to gassify the fuel. All you need is to burn it in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the air and pipe the hot, oxygen-depleted air that results through (or around) the tubes.

The device is an oxygen-concentration cell. Oxygen dissolves into the ceramic on one side, donating two electrons per molecule to the electron there, migrates through the ceramic, and picks up two electrons from the electrode on the other side. (It has to be hot for the oxygen to migrate rapidly, but that heat is not a consumable.)

Of course it's easy to use with a fuel gas on the low-oxygen concentration side to consume the oxygen (and donate the electrons) in its stead. (The ceramic is hot enough to light the fresh fuel, and some of the energy of combustion goes to keep it hot.) But anything that gets it hot and with an oxygen-gradient will work fine.

These devices are also the "exhaust gas oxygen sensors" in your modern car's control system.

I read a similar rah-rah for these devices in an Analog magazine science-fact article back in the '60s or so, and have been wondering why we don't hear more about them or have them more widely deployed. (Fuel cells capture a lot more of the chemical energy of a fuel than heat engines do. In principle they can get it ALL - less a small delta to keep the second law of thermodynamics happy.) Perhaps the stuff in this article about solutions to fragility and ablation tells us why.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal? My favorite fuel is lard. As long as there is McDonalds, there will be plenty of fat people.

Re:Any kind of fuel??

[mprinkey]

The problems with SOFCs are numerous. First, they are ceramic so they are brittle. So, they need to run at a more-or-less constant and uniform operating temperature. Thermal gradients in the system lead to differential expansion and thermal stress. Placing a ceramic in tension is a good way to find out that you need to buy a new ceramic.

Second problem is sealing. You need to build stacks of cells in order to get a decent operating voltage out of the system. This requires a sandwiching scheme of some type...there are different approaches, all with their own drawbacks. But sandwiching always leads to the possibility of leaks between cells...fuel in the air stream or vice versa and you no longer have a fuel cell--you have a combustor. These things operate at 800-1000 C, the normal sealing technologies are not useful.

Another problem is ionic migration. Things you uses in seals or supports or electrical or thermal management can all allow ions to migrate into the electrochemically active part of the cell and that can poison the system. Or the catalyst that is necessary to allow the electrochemical reactions can migrate away from the three-phase boundaries and reduce efficiency.

Another problem is ohmic losses. The current carrying parts of the cell are doped ceramics. These are not the most electrically conductive materials, so ohmic losses (and the resultant heating) can be a problem.

Just building the things is a problem. You have two different ceramic compounds with two different coefficients of thermal expansion. They have to be sintered together somehow. The layers need to be very thin to cut down ohmic and diffusion losses. And electrolyte needs to not leak. Making all of this work is something of a black art. Most test cells are only a few square inches. Scaling production up so that you can get a planar cell that something like a 1 ft on a side is still a daunting task. I think the folks doing tubular cells (including Accumetrics) may have an easier time of this, but again, they have there own manufacturing issues.

If you run the cell on anything but pure H2, you run the risk of coking the thing up. These are porous ceramic parts with lots of tiny passages through which reactants must diffuse. If you get the conditions wrong, atomic carbon can precipitate and plug the thing up.

I could go on and on.

Honestly, there hasn't been much interest in SOFCs until maybe six or seven years ago. Only a handful of companies have pursued the technology. There are still advances to be made in material science and material processing, but I think even with just LSM/YSZ material combinations, a reasonably efficient SOFC system could have been engineered many years ago if the demand was there. In my view, DOE has almost singlehandedly created the demand that we see now. Accumetrics is one of the handful of companies that DOE has funded to pursue this technology. Without DOE's investment, I doubt that private industry would be seriously looking at it today. Just my opinion though.

It needs a name...

[phatlipmojo]

Something catchy. How about Mr. Fusion?

Not perfect ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

... but important nonetheless. It will certainly be cheaper than newer "hydrogen only" technologies coming out and will allow small areas (from rural US to many locations in developing countries) to produce energy for 1/2 the fuel and CO2 emissions. Improvements in efficiency are a step in the right direction. Not everyone (or everywhere) will be making the big energy leaps at the same time or the same pace.

Re:Not perfect ...

[samkass]

If technologies like this and cheap solar become commonplace, the model of the electrical grid that distributes power from one huge generator to a million consumers can be revised. I think that's good not only for carbon emissions, but for the losses due to transmission, the ugly high-tension wires crisscrossing the country, and the likelihood of outages. If we have a hundred thousand tiny generators on the grid, it seems like everyone wins except the power companies.

Re:Not perfect ...

[jonathan DS]

I think this development can help a whole lot of people across the world. The system is quite small and can provide enough energy to supply a reasonable amount of people with power.

It's possibility to interact with alternative energy sources like sun and wind, can even deliver a long term solution without continuous provisioning of fuel.

So: Keep it up Acumentrics!

Re:Not perfect ...

[CastrTroy]

I still wonder about the costs of transporting the fuel. If you have to transport a couple hundred litres of fuel (I'm not sure on the amount) to each house every month, then is that more or less efficient than delivering truckloads of fuel to a single power plant. Obviously, it's easier to just truck it all to one place, but does it offset the efficiency lost from line transmission. Obviously it would still be a lot less connected and prone to failure, and there would be no high tension lines. However, I think that people may end up paying less if they had a choice (gas, coal, oil, hydrogen, biodeisel) as to who they bought their fuel supply from every month.

Re:Not perfect ...

[DrWho520]

These are going to cost a pretty penny for a while, but I would be willing to invest if the cost of ownership and lifetime were reasonable. They are solid state, so they should last a while. Looking at the spec sheet, there is a sulfur filter that needs to be changed every 9000 hours. How much do those cost? Also, you need a quote to get warranty information. I wonder how much service costs? Can I learn to do it myself? A second life as a fuel cell technician would definitely be a refreshing change from a software engineer. Oh, and the operating range is 0-5000ft.

The spec sheet: http://www.acumentrics.com/243ebdc5-db1f-410d-9914 -cff857f5223f/Link.pdf
The home version: http://www.acumentrics.com/6d853cb3-92b2-46f3-b7f5 -920bb4d238a3/Link.pdf

Re:Not perfect ...

[Elfich47]

So I need to change the sulfur filter once a year. Its not like anything else a house doesn't need maintenance.

Re:Not perfect ...

[Ngarrang]

Something like this could especially help California and their rolling black-outs. If the home-unit prices are made affordable and produce enough power, people could power their AC units during the day without using the grid. Maybe. I only have experience with small window ACs.

Re:Not perfect ...

[Angostura]

Certainly in the UK, most houses have residential natural gas supplies for cooking and heating. I've been waiting for several years for a small residential combined heat-and-power boiler to become available so I could heat the house and generate electricity as a by-product. However all the companies I have investigated have been stuck at the 'we will be producing prototypes for you to install next month' stage for the last two years :-(

Re:Not perfect ...

[Tofystedeth]

Why truck when you can pipe? Of course you have to plan, lay, bury, and pump all that, but still.

Re:Not perfect ...

[CmdrGravy]

If this sort of thing really were to take off then the chances are the fuel would be piped into peoples houses. The UK uses natural gas in most homes for cooking and heating and this is piped around rather than being shipped by truck.

I, obviously, haven't bothered reading the article, or the summary much so I don't know if this thing can work off natural gas. If not I don't know how much harder it is to pipe diesal into peoples homes or whatever but I'm sure the payoff would beat mass truckage in the long term.

Re:Not perfect ...

[AndersOSU]

Good luck with that.

The reason natural gas power plants have been falling out of favor is the extreme volatility in price of natural gas. Things might be different on that side of the pond, what with you guys being so close to the North Sea and Norway, but that volatility means you'd be paying less in the summer (when you don't need the heat) and paying a small fortune in the winter.

Couple that with the nearly inevitable fact that a home unit will be less efficient than a power plant, and I'd be willing to bet that the laws of thermo and economics guarantee that you will be paying more for natural gas than you now pay for gas and electric. Not only that but you'd be hurting the environment to boot - power plants are more able to scrub the pollutants from the combustion product than you would be able to - and the carbon emissions per kW/hr would be higher (due to the aforementioned efficiency problems).

But when I say good luck I mean it. It isn't impossible to make something like that work, just very very difficult.

Re:Not perfect ...

[hcdejong]

Some Googling found me at least one company that seems to have progressed to the production stage. I searched for "micro-wkk" (wkk = 'warmtekrachtkoppeling', Dutch for combined heat-and-power boiler)
Asking price is 10k Euro for the smallest model (1 kW electrical, 14 kW heat), that's incl installation. Most of their info in Dutch, though.

Re:Not perfect ...

[xelah]

I think you may have missed the point of combined heat and power. The idea is to generate electricity and heat simultaneously in the winter instead of just heat. As you no doubt know, power stations throw away two-thirds of the energy going in in the form of heat released in to the environment (AFAIK there are no cases in the UK where this heat is pumped in to homes). Combined heat and power in a home can be MORE efficient overall than a power station even if it produces less electricity from the input because it can use a large amount of what would have been waste heat.

You'd only use such a generator when you want heat and not when you just want electricity. The rest of the time you'd use mains electricity.

Re:Not perfect ...

[Locutus]

one problem, the current energy generators also own the grid. As it is, they currently put restrictions on how many solar systems can be installed and how large they can be if they are also tied to THEIR grid. You should see the current energy producers pretend like they are pro-green energy while having plans to limit/restrict growth of said green energy. They love electric cars and plugin hybrids as long as there's no tie-in with said vehicle owners generating their own electricity.

That is a massive hurdle to get over and it is why you'll see many going directly at megawatt sized generating systems instead of the distributed model you mentioned. The Utilities are not too unlike the Oil Industry and have massive amounts of puppet strings attached to government officials in order to protect their business interests.

LoB

Re:Not perfect ...

[Single GNU Theory]

As it is, they currently put restrictions on how many solar systems can be installed and how large they can be

As far as I know, there's only the one. Better ask Slartibartfast.

Re:Not perfect ...

[AndersOSU]

No, I understand. And I know that a modern combined cycle (*not cogeneration) power plant throws away ~40% (not 2/3) of the possible energy.

Cogeneration might be more efficient in the home, but as you say (and as I didn't realize) you only run these things when you want heat and power. That would slightly more than double the time until pay-back wouldn't it?

If you want cogeneration for a residence you're more likely to succeed if you install it in a large apartment building. I don't know exactly what people are developing for these cogeneration devices, but if it is the rankine or brayton cycle turbines are expensive. Fuel cells share the cost problem, and compound it with the problems associated with hydrogen or (in TFA's case) with the problems associated with an in situ chemical plant. If it is the otto, or diesel cycle then you've got nasty incomplete combustion problems. The stirling cycle shows promise, but there are size and working fluid problems.

I still mean it when I say good luck, but I still maintain that it is very very hard to make something like this work.

Re:Not perfect ...

[evilviper]

I think that's good not only for carbon emissions, but for the losses due to transmission, the ugly high-tension wires crisscrossing the country, and the likelihood of outages.

Carbon: Nothing existing, or on the horizon, has any potential to burn the same fuel as large power plants, with better efficiency, in a small space. Thermal efficiency works the opposite way. As for solar power, I'm hopeful, but it's still going to take quite a few more years before they're an all-around win.

Losses: Sure to be higher than the grid. No inverter+energy storage method will do better than (average) grid losses.

Wires: Hydro is the cleanest and cheapest energy source we know of, and so the grid is sure to remain, even if distributed power generation improves dramatically.

Outages: The grid doesn't fail often. Home equipment is sure to be less reliable (what fails more often, the grid, or your car?). And I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay the price for fully-redundant home equipment. If you want the highest possible reliability, use the grid along with a home generator (fail-over).

If we have a hundred thousand tiny generators on the grid, it seems like everyone wins except the power companies.

People lose, because they have to pay up-front for the capacity they need, and pay again if they need more. People lose because physically transferring the fuel is more expensive than sending electricity, introduces excess energy losses, and puts you at the mercy of the fuel supplier. The world loses, because the government would be much more reluctant to force millions of people to upgrade the pollution controls on their generators, and/or replace them. The world loses because it's much cheaper and easier to maintain central power plants than millions of individual power plants.

Your traditional generator is designed to be cheap

[Colin Smith]

This thing costs $175,000. How much does a 5kW Diesel cost? Even with a 45% electrical efficiency it's going to take rather a long time to pay for itself. For cogeneration a Diesel is just as useful and yup, can also hit the 90% efficiency range.

Use as backup generator?

[James McP]

I wonder what the startup time is on the cells. The lack of moving parts and high efficiency sounds like it would be ideal for a backup generator since you could get twice the duration for the same fuel tank. The big question is how long it will take to reach nominal load. If you need an excessive amount of batteries to make the transition it could still be unfeasible.

One would think that you could get racks of the things to get generation capacity in excess of 5KW since the units already consist of multiple tubes. It would simply mean removing the individual DC/AC converters and using one big one.

Anyone have any idea what the maintenance cycles are on fuel cells and how long you can let one sit idle?

Re:Use as backup generator?

[jonathan DS]

The common used UPS systems are provided with batteries that last for about 4 years.

These days the batteries are also measured while nog being used. When their are nearly discharged, they are charged automatically. This happens in a way so the life expectancy will be maximized.

Of course there's still Murphy's law, and batteries can fail a whole lot earlier!

Re:Use as backup generator?

[Critical Facilities]

Not true. Most wet cell batteries used in commercial UPS Systems' battery strings claim a life of 15-20 years with a realistic life of 8-10 years (slightly less for valve regulated batteries, though they're less common). Also, while it's true that the batteries are "measured"/monitored while not being "used" (e.g. voltage, temperature, specific gravity, internal resistance, etc), they are not fully discharged and then charged automatically.

The only time your batteries should be being discharged at all is when you're experiencing an emergency and are transferring to generator, when you are experiencing a brief undervoltage from your utility provider, or when you are performing a load test of your UPS system. Other than that, there should be no discharging of your batteries going on at all. If there is, you have a problem and are radically shortening the life of your batteries.

Re:Use as backup generator?

[Lumpy]

The lack of moving parts and high efficiency sounds like it would be ideal for a backup generator since you could get twice the duration for the same fuel tank.

except from the website it can only be started up 100 times before damage occurs. That is a major show stopper right there.

Re:Use as backup generator?

[James McP]

I guess that depends on the expected usage of the unit over its operating life. If you assume it will be used twice a year plus an annual maintenance startup then you have a nominal life of 33 years, which is on par or greater than traditional internal combustion generators. If, on the other hand, you were in someplace with relatively frequent power outages, say monthly, then it would only last a decade.

The flip side is that if you have need for continuous generation power, particularly in remote areas where the cost of transporting the fuel is significant, the increased efficiency over the life of the unit could be a major cost savings.

Re:Use as backup generator?

[whitis]

"It would simply mean removing the individual DC/AC converters and using one big one."

If they are designed properly, this is unnecessary. Good inverters are designed to be paralleled.

Check their "Test Stand"

[visualight]

http://www.acumentrics.com/products-fuel-cell-test -stand.htm

That looks interesting. I couldn't find a price though. According to their FAQ a 5kw unit costs 175,000 dollars, I think the test unit should be less though since it has fewer tubes.

It's small enough that you could put it in the corner of your garage.

The website describes it as a tool for learning about fuel cells etc., but I think that would be limited by virtue of the tubes being manufactured (and sealed I assume). But it would be useful for "complete system" prototyping and experimentation.

Re:Check their "Test Stand"

[LynnwoodRooster]

I think the test unit should be less though since it has fewer tubes.

RTFA! It's a GENERATOR, not the Internet... Tubes don't play any role here...

A much better idea

[91degrees]

Hydrogen fuel cells are never going to become common until the infrastructure is in place, and the infrastructure isn't going to be in place until hydrogen fuel cell cars are common.

That and hydrogen fuel is a huge environemental con anyway. We get hydrogen from fossil fuels. Not water. It's cheaper and using nuclear or renewable electricity to separate the hydrogen from water would be false carbon economy. You might as well use that electricity to replace a coal or oil power station. Our best bet is to get as much energy as possible from the fuel.

Re:A much better idea

[Knowledge_Chugger]

I don't know .... if you look at hydrogen fuel as an energy storage mechanism, then using hydroelectric power to manufacture hydrogen from sea water could make sense. I haven't looked at the relative efficiency of hydro electric transmission systems (i.e. big whacking wires) vs conversion to hydrogen and then pipeline transport to the point of use but all that does is change the location of the hydrogen manufacturing plant. In vehicles it's all about usable energy stored vs weight of storage mechanism, whatever technology comes out on top in that department should win the prize once fossil fuels are either gone or too expensive to use anymore. K_C

Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Viol8]

Err , not if the grid power in your area/country comes from hydro, nuclear or renewables.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Combustion is combustion is combustion. Fuel cells are no different than internal combustion engines when it comes to producing CO2 from fuels. (neither do the fuels themselves differ in moles of CO2 per unit energy). Combustion in fuel cells is likely more complete, so in fact more CO2 would be produced.

Why do I even bother looking anymore? People are such fools.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[mdsolar]

Their comparison on efficiency is to a small generator, so it seems likely to me that comparison to grid efficiency is less favorable even for fossil fuels, particularly if a combined cycle plant is being used. It is not that fuel cell efficiencies are scale dependent the way that ICEs/turbines are but that, when using fuels other than hydrogen, you don't really get to use the energy content of the carbon because carbon fuel cells are a big order: http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/0 3/dcfcw/dcfcw03.html#Conversion.
--
Carbon free power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[itlurksbeneath]

You are the fool. There is no combustion in a hydrogen fuel cell and there is no CO2 byproduct either (pretty sure that's true for ALL types fuel cells). See here.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Ihlosi]

There is no combustion in a hydrogen fuel cell

It takes some sort of fuel and oxidizes it.

and there is no CO2 byproduct either

Of course. And the hydrogen is generated magically "out of thin air" ? Last thing I heard was that today, most hydrogen is generated from natural gas.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[BobPaul]

And if you read the article, there's no statement that this is more efficient than grid power either. The only statement is that if you use fossil fuel rather than straight hydrogen it will produce half as much CO2/kilowatt than small engine generators. There is absolutely no mention comparing this to large coal or other power plants.

So, good for backup power, but maybe not so good for getting yourself off the grid.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[itlurksbeneath]

He was talking about emissions from the fuel cell itself.

Oxidation -- Loss of one or more electrons by an atom, molecule, or ion. Oxidation is accompanied by an increase in oxidation number on the atoms, molecules, or ions that lose electrons. Combustion -- The rapid oxidation of fuel gases accompanied by flame and the production of heat, or heat and light.

Is there a flame in a fuel cell?

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was talking about emissions from the fuel cell itself.

Wrong. I was talking about the overall net effect of the process, which is the same as combustion (though perhaps with more complete oxidation).

Is there a flame in a fuel cell?

No. But oxidation catalyzed by a platinum surface is effectively the same thing.

I have yet to see a commercially available fuel cell that uses hydrogen directly. If you look into Ballard Power's products you will find that virtually all of them "burn" natural gas.

The most environmentally responsible source of power is from Candu nuclear reactors. That is the fact of the matter, no matter how many people deny it to protect their financial interests.

I was a professional chemist for over 15 years. I know what I'm talking about. I left the profession because inevitably every boss I ever had was someone like you with no scientific clues whatsoever, yet sure they were right.

I have concluded that knowledge is useless in modern society, as it is cast aside on the word of the ruling elite to protect their inherited fortunes and power, every time, guaranteed.

Now excuse me, I have to go disk the field I plowed last week. (In time I will replace my tractor with a pair of Clydesdales as well.)

Carry on, use your illusions. I dropped out years ago and will never return, I just cannot bear the stupidity that pervades all.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Atario]

Also, you could just put a bunch of these on the grid.

People, "the grid" is merely a transport/exchange medium, not a power-generation method.

As far as "being off-grid" as a goal -- why? It just means you have reduced your options.

Re:Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess inhaling all those toxic fumes did no good to you either.

I'll borrow this one from others

[Jack Malmostoso]

Hey, global warming is solved for this week! And it's only monday!

Wow! what product volume!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, this says alot: "We have shipped over 30 fuel cell power generators to the field."

Factless hype.

[LWATCDR]

"Less than half as carbon intensive as grid-power".
Unless you get your power from hydro-electric or nuclear.
Less than half as carbon intensive as coal, oil fired, or natural-gas? Or is taking the US grid as a whole?
Please try and give more than hype.
This may be great power system but I would like a little more in the way of facts in the summary.

Re:Factless hype.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the share of the world's power generated by coal, oil and natural gas is vastly larger than the small fraction that is hydroelectric, wind or nuclear, AFAIK.

Re:Factless hype.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like a little more in the way of facts in the summary.

You must be new around here.

Re:Factless hype.

[LWATCDR]

Of the world's maybe. Of the US's maybe. Of Canada, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Iceland not likely.
Even then the carbon load from natural gas is much lower than from Coal. Again hype without facts.

Re:Factless hype.

[Smidge204]

Of the world's maybe. Of the US's maybe. Of Canada, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Iceland not likely.

Wow, cherry-pick much? How long did you Google to find countries that have the lowest possible fossil fuel consumption? Except for Japan, anyway. Percentage wise, Japan's use of fossil fuels (~65%) is almost as bad as the US (~71%).

Just for shits & giggles, let's include China - a rapidly industrializing country whose electrical conspution is and will continue to expand rapidly - with ~82% of their power coming from "conventional thermal" generation. Or the UK with ~74%. Or Australia (~92%), Netherlands (~90%), Greece (~89%), India (~83%), Mexico (~83%), Denmark (~82%), or Italy (~82%). (source)

Hey look, I can be highly selective with my data too!

Here's an idea - maybe, just maybe, it is understood that the phrase "half as carbon intensive as grid power" only applies if the power comes from fossil fuel sources. Call me a radical thinker, but sometimes it's easier to consider the subtext than to throw yourself into a fit of self-righteous rage.
=Smidge=

Re:Factless hype.

[Bob-taro]

Call me a radical thinker, but sometimes it's easier to consider the subtext than to throw yourself into a fit of self-righteous rage.

FYI, Smidge204, your post comes off sounding a lot more self-righteous and angry than the parent. I think the guy was just making the valid point that some grid power is already pretty clean, and the marketing info (not surprisingly) compared their product to the worst sources of grid power - which is arguably misleading.

Re:Factless hype.

[LWATCDR]

Actually I just picked the countries that I knew off the top of my head that used a lot of hydro, nuclear, and or Geothermal power no need for Google.

What they provided was totally useless. Is it more or less efficient that the latest natural gas fired power plants? Since it can't burn coal comparing it to coal is useless. It may be the best system ever but this is just mindless marketing drivel.

Re:Factless hype.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just nuclear or hydro. The specs show an efficiency of about 50%. Coal plants are capable of operating around 40%, although they do have a higher carbon content in their fuel. Natural gas plants can operate around 45% using the exact same fuel, but can get as high as 60% using a combined cycle design.

To clear up a few questions

[tygerstripes]

Wiki it, for pity's sake. (Okay, hardly scientific research, but...)

For what it's worth:

• Research & engineering has reduced startup time from 8 hours to more like a few minutes
• There are several automotive companies (Delphi, BMW, Rolls-Royce) looking into the use of SOFCs
• Hydrogen fuel-cells are a false economy on their own - they are for energy STORAGE, not generation. SOFCs however are very, very efficient generators, and portable to boot. They're just also incredibly expensive ATM.

Okay, that last one wasn't from wikipedia, but it needed saying.

Re:To clear up a few questions

[Tintivilus]

Rolls Royce the automotive company is a subsidiary of BMW. Do you mean Rolls Royce the aerospace company, or are you double-counting BMW?

Re:To clear up a few questions

[mwvdlee]

And how about the environmental cost of producing them?

That's where the hybrid-car equation breaks down; producing the fuel cells for those cars is so environmentally unfriendly that it takes many years to break even. By the time the current generation hybrid-cars is about to break even, most likely it'll be more environmentally friendly to buy a new car with the latest technology at that point in time.

Even more interesting.....

[antisoshal]

If you dig around they are marketing a home system that doubles as a furnace for home heating. Heat is generated using natural gas or propane, and electricity is generated simultaneously that could be used to power a forced air system. Unfortunately like everything else of this nature that seems revolutionary, the home unit is "not currently for sale and available only for testing by suitable partners", and the few products actually for sale are priced so far out of reach as to be functionally useless. I can get a decent 5KW generator for under 1000$ easily, and a good permanent installation could be had for well under 2000$, so this product more or less falls in the same category as the 800,000$ electric car: If you can afford it, you don't need it and could do more for the environment by using that money elsewhere. It seems there is a whole industry based on technology that never comes to fruition. Anyone else remember the computer company in Utah making ASIC based computers that compiled each time they ran to a benefit of 10x the running speed? whatever happened to them?.... Now, if someone like GE or Kohler were to license this tech, it could be produced a magnitude of order cheaper. But then a major player runs the risk of re-tooling at a substantial cost to begin production, only to have their investment dashed by next years innovation which will be even more efficient. There really aren't that many conspiracies out there. We have painted ourselves into an economic hole with the business models we use for capitol investment. Intel could be making chips three times as fast, but until they pay off the 2 billion dollar factory they just finished building for last years chip innovation, it just isn't happening. The conspiracy is just supply and demand economics....

Re:Even more interesting.....

[Lumpy]

There are three factors to making something affordable for the masses.

1 - it most be very simple.
2 - it can not use any exotic or expensive materials.
3 - it cant be legislated to have all kinds of silly requirements that are expensive.

Electric cars and efficient small cars here in the USA are expensive because of the incredibly retarded safety laws we have. The Smart Car is available in Canada for reasonable prices. the ones sold legally here in the states are 3X the price because of silly crap added. electric cars in europe are cheap, hell even velomobiles (bike cars) are popular over there, here in the USA they are illegal in most places.

Solar heat is incredibly cheap, problem is that everyone that tries to do it get's all kinds of BS laws thrown at them to make their life difficult. Local building inspectors need their hands greased with their "permit" extortion. appearance laws, etc...

If you can make it dirt cheap to have a 150% or higher profit margin, you get cheap green and rapidly adopted technology.

How do they clean the fuel cell elements?

[ishmalius]

The first thought I had when they mentioned biodiesel, is that it is very dirty. One of the benefits of a piston engine is that it is constantly scrubbing itself clean of all the residue of the combustion. Won't the fuel cell elements get coated with a layer of gunk in only a few hours without some process (mechanical?) that periodically cleans them?

Re:How do they clean the fuel cell elements?

[rawg]

Maybe it's the 800C that cleans it?

Re:How do they clean the fuel cell elements?

[Cyberax]

+800C tends to burn away any soot :)

I've worked once as a consultant in a factory with several blast furnaces - the furnaces themselves never needed cleaning.

Re:How do they clean the fuel cell elements?

[Ihlosi]

+800C tends to burn away any soot :)

Yep. That's also how they keep diesel particulate filters working. Every couple of hundred miles, raise the exhaust temperature for a few minutes, and you're good again.

Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch

[delt0r]

For cogeneration a Diesel is just as useful and yup, can also hit the 90% efficiency range. That is not a fair comparasion. You mite want to check those numbers too. About 70% is the best there is normaly for cogens. You can fudge things a bit since you are using *heat* energy and electricity (5Kw of heat is not the same as 5Kw of electricity). But conversion to just electricty is never much better than about 50% which is the figure of merit that is talked about here.

The story source

[trawg]

... and, here's a link to the story source - at least they referenced it in the article, but essentially its a rewrite of the treehugger item submitted as blogspam.

While I'm whining, is there a template for stories about huge technological advances in energy production? Like "A startup has developed a new form of [insert name of your favourite green energy production system here]. It takes the existing process of [current way to produce power] and optimises it by [super high level technical details of magical new system], resulting in an efficiency improvement of [insert random number greater than 1 here, without citing details about how it was measured or what the costs of the new procedure are]. Read more about it on [insert link to your blog].

Re:The story source

[camperdave]

Hey! Great!... That one sure beats the template I've been using. ... Thanks.

Re:The story source

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir,

Please cease and desist from using my intellectual property.

Signed,

R. Piquepaille

Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch

[Elfich47]

You should also include that when you are going Diesel cogen (or coal) and trying to get efficiencies over 50% you are producing power in the MW not the kW. Needless to say, you aren't going to be fitting that in your basement anytime soon.

Total cost of ownership over time, otherwise B.S.

[smchris]

Twice the efficiency _is_ technologically interesting. But a generator lasts, what, 10-20-30 years? These cells are what? One use recycled? So how many dozens, hundreds, or whatever fuel cells need to be built to get that "doubled efficiency" of building one generator? And what's the closed system total cost of each system over time?

I notice the article is suspiciously devoid of "$" signs.

5kw Back up plan

[Martix]

5k diesel is $1500 around here.

I am planing a hybrid system for the house when we get one.
will consist of Outback inverters, batteries, little solar wind/panels and last but not least is a generator.

The idea is during a short power outage run off batteries - if it is a long one the generator will start up and
charge the batteries. the solar and wind will be added in stages starting with the pannels

Using CFL's for lighting and auto transfer of vital circuts to the back up system. ie Beer fridge

The idea is that the generator will run at 80-90% load instead of wide fluctuations of 10-90 % the difference is is 2 - 4 hours of run time to a tank so i will use less fuel during a longer outage.

Also being conservative on power consumtion during that time i can even extend my fuel supply

Can also get exaust to water exchanger and use it to help heat the house in winter if needed.

The big advantage is that i can handle larger surge loads then just useing a generator which would have to be 2 to 3 time as large for start up of motors and short peak loads. Ie well pump and sump pump were rural.

Will cost more then just the generator but is way less the $175,000

Re:5kw Back up plan

[Nefarious Wheel]

Also you can buy a second battery for your car (excluding Prius of course) and swap at home after your daily commute, run your house lights off 12V. Save a few kilowatts off the mains.

Re:5kw Back up plan

[Martix]

That would kill a starting battery in a few days there not made for that. Heavy traction or solar batteries are. Plus make the battery bank large so you only dischage shallow and extend the life.

Re:5kw Back up plan

[llefler]

A couple things you might want to think about on your design. If you only run off of batteries when the grid is down you will reduce the life of your batteries and have a very low ROI on your PV and wind turbine. Overall efficiency wise, you'd be better to drop those and just install the right size generator. Assuming the power grid is reasonably reliable.

If you want to have all those components in your system, investigate dedicating critical circuits to your batteries/inverter. Use the PV, wind, and grid to maintain the charge. This way you would use your own generated power first, all the time, and make up for shortfalls from the grid. You can then back up the grid with a small generator.

And rather than trying to capture heat from the exhaust of the generator, consider passive solar to heat water for radiant heat. You could also tie into the same system with a pellet boiler as a backup heat source. If you try to pull heat from the exhaust (or the generator's cooling system), you will have to custom build equipment and it will need to monitor head temperature and EGTs to make sure you aren't pulling too much heat. Diesel engines depend on head temp to run efficiently.

If you are building your new house, use geothermal heating/cooling by installing a ground source heat pump. You could also avoid the CFL mercury issue by installing fiber optic lighting with a high efficiency light source.

Re:Not perfect ... behavior under partial load?

[elwinc]

One of the big issues with off-grid power is how does the power generator behave under partial load; i.e. does efficiency get lousy when you only need 25% or 50% of rated output? For example, one poster points out that in a co-generation system, diesel can hit 90%. This is at higher loads where the diesel is most efficient. I'm wondering because you have to devote some energy to keeping the 'solid oxide' (AKA catalyst?) hot.

By the way, from Acumentrics FAQ:

How is Acumentrics technology different from its competitors?
Tolerant of repeated thermal cycling (over 100 v. fewer than 15 for others)

That means you can shut it down about 100 times. Any more shutdowns and you may start to damage your unit. So if your nighttime load is near zero, sorry unlike a diesel, no cutover to batteries. You gotta keep the generator hot. This is gonna adversely affect the efficiency of home use.

More Carbon-Intensive Than Grid Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Acumentrics clames that their PEAK efficiency is upto 50%. This may be twice as good as other 5Kw generators, but it is less than the 60% efficency of modern combined cycle power plants and in the range of some coal fired plants.

Re:Total cost of ownership over time, otherwise B.

[Martix]

Run time between tear down of the stack for cleaning.
PEM cells are able to run for about 1500 -2000 hours before
that then need to be worked on and at what cost......?

Not twice as efficient as generators ... can't be

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle

The thermal efficiency of a combined cycle power plant is the net power output of the plant divided by the heating value of the fuel. If the plant produces only electricity, efficiencies of up to 59% can be achieved. In the case of combined heat and power generation, the efficiency can increase to 85%.

Given the figures cited above, it is impossible for fuel cells to be twice as efficient as modern power stations. That would mean they could get 118% efficiency.

The other issue is global warming and greenhouse gases. At a large power plant, it is feasible to sequester carbon dioxide. That wouldn't work with a zillion small fuel cells scattered around the country. These fuel cells aren't an environmental panacea and may not even be that good for the environment unless their only fuel is hydrogen.

Somewhat offtopic but

[cinnander]

Nuclear power IS carbon intensive.

Consider how much concrete needs to be made during the commissioning of a nuclear power station.
From this page:

Concrete is responsible for 7-10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, making it the biggest climate change culprit outside of transportation and electricity-generation.

Re:Somewhat offtopic but

[WaZiX]

What a dumb point against Nuclear energy.

1) How much of the concrete production comes from building Nuclear powerplants?

2) Electricity Generation is a bigger culprit, so going nuclear (I've been watching Heroes too much) would go in the right direction...

3) Transportation is also a (much) bigger culprit, and electricity will probably end up playing a large role in alternatives to fossilized carbon.

So, the first point isn't really a point, and nuclear energy could save much on the 2 biggest culprits...

Anything else?

Re:Somewhat offtopic but

[Firethorn]

The same argument could be used on wind power, you now. There's plenty of concrete involved in making the footings. Then you could get pedantic and count the vehicles and construction equipment running with IC engines, burning hydrocarbons.

Sure, concrete production emits a lot of CO2.

But that hardly makes a nuclear plant 'carbon intensive' because a 'lot' of concrete is used in it's production. Carbon intensive would be for things like coal - which produces carbon dioxide day in and day out in massive quantities to produce power.

For one thing, any large power plant is going to use a lot of concrete. I'd be suprised if your standard nuclear plant uses 20% more concrete than a similarly sized gas or coal plant in the same location would.

For another, the amount of concrete involved in building even a nuclear plant is a tiny fraction of concrete construction each year. Think about all the miles of road built each year. All the foundations poured. Many lar

Hoover Dam: 4.5 million cubic yards.
Nuclear Plant: 400 thousand cubic yards
Pentagon: 400k cubic yards
Green Building: 15k cubic yards, for a nine story, 293,000 square feet structure.

I was unable to find a figure for roads, but I did find that a concrete truck can carry 10 cubic yards, and one of them only gets you a few feet of road. 165 cy for a bridge of unknown size, but assumed small(as they were building a lot of them).

Re:Somewhat offtopic but

[djrogers]

1) How much of the concrete production comes from building Nuclear powerplants?

Well, in the USA that would be precisely zero... Yay us!

Re:Somewhat offtopic but

[ATMAvatar]

Ok, so what percentage of the total concrete worldwide makes up nuclear power plants? Even better yet - what CO2/MW output do nuclear power plants have, relative to other power generation methods? Note that you have to take that across the life of the reactor, since the CO2 cost of a nuclear plant from concrete is a one-time, up-front cost, whereas the CO2 cost of a coal/gas/oil plant adds in ongoing costs from burning their respective fuels.

You have to consider the above before that 7-10% figure becomes remotely relevant or applicable.

Re:Somewhat offtopic but

[cinnander]

True, I'm sure it's a tiny proportion, but my posting wasn't to make a point against nuclear per se or to imply that it was pollutive because of needing concrete, but was an observation that it - or, as I was corrected on, anything requiring significant structural construction - isn't as "carbon free" as you might think. Was just a bit of information for those who may not have known. It got modded down anyway, so apparently you all knew ;)

And again apologies for the offtopic.

Oooh! Thanks for the template!

[wiredog]

Been needing one of those...

Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch

[camperdave]

This fuel cell device is only hitting 45-50% as well. It only hits the 90% figure by reclaiming the exhaust heat. [Details in the fancy article.]

Yaaaay! Mr. Fusion!

[apodyopsis]

Sod this fuel cell, when can I get my Mr. Fusion and flying car?
:-)

Re:Yaaaay! Mr. Fusion!

[AHuxley]

Still waiting for my EV1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electr ic_Car%3F

The skeptic speaks

[Danathar]

This is all find and good. Yea..new technology!

I'll believe it's viability when I see people buying it.

Maybe I'm jaded..but why is it that every new cool tech that's announced is always at least 10 years away from deployment. Plus I never hear about that revolutionary tech that was announced 10 years ago...where is it?

Re:The skeptic speaks

[iamlucky13]

It's fair to be jaded by false or over-hyped (this is a case of the latter) promises, but I want to point out three things about revolutionary tech in general:

1.) Revolutionary tech almost always takes more than 10 years to enter the mainstream and it happens incrementally as prices fall and ease-of-operation makes it attractive to the masses.

For example, Bell started working with "cell phones" for the Army in 1947. The very first commercial system was the brick phones introduced in 1981. Adoption is only just now reaching 50% in the US. The internet moved a bit faster. The first networked computers, as far as I can tell were connected in the late 1950's. ARPAnet went live in 1969. TCP/IP came in 1974. HTML was 1991. Likewise, the first self-powered carriage was built in 1769. The Model T hit the market in 1908, and they were still only owned by a minority of even the US population for decades. Fuel cells, by the way, were invented in 1843.

2.) Once a revolutionary tech becomes mainstream, it tends to be taken for granted. You may humorously bemoan the lack of jet-packs, space-elevators, and holodecks, but how much time do you actually spend thinking about how the internet, cars, lightbulbs, transistors, etc really change your life?

3.) There's a lot of people who tripping over themselves to announce the next revolutionary technology, whether it be to impress their friends, sell newspapers, or just plain scam people. As a result, anything and everything can be presented as the next big thing. It's also usually a minor improvement on something that already exists, often with minor or indistinct differences. "Web 2.0" has no clear definitions and it's all the same stuff, but with more emphasis on user-interface. Cell phones are a merger of telephone switching and radios.

They have the wrong business model

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to get Halliburton to invest heavily in them. Then they will get massive federal support and Tax cuts. After that, the feds will pay you to use this, as opposed to having somebody pay 175K.

plug in hybrids

[Anonymous Coward]

They actually want to do that there once plug in hybrid cars become commonplace. A million "peak power demand" generators available would go a long way to help make rolling blackouts a thing of the past without having to resort to building new expensive large power plants.

The silver bullet for alternative energy is already here, it is the *combination* of all the tech you can get now, solar, wind, etc.

The devil is in the details. IOW, fuggetaboutit

[Ancient_Hacker]

There are a lot of caveats in any use of fuel cells: * A lot of fuel cells work just fine in the lab. Where you have several PhD's carefully tweaking up the chemical inputs over a period of hours or days. Where they hourly titrate the input chemicals to ensure they're at 99.99% purity. Where the cell is maintained with 843 degrees C on the cathode side, -177C on the anode side, maintained plus or minus 0.05 degree C thanks to the half-dozen HP $4,000 quartz resonator thermometers. Where the load is constant non-inductive fixed-value pure resistor. Where it sits on a marble lab bench with no vibration. Where it doesnt matter if a layer of micro bubbles of liquid plutonium forms on the cathode, as your PHD with the least senority can be mandated to start through a stereo microscope and scrape that gunk off with a nano-curette. Then consider the operating environment for your typical car engine. Compare and Contrast. Hand in by the end of the hour. Points for neatness.

A little clarification

[raygundan]

There aren't any hybrid vehicles on the market using a fuel cell. If you were referring to the extra energy required to produce the batteries and electric motors required in current-generation hybrid cars, there is indeed a penalty compared to normal cars. The payback time is short, however, generally just a few months. After the payback period, the car saves energy over a comparable car for the rest of its lifetime. And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.

As to whether you should wait for the next generation or not... that's always a tough call. At some point, you just have to stop and buy a car. Otherwise, you'll *always* be waiting for the Next Great Thing. It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.

Re:A little clarification

[Chris Burke]

And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.

This is a big thing for me. I was concerned since reports of the hybrids' battery lives weren't that great. But with closed-loop recycling the environmental cost is minimized, and as usual the primary cost is the energy required to recycle, meaning it's as bad as whatever your electricity source is. We must improve our electricity generation.

It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.

In an algorithms course I took we considered situations where your processing time would be so long that you could in fact be better off waiting. For example, if it took a year for your simulation to finish, you might be able to wait six months before starting, buy a computer that is a little over twice as fast, and still end up getting the answer sooner. This means knowing what is coming out in the future, and beyond the near term you can't do much more than use Moore's Law to guesstimate.

I'd look at hybrid cars or other new tech the same way I do computer upgrades -- just try to find the best combination of price/performance, something near the top but without paying the hefty premiums for the truly top end, to get as much longevity as possible out of a reasonably priced product. Which... means that when I was shopping for a car in 2003 I skipped the hybrid and went with an economy car. I still get over 40mpg highway! :)

Blue-collar

[mdsolar]

Here's a chance to get the blue-collar side going: http://www.citizenre.com/web/index.php?p=franchise d.
--
US job growth through solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Blue-collar

[WED Fan]

Remember the boom for computers? Gary Geek was the only guy in town that knew computers. In the 1980's, he set up a store, sold Geek Brand Computers that he built in the back. Wrote a small flat-file system to catalog the local radio stations music, and opened a BBS with 4, count them 4 modems.

By the mid-80's, he was taking mail order for the computers he advertised in Byte and Computer Shopper.

By the late 80's, he had closed his store front. Spun off his programming operations, and was building and shipping computers across the country. And his BBS operation was covering much of Southern California.

By the mid-90's, Gary Geek was a millionaire, his BBS had become an ISP that got gobbled up by the local telco for a huge amount of money. His mail-order PC business boomed and became a huge success with a web based "you build it" service.

By 2007, Gary Geek was getting ready to be launched into space and then return to his undersea habitat he's had built off the coast of Corpus Cristi. And has built the worlds first "Xena" museum in Seattle and charges $24 a pop for entrance. He also owns a basketball team, a football team, and a hockey team, all as tax shelters, cause lord knows that they aren't winning.

Oh, and the high school bully that gave him a hard time, is taking a his MCSE courses paid for by the State, cause he is an underemployed truck driver.

Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to start backing them now. Subsidize them, let them get a good base then buy them out.

Re:Blue-collar

[The Fun Guy]

Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to start backing them now. Subsidize them, let them get a good base then buy them out.

"Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to ... buy them out."

In Soviet Russia, you fight the power.
In Corporate America, the power fights you!

Re:Blue-collar

[Anonymous Coward]

there is actually a lot of demand for truck drivers right now.

Re:Blue-collar

[Anonymous Coward]

He also owns a basketball team, a football team, and a hockey team, all as tax shelters, cause lord knows that they aren't winning.

Paul Allen's Seahawks have a winning record even if they haven't yet won a Superbowl. It's much better than the days of ownership by the Nordstom family and Jim Zorn as QB.

Re:Blue-collar

[Anonymous Coward]

>"Oh, and the high school bully that gave him a hard time, is taking a his MCSE courses paid for by the State, cause he is an underemployed truck driver."

These days, I'm pretty sure truckers make more than sysadmins.

Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch

[newandyh-r]

Good points, but I can see certain organisations for whom its (presumed) low maintenance / low noise properties will be worth a lot of money. Also any mobile application (locomotives, small ships, maybe even airbourne) will have massive gains from requiring a much reduced fuel load for the same performance.

Expect it to be under serious evaluation by the US Army, US Coastguard, probably also the Navy and emergency services. And if it does perform as implied they will be paying military procurement prices - keeping the public price up - for a long time.
Andy

Re:mod parent up

[Duhavid]

I wish I still had your mod points also.

Re:Not perfect ... behavior under partial load?

[Anonymous Coward]

So attach your home to the grid, leave that sucker running, and sell power back to the utility. Everybody wins. Distributed grid power, anyone?

by now you have to know it's coming...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but would it run Linux!?

Re:by now you have to know it's coming...

[mikiN]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

Compare to combined cycle?

[IvyKing]

The latest combined cycle plants are capable of a 60% thermal efficiency - so I have a hard time imagining how this 'new' fuel cell will halve the carbon footprint of a natural gas fueled combined cycle plant.

Agree, TFA is more hype without facts.

Re:Compare to combined cycle?

[LWATCDR]

Not only that but a combined cycle system is pretty iffy for most small installations. The only use for the heat would be heating or hot-water. You can only heat so much hot water in a typical home or office I guess if have a pool or if the temperature is high enough you could use it to distill water or maybe an absorption style air conditioner. I don't see how you could use coal in this thing so comparing it to a coal fired plant is a little dishonest as well.

"back to the future" car engine?

[peter303]

Didnt it run on anything, including garbage?

Speaking of templates...

[Captain Sarcastic]

Here are some reply templates, while we're at it.

Reply Template #1

Oh, wow! That's great! Too bad <insert name of particularly reviled industry> is going to buy it out before it gets big, just like it did with <insert name of 100-mpg-carburetor / perpetual motion machine / free energy source>!

Reply Template #2

Are you kidding? This was already published in <insert link and name of mainstream publication / snopes.com >. How is this "News for Nerds"?

Reply Template #3

It'll never work. This idea violates <insert name of sacred precept being violated, such as the first law of thermodynamics or the Boy Scout Law>. How could you have fallen for this, you idiot?

Reply Template #4

Frist P0st... oh, did someone beat me to that?

off-lay?

[p3d0]

My new word for the day.

I always thought

[Belial6]

The big benefit of fuel cells in residential use will be to make actually power generation useful. Net metering is only useful if few people do it. If too many people do it, it simply won't work, so it is great for now, but it is a stop gap measure. If we all had hydrogen burning fuel cells, we could use our solar panels and windmills to generate electricity. We could use that electricity to produce hydrogen, and store the hydrogen for use during the times that your power generation system is not producing electricity. This would mean that there would not be any cost or infrastructure to deal with delivering fuel.

Re:Limited amount of "fuel"

[destrowolffe]

We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world. We don't "know" that there is a limited amount of "fuel" in the world. What we consider to be fuel changes overtime. First we had wood (biomass), then dams and windmills, then we added electricity, then coal, then oil, then nuclear, then solar and wind-farms, now we're investigating Hydrogen and other alternative "fuels," which have the benefit of reducing carbons or being carbon free. We also keep discovering new ways to extract oil from the earth opening up new possiblities and extending how long oil will last (NOT a good thing, IMHO).

The U.S. people should absolutely want to move to a new fuel source that has lower or no carbon emissions for environmental reasons and should want to cut the lifeline with OPEC for political and environmental reasons. Energy independence is a wonderful thing, especially if its environmentally responsible as well, but using the populist argument/scare tactic of "we're going to run out of fuel; the apocalypse is upon us, oh no!" is every-bit as harmful to rational debate as the big oil companies who run ads about happy children and oil making the future brighter.
 
/rant

Re: behavior under partial load?Battery use

[Miykayl]

Yes, shutting down and switching to batteries is out...

But, you can undersize the fuel cell, so that there is a surplus at night that charges batteries. Then, during the day, the batteries supplement the fuel cell during those higher loads.

The fuel cell, being smaller, will require less fuel to remain hot, and the "off-peak" energy it generates will still be captured and available.

Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch

[delt0r]

Well I didn't RTA, but that sounds pretty bad since a nominal effecincy figure for fuel cell is around 70%.

Slashdotted

[PPH]

... or the Big Oil companies bought it and buried it.

Re:The devil is in the details. IOW, fuggetaboutit

[PPH]

IOW, just like MS Windows. ;-)

Not bad, but ...

[PPH]

... 30 to 50% efficiency. Up to 80% with waste heat recovery. You can get close to this with a combined cycle IC generator. I've seen some small multi-fuel gen sets that were modified to recover the waste heat. They can get close to thee efficiencies with no technology risks. Parts and skilled mechanics available locally.

Legal Incentives Required

[SoopahMan]

There will always be a cheaper method that gets there on the broken back of the environment. What you're asking for is essentially unreachable - after gas is exhausted there will be other polluting fuels, etc etc and on it goes. If cost is your sole decider it won't happen before you're dead, or your kids, or theirs - there will always be someone with a novel way to make a buck that harms the environment. Legal incentives are needed to encourage green alternatives.

The argument that cost is the sole factor is a lot of bull anyway - I've got a $23000 Prius on the road that cost less than the gas guzzling SUVs and trucks beside me on the highway. I've got better resale value than any of them as well - so clearly, it's not "just cost." At least some people throwing that excuse out use it to avoid feeling guilty about not having even looked into being environmentally responsible - or not admitting they could care less.

Re:Legal Incentives Required

[shmlco]

Cool. Seen this? Could be a nice little add-on to your Prius...

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/hippies/make-your-h ybrid-a-hybrid+hybrid-with-solar-power-265635.php

Re:Legal Incentives Required

[zerkon]

Resisting the urge to make a comment pertaining to a particular "smug" southpark episode... I'd still like to point out that I've read in a more than one places (including I think a slashdot article a bit back which cited the same data I'm posting here) about how the Prius from construction to disassembly at End Of Life, is a TERRIBLE car for the environment.

In fact a little bit of research (not saying this is accurate, just something to think about) leads me to a report comparing the overall cost per mile taking into account manufacturing, repairs, and consumables (ie gas and oil and batteries if applicable). The industry average that they came up with is $2.281 per mile. The Prius costs $3.249 per mile as compared to the most expensive (a Maybach $11.582) vs the cheapest (Scion xB $.478). As another example, the Corvette costs $3.158 per mile.

By their math (again, not saying it's correct, could be FUD for all I know) I'd be better off buying a Corvette than a Prius. Now to be perfectly honest I disagree with a lot of their math, HOWEVER that isn't the only source I've read it from. Their numbers may be FUDdy but Other sites reach some of the same conclusions albeit in less objective way.

I am not what you'd consider an environmentally conscious person. It isn't that I drive a huge truck (VW GTI which gets fairly good gas millage out of it's 1.8L Turbocharged engine and is fast to boot). The fact is there's far more to a car's environmental impact than strictly going by MPG. And thus, your argument that there's more than just cost that dictates how good something is for the environment... well take it with a grain of salt is all...

And then of course there's other cars that get very close to the Prius in gas mileage, that cost a lot less, and don't have polluting batteries in them...

I'm actually not against the Prius, I think it was an important first step in the American psyche that we are open to listening to alternative energy ideas, it was IMHO the first successful/popular hybrid car which shows that Americans are willing to shell out for a greener (if only in theory) car. Which means the Big Three will shell out money for R&D. I just don't like people getting up on their high horse because they own a Prius.

Re:Legal Incentives Required

[StikyPad]

Now all they need is an add-on to allow hybrids to run on smug and we'll be free of fossil fuels!

Great idea...except...

[C10H14N2]

Twenty-five years ago that trick may have worked. Today, that structure is little more than a means of generating extra tax forms and accounting books while offering essentially zilch in terms of shielding liability. Besides, closely-held corps are themselves tenuous at best, certainly in their infancy. In reality, the corporate veil can be pierced simply if you're a sloppy excuse for a company or if it appears you are simply using it as a personal ATM...which is pretty common in such scenarios. When that happens, even the most absurdly complicated Rube Golberg paper conglomerates can quickly vanish into the glorified sole-proprietorships they really are to the sound of uproarious laughter from tax collectors, judges and creditors.

Re:Great idea...except...

[ronadams]

Interesting... what's changed since then? I mean, obviously case law and precedent, but why?

Re:Great idea...except...

[electroniceric]

Not only that, but chances are extremely high that in the process of founding company B, you will need to raise money to make it run. Since the people from whom you're asking for money are not likely to be total dopes, they will ask you for equity covering the things you have of value (i.e. your patent). So if and when you get around to actually running company C, the investors in company C will hold claim to the patent as well as the business, having dispensed with the company A and B formalities. Be nice if it'd worked, tho...

Re:Great idea...except...

[C10H14N2]

Oh, it's been going on a lot longer than that, but a certain widespread exuberance with this sort of shell-game crap among even the lowliest small business owners made the relevant courts a bit more sympathetic to the plaintiffs and prosecution of late.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporat e_veil

They are not new

[iamlucky13]

Solid oxide fuel cells are not new. They've been on the market since at least the 1990's, and SOFC research goes back to the 1930's. They're less expensive than PEM fuel cells, but also heavier. They have higher operating temperatures and must be warmed up to achieve peak output. The high temperature has both advantages and disadvantages.

If I understand right, the flexible fuel use is one of the advantages of the high temperatures (along with non-catalytic electrodes that aren't adversely affected by carbon exposure), which allow the fuel to be broken down into hydrogen and other elements within the fuel cell, instead of in a separate reformer.

Most types of fuel cells being actively researched have comparable electrical efficiencies, some better, some worse. They're also all very big. The news is this company released a new model, an alternative energy blogger thought it was cool and wrote a few non-technical notes on it, and now half of Slashdot seems to think it is something revolutionary. It looks like a good product, but it's far from as significant as the summary implies.

By the way, I looked up the company's page on this product, which is much more informative. Also on the page are links to a spec sheet, suggested applications, and a couple pictures so you can get a sense of scale. These things are clearly a lot bigger than a typical 5 kW internal combustion generator.

The DOE has a decent overview of solid oxide fuel cell technology.

What's novel? Fuel flexibility and thermal cycling

[inca34]

I've been working with fuel cells for a little bit now and I must say that while the efficiency arguments are nice and all, that's not where R&D is stuck right now. Though I mostly work with PEM fuel cells, which suffer from CO poisoning (CO molecules inhibit H2 molecules by taking their place on the membrane), SOFCs have their caveats as well. The main show stopper for the SOFCs has been thermal cycling and sulfur content in fuels. The sulfur issue has been fairly well addressed with simple fuel filters. Thermal cycling of the SOFC essentially kills the fuel cell a little every time it's started and stopped. The start cycle brings it from ambient, ~30C, all the way up to ~1000C, and back down again for shutdown. Needless to say, that's a lot of thermal stress on a system. The expansion and contraction due to uneven heating/cooling tend to destroy the SOFC after 10s of cycles.

So, I am very interested in how they addressed this thermal cycling issue. Did they find some novel way to distribute heat evenly so the expansion/contraction was uniform? Or did they find some new novel manufacturing process for the solid oxide that is a lot more robust to thermal cycles?

Twice as efficient == half the innefficiency?

[Chris Burke]

That may be a reasonable interpretation, as it does not suffer from overflow problems. Efficiency is a 0-1 scale, with 100% efficiency an impossible to reach goal that you suffer severe diminishing returns from. E.g. a power plant going from 59% to 85% efficiency means that over 60% of the energy that was being wasted is now being used (more or less directly in this case, under the requirement that you need heating). Going from 85% to 93% would require reclaiming halve of the remaining waste heat and would be a significant achievement by itself. That's a halving of inneficiency, but only a 10% improvement in efficiency.

Who knows what they really mean, it's a marketing release. It may mean nothing at all.

Re:The devil is in the details. IOW, fuggetaboutit

[Chris Burke]

A lot of fuel cells work just fine in the lab. Where you have several PhD's carefully tweaking up the chemical inputs over a period of hours or days. Where they hourly titrate the input chemicals to ensure they're at 99.99% purity.

Hmm... Having several PhDs around to tweak my fuel cell day in and day out sure does sound expensive. But most of those things you decribe sound like they could be done by grad students, which should lower the maintenance cost to next to nothing. Pizza, coffee, and a promise to put their name somewhere on the paper that you may or may not eventually publish should do it.

If we can design the fuel cells to use waste heat to warm the pizzas and coffee the system would be nearly perfect.

Ballard Power Systems

[rm-R-winnt]

Personally, my money is on Ballard Power Systems' Mark1030

They have been doing lots of field testing of residential cogeneration systems in partnership with Ebara Corp. of Japan for a number of years.

I want a small one of this for my travel trailer.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I think you may have missed the point of combined heat and power. The idea is to generate electricity and heat simultaneously in the winter instead of just heat. ... Combined heat and power in a home can be MORE efficient overall than a power station even if it produces less electricity from the input because it can use a large amount of what would have been waste heat.

Another place it would be VERY useful is for travel trailers - for both recreation and construction.

Self-contained trailers normally carry water and propane. They can be self-contained for water and sewage for about a week, and on fuel for far longer. But electricity is a big problem: Batteries are heavy, so they typically only last for a day or two for lighting, ventilation, and the motor in the furnace. Beyond that (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.

But such a trailer will have several flames running all or much of the time: Burner for the ammonia-cycle refrigerator, pilot and main burner for the water heater, burner for the furnace. If those "burners" were actually these ceramic fuel cells you could get enough power to keep the batteries charged, run major appliances, and have plenty to spare.

All three use the heat of combustion at a far lower temperature than the flame is capable of. These cells give you all the heat of combustion in their output gas, getting their electrical power by producing that exhaust gas at a lower temperature. So (after the capital cost of the fancier "burner" is absorbed) the electricity is "free". You burn no more fuel than you would without the ceramic fuel cell being involved in the process - rather than consuming lots of extra propane in a noisy, high-maintenance generator.

First one to convert would be the propane refrigerator. Though its power level varies (to regulate the box temperature as the door is opened and warm food is added) it is "on" all the time, making up the heat loss through the refrigerator's insulation.

Propane/ammonia refrigerators that also generate enough "free" power for lighting and small appliances would also be useful in off-grid housing.

Re:I want a small one of this for my travel traile

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Beyond a day or two (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.

Well, you CAN mount solar panels and/or erect a small windmill. But those are pricey, heavy, fragile, and depend on weather and siting. (Parked in a cool, comfy, deep forest? Forget wind and solar.)

Peak Coal?

[mdsolar]

There is an interesting report linked here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/three-cornered -ghost.html suggesting that the US has already seen peak energy production from coal. As you'll see I'm not completely persuaded of that, but surely you'll concede that the duration coal reserves is dependent on how quickly they are used. The coal industry is now trying to recapture the transportation market making inefficent use of the resource so your estimate might need revision.
--
Get Inexhaustible: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

It means buy our stock RTF NOW!

[HornWumpus]

Hurry, hurry, they've solved global warming.

I hope /. makes a good money whoring themselves like this.

I recall, at the worst place I've ever worked as a programmer, one of the older coders found out what everybody else was making (he was kind of slow). His reaction: 'I feel like a $2 whore who, after years on her back, found out the going rate was $5!'

There is a peak amount of energy

[Anonymous Coward]

At the moment we're burning lots of fossil fuels, that are in effect millions of years worth of stored Solar energy.

If we get to a point where that is all burnt then we are left with renewable resources:

• solar
• wind
• geothermal
• 
  

  
  Wind is actually driven by solar energy (heating/cooling of air masses.) There is a very finite amount of Solar energy that falls on the earth and understanding this will require determining what Earth's Energy Budget is.
  

  
  And at some point we need to go back to nuclear fuels and develop better processes for extracting energy from it so that the waste that we now have becomes fuel rather than a problem.
  

You're out of date on batteries

[Engineer-Poet]

A123Systems' cells can be recharged in as little as 5 minutes. AltairNano claims a cell which can be charged to over 90% in 6 minutes.

The world is changing fast, try to keep up.

Re:You're out of date on batteries

[ultranova]

A123Systems' cells can be recharged in as little as 5 minutes. AltairNano claims a cell which can be charged to over 90% in 6 minutes.

Suppose a car has a 60 kW engine, and uses, say, 6 kW while cruising. Suppose that the car's fuel system has juice to cruise for 6 hours before refueling; in other words it holds 36 kWh worth of energy. In order to transfer this amount of energy into the cell in 5 minutes (1/12th of an hour) requires a sustained power output of 432 kW. Multiply with the amount of vechiles being reloaded simultaneously.

Now, to put this into perspective, a microwave uses around 0.7 kW, an light bulb around 0.06 kW, and electric heating of the whole house in subarctic regions takes around 2-4 kW; a typical house has around 10-20 kW power input from the grid. In other words, 432 kW is an absurd amount of power, and there's no way the power grid can deliver it, especially to multiple stations in an area with multiple charging points each.

On the other hand, if you build an artificial fuel manufacturing plant right next to a power plant, you can simply run meter-thick cables from one to the other and use the same methods of distributing the fuel as are currently used. This is the energy equivalent of "never underestimate the bandwith of a truck full of data tapes".

The world is changing fast, try to keep up.

Don't get so caught up in the change that you start overlooking things.

Read it again

[Engineer-Poet]

He's making an academic point without the academic caveats, just to yank people's chains.

In other words, he's a troll.

Rebutting a troll won't change his behavior, BUT

[Engineer-Poet]

You can't run out of water either, but you sure can run well short of water at the rate you need it. Water tomorrow doesn't flush your toilet, water your crops and keep your salmon run alive today.

If you don't have the ability to capture all that non-hydrocarbon energy and convert it to hydrocarbons as fast as Business As Usual consumes them, we have at least begun to "run out" for all intents and purposes. Trying to continue using hydrocarbons made from other energy supplies just adds conversion losses to the list of problems. The solution is the same: convert from hydrocarbons as the preferred medium to something more efficient. That something is almost certainly electricity (and almost certainly not hydrogen).

Re:Rebutting a troll won't change his behavior, BU

[Rei]

You can't run out of water either, but you sure can run well short of water at the rate you need it.

Yes, it does come down to economics. However, when the money is to be made in power infrastructure, people will invest in power infrastructure. That's how the market works. Whatever is most economical is what people will invest in. There is, of course, some hysteresis (new plants don't come online the minute you decide to build them). But they do come online 5-10 years down the road. If people overinvest, there's a glut in supply. If they underinvest, there's a shortage.

Good strawman, it falls down easily

[Engineer-Poet]

Suppose that the car's fuel system has juice to cruise for 6 hours before refueling; in other words it holds 36 kWh worth of energy.

Way out of line with the first generation of PHEVs. The Chevy Volt's battery was recently specced at 16 kWh; the VentureOne, 3 kWh.

In order to transfer this amount of energy into the cell in 5 minutes (1/12th of an hour) requires a sustained power output of 432 kW.

36 to 192 kW, for those vehicles being fast-charged (most will be charged overnight, and may even supply excess energy to the grid for people who want to charge immediately).

Multiply with the amount of vechiles being reloaded simultaneously.

This will be limited to the number of vehicles on long-distance trips. If they are Tesla Roadsters or the equivalent with ~60 kWh of battery and 3+ hours range, the average load will be about 20 kW per vehicle, less than 1/20 your naïve figure.

Vehicles parked at home will be charged overnight. A Tesla Roadster will charge overnight from a 220 V, 30 A dryer outlet; the VentureOne will charge in a few hours from an extension cord, and the Chevy Volt will come to full charge in ~12 hours from the same. These loads are countercyclical, offsetting the normal daytime load peak; somewhere between 73% and 84% of the vehicle fleet could be supported by the current electrical generators as PHEV's.

New Fuel cells? I predicted it!

[Einstein's Bees]

Ya, yong man! As I said in 1937, "When mankind develops proper fuel cells, all liffe az we know it will benefit! und wit der hydrogen wells we are now drilling, we shall have UNLIMITED power for our SUVS!" Und don forget- Ze SUV had not yet been invented! Pleazze piss on silly old Lord Kelvin! He Knew NOTTING! Laws ov Termodynamics... (mutter, mutter) Wit Hydrogen we can brek zem ANYTIME!

New Fuel cells?? I PREDICTED IT!

[Einstein's Bees]

Ya, yong man!

    As I said in 1937,
"When mankind develops proper fuel cells, all liffe az we know it will benefit!
Und wit der hydrogen wells ve are now drilling, we shall have UNLIMITED power for our SUVS!"

Und don't forget- Ze SUV had not yet been invented in 1937!

  Pleazze: Piss on silly old Lord Kelvin! He Knew NOTTING!
Laws ov Termodynamics... (mutter, mutter) Wit Hydrogen we can brek zese laws ANYTIME!

Ze bees know!