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Get Off The Grid: GE Announces Home Fuel Cells
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Sep 17, 2000 08:46 PM
from the keep-your-mitts-of-my-juice dept.
from the keep-your-mitts-of-my-juice dept.
Scareduck writes: "GE has announced a nifty home fuel cell system, the HomeGen 7000, that they claim will be able to generate enough electricity for a single family dwelling. 'About the size of a refrigerator,' there's no moving parts, but they still want to inspect the thing on an annual basis. All you need is a natural gas or propane connection. They claim that hydrocarbon emissions are much lower than conventional power plants, plus you get free hot water or space heating with the waste heat. GE's looking at a 2001 launch date, but they're taking names for early adopters now."
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Get off the Grid: GE Announces Home Fuel Cells
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Re:Great! (Score:5)
Let's talk about economics for a moment... (Score:3)
Then there's an ecological pay-back. How long does it take the device to return the energy used to manufacture it, and at what cost. This may not be as much of a factor for fuel cells, but it is really crucial when considering solar cells: many of them never pay back in energy the energy it cost to manufacture the system, if you count the aluminum frames for the cells, the mounting and tracking hardware, and the batteries and electrical equipment. Solar cells still make sense if you're off the grid or want to be prepared for an extended outage. I have a rather large panel that charges a battery to run my ham station in an emergency. But we need a breakthrough in efficiency.
Bruce
Ballard fuel cells (Score:3)
Take a close look at the spec sheet. Max efficiency of this system is at loads below 30% of full load. This is very different from most other generating systems, which are most efficient near full load. There's thus a tradeoff between plant cost and fuel consumption; it may pay to buy extra generation capacity. Also note that the operating temperature range is limited (-20F to +104F) without "optional upgrades". Having generation gear that quits in hot weather is not good; that's not when you want to suddenly start drawing power from the grid.
Still, this is going to look really good to anybody who has a Diesel running off a propane tank.
Wow (Score:4)
Just imagine a Beowulf clust . . . oh, never mind.
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Re:Wow (Score:3)
If I understand correclty, the fuel-cell technology wil work with just about any reasonable hydrocarbon, or just pure hydrogen (and oxygen from outside osurce, ie: the air).
Natural gas, propane, are simply compact and available sources of hydrogen.
If Ballard ever gets their fuel cel into cars, that's great.. why? THe gas industry is happy, they can still sell gas. THe environmentalists are more happy, becuase the cars no longer have toxic emissions. ANd when we run out of petrol, we simply move to some other organic/synthetic.
Re: sorry this one is formatted properly (Score:4)
2H2(from the electrolyzed water) + CO2(from your breath, the air, whatever) ---> CH4(methane [natural gas]) + O2
robert zubrin is proposing this as the method by which a mars spacecraft could produce its own fuel for the return trip using the CO2 marian atmosphere and sunlight BTW.
Perpetual motion, eh? (Score:3)
So let's see.... you expend energy to crack the water, get H2 and O, run it thru this fuel cell, get H2O and energy.
Am I missing something subtle here?
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Re:Why natural gas over hydrogen? (Score:4)
Fuel cells work by reacting hydrogen with oxygen to make water and electricity. You can't put water into a fuel cell and have it work.
You could split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then run the fuel cell off the hydrogen. If you did that, the fuel cell wouldn't actually care where you got the hydrogen; it still wouldn't be a water cell.
There are several problems with hydrogen for the home. No one has hydrogen lines running to his house; no company is set up to provide hydrogen even if someone was ready; and hydrogen is difficult to contain safely and effectively. (The tiny hydrogen molecules can seep through many materials, even including some metals, so you would probably want to use liquid hydrogen, which you would have to refrigerate... aack.) If you want to make your own hydrogen from water, you will need to get a lot of electricity from somewhere and you will need to store the hydrogen... see above for some of the problems.
But recently an almost magical catalyst was discovered: feed it natural gas, and it strips hydrogen off. It's simple: natural gas and oxygen in, and electricity, waste heat, and carbon dioxide out. (You can also do this trick with methanol, or even gasoline, so we may get fuel-cell cars soon.)
With natural gas, you can just hook it up and it will just work. Direct hydrogen feed would be much messier.
As to the science fair project... I don't think you correctly understand what was going on. It sounds to me like the fuel cell would run on hydrogen and oxygen at night, producing water; and during the day solar cells would split the water back into hydrogen and oxygen. As long as nothing wears out or breaks, and as long as the sun shines, such a device could run continuously.
steveha
Too bad for this company... (Score:4)
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Become your own utility co? (Score:5)
We've seen distributed computing, is it time for distributed power generation?
Re:Wow (Score:3)
Of course, you can always look for other alternatives, like grow corn for ethanol production (and use the excess biomass for methane) but the big oil companies don't like people looking into these kinds of ideas and technologies.
"Less emissions" (Score:5)
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Re:"Less emissions" (Score:3)
clean, continuous power (Score:3)
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Re:Become your own utility co? (Score:3)
Those who run windmills or solarcells often stay "on the grid," and the electric company is forced to compensate you for your power. (Forced, at least in most US jurisdictions, your mileage may vary.) If a windmill provides more than your whole house needs, then you'll get paid by the electric company.
However, those solutions work because you don't have to pay for the source of energy: wind or sunlight. You may have to pay maintenance on your mills or replace damaged cells, but that's about it.
If you have to hook a propane tank to a fuel cell, you're probably NOT going to get electricity cheaper than it's sold "on the grid." You'll be more independent, but you won't want to burn an extra tank to turn natural gas into cash.
Single family dwelling? (Score:4)
Winter gas supply? (Score:3)
Last winter, natural gas supplies, at least to the Northeast United States, shrank, and prices skyrocketed. In California, I believe natural gas or propane increased several hundred per cent, if it was even available.
Many contracts for natural gas in the Northeast U.S. specify only a limited supply--if you exceed that you have to pay considerable surcharges--it may be cheaper just to buy electricity for the added load.
The situation may change, if Canadian natural gas is imported in adequate supply and a reasonable price. But natural gas supplies suffer from the problem that it is not as easy to move them to users as it is electricity or fuel oil. And the supply life may not be as long as petroleum, unless some exotic sources are located, as for example, at extreme ocean depths.
I too would like to see a less expensive and less polluting and more reliable energy source for the home. However, in many other areas, solar power may be the better bet. I wonder whether it will turn out to be practical to install these gadgets in the northeast U.S.
My neighbors' home a few years ago exploded and burned after a propane accident--our property was, luckily, spared, and nobody killed. Of course, they still use propane, but others are more cautious.
Re:Interesting ... only a few concerns (Score:4)
2.This is true, however when the NG is reformulated to extract the hydrogen, the sulfur is extracted as well. I think the figure that ive heard is its down to about 2 ppm, and the acceptable level is about 10 or so but im not sure on that. Even if they do need a catalyst that has to be swapped out, it would be like getting the oil changed on your car or something, plus the article says they will check the things and service them yearly, at which time i assume this would be done
But will it power... (Score:4)
Re:Wow (Score:5)
Its all about the efficiency. Home fuel cells can get up to 80% efficient with cogeneration, 40-50 without. A natural gas power plant would be very very lucky to hit 40 % efficiency, and forget about seeing that with a coal power plant. Not only that but the emissions are much cleaner than even a NG turbine, since theres no combustion, NOx is reduced significantly, its mostly just giving off carbon dioxide and water. This is not a revolution in power generation, but an evolution, so far for fuel sources weve gone from solar to wood to coal to oil and now to natural gas and maybe back to solar again. Coincidentally each transition has resulted in a massive economic boost. Also, you can use electricity and air to actually produce natrual gas, which is what they did back in the 1880's before the discovered they could mine the stuff, so in theory you could just hook up a big solar array out in the desert somewhere and make natural gas and pipe it out to people everywhere.