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Fuel Cells Promise To Reduce Carbon Emissions of Mobile Base Stations
Mickeycaskill writes: Vodafone says fuel cells could reduce the carbon emissions and noise pollution caused by mobile base stations in remote areas of developing economies. The company has 122 million mobile data customers in emerging markets and needs to expand its network in these countries to meet demand. However many base stations are in rural areas where grid power is unreliable and need on-site power generation. These are typically diesel powered, but Vodafone wants to move away from this type of power and says solar power is too expensive and not suitable for urban areas. It has already deployed 200 fuel cells in South Africa and wants to replicate the model elsewhere.
The article says the justification for fuel cells is because grid power isn't reliable in rural areas. Fine, that makes sense. But the justification for using solar is that it's not suitable for urban areas. I'm confused why the power grid isn't good enough in urban areas while using solar for base stations in rural areas. Am I missing something? Also, why not use wind energy and mount turbines on the towers in rural areas to provide additional power?
Long term damage of the planet is perhaps even bigger with "cell of any type" - primarily due to carcinogenic & lethal disposable parts that need to be stored in underground, lead shielded bunkers. Phosphoric Acid or H2SO4 are corrosive... they eat metals!
Go Solar. - a kickass way would be to do away with batteries completely & use solar to store capacitor based energy on a slow discharge.
Wind turbines kill Pigeons & Sparrows - see any large scale wind turbine project - what they dont tell you is how many bird "hits" are happening.
The main commercial source of hydrogen at the moment is by catalysis from hydrocarbons, thereby pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. I don't think Vodafone has got the foggiest with this line of reasoning.
10, 20, 30 kw? More?
It seems kind of hard to judge what the generation options are without knowing how much power an individual site uses.
Fuel cells should be more widely available before long and fuel every bit as quickly as gasoline cars, which is precisely why evs are never going anywhere except perhaps niche applications and greentards.
A lot has changed in the last decade.
My university alone holds many dozens of patents on solar energy and battery technology, and the license fees are much cheaper than they would be if held by a private firm.
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$5000 seems kind of in the low side for a low-volume production. The initial units were sure to cost a lot more. Also a fuel cell that works with complex hydrocarbons as a fuel is more expensive to manufacture because you need a fuel reformer. Even SOFC fuel cells can burn only simple hydrocarbons like CH4 but must be made of brittle ceramics and run at high temperatures.
I've always thought fuel cells would be a good option for extreme northern and southern communities.
Solar is nice and all, but less useful the further you are from the equator. Whitehorse Yukon (60.7^ north latitude), for example, has a shortest day of less than 6 hours. Also, winter sun is low in the sky passes through a lot of atmosphere to reach your solar panel, so I imagine efficiencies would be sub-optimal.
But if you could use solar all summer to produce hydrogen that your fuel cell could run off all winter, I think you might be on to something. Remember 6 hours of daylight in December means 18 hours of daylight in June (when you're using little if any lights and heat)
I just don't know if the inherent energy costs of splitting water vs energy gained in a fuel cell would let this be a viable idea. And I wouldn't want to think about paying for such a system.