Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
Here's a direct link to the fuel cells: http://www.acumentrics.com/products-power-generato rs.htm
a good acronym.
duh.
I can't even talk about this without a decent acronym.
Anything you say will be held against you.
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.
Something catchy. How about Mr. Fusion?
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
... 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.
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.
Deleted
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?
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
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.
Err , not if the grid power in your area/country comes from hydro, nuclear or renewables.
Hey, global warming is solved for this week! And it's only monday!
"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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.Meta will eat itself
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....
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?
... 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$/year for everyone except BigOil Inc., who would have to pony up, say, half a billion per month. Your patent, your terms.
Sticking it to The Man for fun and profit. Behave responsibly
... and, here's a link to the story source - at least they referenced it in the article, but essentially its a rewrite of the treehugger item submitted as blogspam.
While I'm whining, is there a template for stories about huge technological advances in energy production? Like "A startup has developed a new form of [insert name of your favourite green energy production system here]. It takes the existing process of [current way to produce power] and optimises it by [super high level technical details of magical new system], resulting in an efficiency improvement of [insert random number greater than 1 here, without citing details about how it was measured or what the costs of the new procedure are]. Read more about it on [insert link to your blog].
Twice the efficiency _is_ technologically interesting. But a generator lasts, what, 10-20-30 years? These cells are what? One use recycled? So how many dozens, hundreds, or whatever fuel cells need to be built to get that "doubled efficiency" of building one generator? And what's the closed system total cost of each system over time?
I notice the article is suspiciously devoid of "$" signs.
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
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!
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.
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?
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.)
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.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
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.
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.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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
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?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
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.
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.
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.
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.