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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.)"
.. 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.
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.
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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.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
E pluribus unum
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?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
4 -cff857f5223f/Link.pdf 5 -920bb4d238a3/Link.pdf
The spec sheet: http://www.acumentrics.com/243ebdc5-db1f-410d-991
The home version: http://www.acumentrics.com/6d853cb3-92b2-46f3-b7f
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
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.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
By the way, from Acumentrics FAQ:
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.--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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 :-(
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.
Here's a chance to get the blue-collar side going: http://www.citizenre.com/web/index.php?p=franchise d.
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US job growth through solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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).
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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.
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.
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.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.