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Boeing Installs World's Largest 'Reversible' Renewable Energy Storage System (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Boeing announced that it has installed a first-of-its-kind 50MW Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) system on a naval base in Port Hueneme, Calif. The fuel cell system, which can scale to 400KW, is unique in that it uses solar power to generate hydrogen gas from seawater, which it then stores until it releases the gas into a fuel cell stack to produce electricity, heat and water. Because the system can both store energy and produce electricity, Boeing is calling the fuel cell system "reversible." The Navy's Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center is testing the fuel cell system on a microgrid to determine its viability for use at both remote bases and during overseas military missions.
"The Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) system, which can generate 50 kilowatts (KW) of power, is the largest of its kind and can use electricity from wind or solar power to generate hydrogen gas, which it then compresses and stores."
50 kw per hour is 36 megawatts a month.
I don't think that math means what you think it means. That means 36 MWh / month. 3600 KWh / month.
If I leave on a space heater, that's 1.5KWh / h = 1080KHh / month. So 36 people could run their space heaters.
A small town needs a power plant capable of 36MW. Not 36MHw / month.
That is, if you're near a large supply of readily accessible water.
If you read TFS (not even TFA) you'll see that this has been built "on a naval base in Port Hueneme, Calif." Port Hueneme is on the West Coast of California, right next to the Pacific Ocean. Is that a sufficient supply of water for you?
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Reversible energy storage systems have been around for a while. Pumped water storage scales to GW levels with 70% efficiency, but depend on specific geography.
Another scheme is to use an electric locomotive to push rail cars up a hill, and use motor braking on the downhill run to extract the energy again.
Storage in hydrogen is less efficient: electrolysis is 70% efficient, a fuel cell is 40-60%, so chain efficiency is around 35%. The advantage is it's scalable and can be made portable (which is why the DOD is interested).
"Kilowatts per hour" doesn't make any sense at all. Watts are already a rate - joules per second.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not really. If it was, they'd stop the farmers growing Alfalfa in the California deserts, then exporting it to China. The "BIG issue" is an utterly broken antiquated system of pre-1914 water rights.
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Yea, we've been calling that 'Rechargeable' for the last hundred years, but the marketing gonks at Boeing go with 'Reversible' instead then like it's something novel.
Wrong. Fuel cells are already commonly referred to as "reversible" when you can run them in both directions, which is not a given. Thanks for demonstrating your ignorance, though, and helping to make Slashdot grate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder if it was spelt wrong? It made perfect sense to me, grate as in "make an unpleasant sound".
117 words. 2 mistakes.
If you can't do your job as an editor, don't post. I'd prefer to get a post a day later than have to sit there staring at why 50MW may scale to 400kW and figure out what "stores until power" is supposed to mean.
Not really. If it was, they'd stop the farmers growing Alfalfa in the California deserts, then exporting it to China. The "BIG issue" is an utterly broken antiquated system of pre-1914 water rights.
I just spent 2 weeks in the Imperial Valley in Fall 2015, and 2 more weeks in the last month. You can drive through there but you can't really appreciate how damaging that style of industrial farming is to the environment until you actually go there. They are basically farming in a dust bowl by using open canal irrigation. The pesticides and fertilizer drain into the Salton Sea, an accidentally-created manmade body of water, which is drying up. As it dries up, a lot of the salts and chemicals in the water turn into a very fine dust. I drove out to the Salton Sea itself on a windy day and it looked like something straight out of Fallout 3. I could see no difference between the landscape there now and a nuclear wasteland. It's an ecological disaster. I've been to industrial farm towns all over the USA and I've never seen industrial farming like that before. The fact that it is allowed to continue to exist in California, of all states, just boggles my mind. And I work in coal power plants.
The refrain I heard often was "we grow xx% (double digit number) of the nation's fresh fruits and vegetables!". I am not going to dispute the figures. It isn't hard to gain a huge chunk of the market if you have free/cheap water, 350 days of sun, and an endless supply of cheap immigrant labor, however. That is a rare set of circumstances, and there isn't a farmer anywhere in the US that can compete against that.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It is amazing how many people missed the sarcasm in your comment.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The Gibbs free energy of water is -237.14 kJ/mole, or (at 55.6 moles/liter) 13.184 MJ/liter, or (in electrical terms) 3662 kWh per ton of water. That's how much energy you gain combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water (H2 and O2 have a Gibbs free energy of zero). So about a third the energy density of gasoline (negative energy density actually, since the end product is water).
An average U.S. household uses about 13 MWh/yr, so if were to all come from hydrogen and oxygen, they would form about 3550 liters of water in a year, just under 10 liters a day. Or put another way, a 1000 MW version of this would generate about 273 tons of water per hour. Divide by the efficiency to get how many tons of water are needed to separate into hydrogen and oxygen.
This actually gets to another off-topic synergy I've been wondering about. Evaporative distillation takes more energy to desalinate seawater than reverse osmosis. So most of the solutions thus far have been to build big reverse osmosis plants. But that's purely an energy analysis. It ignores the cost of the energy. Evaporative distillation relies almost entirely on thermal energy. Well, at power generation plants, heat is considered a waste product - it's free energy.
For places where water is in short supply like California, why isn't every power plant being built near the sea, where they can use seawater for cooling? It'll have to be a two-stage cooling circuit with a heat exchanger to prevent corrosion from affecting power generation systems. But that's already what's used in nuclear plants so there's no new engineering which needs to be developed there. Do this and 1/3rd the energy from burning coal, oil, or nuclear can go into generating electricity. The remaining 2/3rds of the energy can go into desalinating seawater.
The thermal energy cost to desalinate is on the order of 80 kWh/ton. Or 288 MJ/ton. So your 1000 MWe power plant (which is generating about 2000 MW of thermal energy) has enough thermal energy to desalinate seawater to produce 3.5 tons of fresh water per second.