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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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)?

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??

[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??

[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/

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 ...

[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 ...

[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 ...

[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.

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?

Half as carbon intensive as grid power?

[Viol8]

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

I'll borrow this one from others

[Jack Malmostoso]

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

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.

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.

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: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 :)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir,

Please cease and desist from using my intellectual property.

Signed,

R. Piquepaille

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: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.

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.

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?

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.

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?