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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.)"
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.
Something catchy. How about Mr. Fusion?
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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
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!
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
"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
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.
... 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].
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.
My fuel of preference is coal. can I use that?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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?
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:
s /vision21/
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystem
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.
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