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Dishwasher-Size, 25kW Fuel Cell In Development
mcgrew writes "Forbes has an article about a new type of fuel cell that is 90% less costly than current cells at one tenth the size (making it the size of a dishwasher), with far higher efficiency than current cells. It runs at only 149 degrees Celsius (300F) . It was jointly developed by Diverse Energy and the University of Maryland. 'The first-generation Cube runs off natural gas, but it can generate power from a variety of fuel sources, including propane, gasoline, biofuel and hydrogen. The system is a highly efficient, clean technology, emitting negligible pollutants and much less carbon dioxide than conventional energy sources. It uses fuel far more efficiently than an internal combustion engine, and can run at an 80 percent efficiency when used to provide both heat and power.' It produces enough power to run a moderate-sized grocery store, or five homes. A smaller, home-sized unit is on the way. Is the municipal power plant on the way out?"
The municipal power plant isn't going anywhere.
Our house has all electric utilities - stove, oven water heater, dryer, home heating (in-wall heaters, no central furnace). I'm too lazy to add up the exact numbers, but we're probably paying $2000-2500 a year for electricity (Washington state).
#DeleteChrome
It will never work.
It's been done before.
They'll get bought out.
The laws of themodynamics make everything impossible.
How the fuck is something like this insightful?! Every single line is full of bullshit, by someone who clearly have no idea how things work, and is just getting talking lines from somewhere.
If it was funded by the University, you can bet your ass the University will get is share.
For example, Google's famous PageRank patent is owned by Stanford:
http://contracts.onecle.com/google/stanford.lic.2003.10.13.shtml
http://www.clickonf5.org/10824/google-pagerank-license-expire-2011/
Fucking moron moderators as well. Insightful my ass. You whole lot should be the ones locked up for sprouting lies on the Internet.
Source: NSF funded researcher. Disclaimer: NSF-funded researcher.
And some tranks.
Answer is no.
While it would be awesome to have your own power plant. You're fighting aginst alot of money.
Won't happen anytime soon.
I assume that 'Big Power' is why ordinary liquid-fuel internal combustion generators can only be obtained on the black market, if you have the right connections, after their brutal suppression? Oh, wait, no, generators are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, they're just a pain in the ass to maintain.
There is certainly a fair amount of capital tied up in generation and distribution infrastructure; but there are some points to remember:
The power company isn't pleased by your fluctuating demand: In an ideal world of steady demand, you could get away with exclusively operating the absolute cheapest (generally a polite way of saying 'coal', except in very good hydro areas) base-load plants 24/7, and size your distribution infrastructure to that load, with a dash of margin for safety. Nice, easy, lowest cost per kilowatt hour. In the real world, with demand fluctuating throughout the day(lights/no lights, commercial facilities open vs. after hours, etc.), throughout the year (A/C in summer, some heating in winter, little of either in spring and fall), and potentially over the longer term(population increases and decreases in a given area, movements of power-intensive industries, turnover of housing stock, improvements or decreases in gadget efficiency), the problem is more complex.
Short term fluctuations mean having to size the grid with peak load in mind (lest you risk some really hairy cascading failures) and mean having to have peak-load plants (often combined cycle natural gas) sitting idle part of the time and burning more-expensive-than-coal fuel the rest of the time. More capital invested, higher cost per kilowatt hour. Seasonal variations potentially mean even more facilities sitting idle, depreciating, part of the time, and longer-term variations mean wacky fun with demand forecasting and the potential for either customer displeasure or wasted facilities built for demand that never came.
If somebody announced, tomorrow, that their 'Unobtanium Plot-point Reactor' could fully replace all legacy electrical infrastructure, it is indeed likely that there would be some... industry unhappiness. However, any widget that costs more than base-load generation and distribution and can be used at the customer site to reduce demand fluctuation and function as a backup unit is a mutually beneficial arrangement: The utility gets closer to their ideal of 100% stable demand, the customer has a backup/peak generator that is ideally less obnoxious than the old diesel unit.
Plus, of course, for any given advance in power generation, there isn't anything stopping a large-scale producer from running the device at a large scale (with capital investment, and engineers on site, and other handy stuff) and offering the result for sale. Unless the transmission overheads or profits are usurious, many people probably don't want to coddle their own generator when they can just plug in for not much. Since the ability of utilities to individualize chargers based on precise per-person expense (ie. transmission line distance, difficulty of terrain, etc.) is typically constrained by some mixture of inadequate information and regulation, the customers who are least impressed by the centralized service (say the ones who live at the flaky edges of the grid, and deal with lots of exciting blackouts and issues, or in an area with brownout problems at peak) are also the customers that are likely to be least profitable.
The universities and other entities involved with funding the research are not shafted when these startups happen. Spinoff companies are great for universities. They get paid for their ownership on the patent(s).
I work at a research management company.
Nothing new here. Identical tech dates back at least to 2009:
http://www.cerespower.com/Technology/TheCeresCell/
There's no question that fuel cells, that can run on the same fossil fuels we use now, would be a huge step forward, if they could be made cheaply enough. They exceed Carnot efficiency, so a fuel cell that ran on unleaded gasoline would instantly double even the best hybrid vehicle fuel efficiency. Large natural gas power plants would get perhaps a 50% improvement in efficiency. Fuel cells running on methanol are quite popular in forklifts because they are zero emissions, lower maintenance and get more run-time than batteries, according to the DoE.
They'd be a great replacement for generators as well. Imagine a fuel cell in every cellular tower, with a CNG tank on-site in case both the power and gas lines fail (and can be refilled by truck). Imagine your central heating boiler being for home and water heating was generating free electricity as well as heat for a combined ~80% efficiency (almost as good as condensing boiler). Imagine every city block has a fuel cell the size of a utility cabinet, reducing transmission losses and easing strain on the power grid.
High efficiency, plus fuel flexibility, plus almost zero maintenance (and nearly no noise), and little pollution, makes these things possible, where they aren't all that practical with conventional heat/combustion engines.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The company is Redox Power Systems, not Diverse Energy. Diverse Energy's fuel cell uses ammonia as a fuel source, not natural gas. The summary is mixing up 2 different fuel cell technologies. (I know broke the rules and read the articles.)
Why? this is perfect for CARS. Dishwasher sized will fit into most full size cars right now. creates electricity at low heat, which mean actual practical electric cars.
you change the fuel source to something other than oil.
Even better at 25kw that is enough to run the majority of homes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Marked as informative but misleading. You mention both the bank and auto bailouts, but forgot the most important figure when comparing them:
Number of senators who voted for the bank bailouts but NOT the auto bailout:
Republicans: 18
Democrats: 2
That means that 24 republicans in the house voted for the bank bailouts, and 15 voted against. Or to put it another way, 61.15% of republicans voted for the bank bailouts. That's a caucus super majority.
So yes, both parties supported the bank bailouts. And most American's think they stunk (and they did). There was no direct benefit to the tax payer. Though, if you're being honest there was a HUGE indirect effect: we didn't have economic collapse and ruin. It was a crappy place to be - the democrats and republicans had to vote to bailout the banks or we'd have been in a massive world wide depression.
The 100% republicans didn't vote for it was simply to save face. Yeah, I said it. It was to save face because it was going to pass no matter what but they didn't want to be the guys who deregulated the industry, allowing for the colossal screw up in the first place, and then use the US taxpayers to bail it out.
Now back to the auto bailout. The auto bailout on the other hand did directly affect MANY MANY American's. It allowed Chrysler to find a home (ironically, saving not just the butts of American auto workers, but also of the former bush administration colleagues who owned the company at the time and steered them towards only making huge gas sucking crap cars, and killing off well selling and loved cars like the Neon, which had a small car following and tuner community), allowed Ford to stay afloat, and GM to get reorganized.
In the end the auto bailout was structured in a way that the government would get it's money back plus interest. This bailout was orchestrated by the democrats, and it worked - the US tax payer got it's money back, plus interest, and kept a crap load of jobs.
Comparing that to the bank bailout orchestrated by the republicans (whose policies of bank deregulation cause the problem) where the only thing the tax payer got was the middle finger, foreclosed homes, robosigning?
And that's why context matters. Posting some figures (which while technically true) doesn't tell the whole story. The whole story is more complex than the figures alone. The whole story is that the republicans knew it would pass with a democratically controlled senate - cause there's no way the democrats, in control of the senate, would let the country delve into the deepest depression in history. They knew it would also be unpopular, yet necessary. So some of them voted against. And for the ones who did it on principle - e.g. the freshmen tea partiers? Those guys were loons. If the guys who voted AGAINST the bank bailout had been in majority we'd all be majorly hosed right now.
"We wouldn't be #1 if we didn't fund this research."
Sure you would.
#1 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe.
#2 According to NationMaster.com, the United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.
#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.
#4 The United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.
#5 The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.
#6 There are more car thefts in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world by far.
#7 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#8 There are more reported murders in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#9 There are more total crimes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#10 The United States also has more police officers than anywhere else in the world.
#11 The United States spends much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on the face of the earth.
#12 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.
#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.
#14 Americans have more student loan debt than anyone else in the world.
#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe. 89 percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.
#16 The United States has the largest trade deficit in the world every single year. Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.
#17 The United States spends 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet does. In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.
#18 The United States has far more foreign military bases than any other country does.
#19 The United States has the most complicated tax system in the entire world.
#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen and it is rapidly getting worse. Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.
Go USA!
Watch this Heartland Institute video