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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.)"
a good acronym.
duh.
I can't even talk about this without a decent acronym.
Anything you say will be held against you.
Err , not if the grid power in your area/country comes from hydro, nuclear or renewables.
"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.
... 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].
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.
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:
Oh, did I mention that it should demonstrate the ability to SCREW over OPEC, Government, and Corporations?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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.