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Consumer Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Posted by
michael
on Fri Sep 28, 2001 04:14 PM
from the no-smoking dept.
from the no-smoking dept.
axis-techno-geek writes: "Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, BC (in Canada, eh), has stated that it will start production this friday of their consumer level Nexa(tm) hydrogen fuel cell (article here). The power module generates up to 1200 watts of unregulated DC electrical power that can keep going as long as it is supplied with hydrogen, and produces no toxic by-products (i.e. you can use it in your home). They also have plans for a 250kW unit. No price as of yet."
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Consumer Hydrogen Fuel Cells
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Great for RV's (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked 2 blocks away from one of their offices in Burnaby, and always wondered how they were storing the hydrogen in those test buses that circled the industrial complex......
NOT dangerous.. (Score:5, Informative)
Propane or Natural gas are more dangerous than hydrogen.
Everyone thinks hydrogen is severely dangerous because of the Hindenberg disaster... which modern science attributes NOT to the hydrogen in the blimp.. but to the canvas covering of the ship that was, unbeknownst to them at the time, coated in a reflective paint made of SOLID ROCKET FUEL (they did not know that aluminum-oxide and some other chemicals were explosive)
The hindenberg got screwed up because a spark ignited the coating... which quickly spread across the whole ship.
Another fact.. people report seeing huge orange flames billowing from it.. but hydrogen burns as an almost invisible blue flame.... of course, the hydrogen added to the fire... but wasn't the cause.
Re:NOT dangerous.. (Score:4, Informative)
I was present at an H2 balloon burning demonstration at Idaho State University a short time ago. The one filled with pure H2 went whoosh!, and a pretty mushroom cloud went up to the ceiling.
The prof then announced the next one was filled with a proper mixture of H2 and 02. I covered my ears, and felt the overpressure 35 feet away. My ears rang, even though my fingers were in them.
I think that's what you experienced.
Had the LZ-129 been filled with an oxy-hydrogen mixture, there would have been no flames, just a big hole in the lakehurst field.
Re:Fuel cells are the way to go, but... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean as oppposed to having natural gas piped into their home that would fill the house with gas if the pilot light just happened to go out while you on vacation? Tens of millions of families are living with this every day.
Re:Fuel cells are the way to go, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The most famous evidence of the unacceptable dangers of hydrogen was the Hindenburg explosion. A close look at the film shows some interesting results. The hydrogen went up (literally). The huge fire was caused by the diesel from the engines burning.
Then too, you have to consider "normal accidents" as well as the flashier exceptional ones. Burning hydrocarbons produce things link carbon monoxide. Not good. Very poisonous. Very insidious. Burning hydrogen produces water vapor. Much less nasty.
Of course, if you get your hydrogen by electrolyzing water and use electricity from burning fossil fuels you are still producing unpleasant stuff. But smokestacks are easier to track down and fit with scrubbers and other anti-pollution devices.
Re:Fuel cells are the way to go, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
The short-term question is where are people going to get the hydrogen from? That infrastructure's not in place yet.
I think one scenario that would make this thing particularly kick-ass right away is this: if the generator is to be used just for backup and emergencies - i.e. it will be idle most of the time - then you could slowly generate your own hydrogen at home from tap water and a solar-powered hydrolysis rig. FREE! Take that, Exxon.
I've seen the buses.. (Score:3, Interesting)
distributed power (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:distributed power (Score:4, Insightful)
More information on Hydrogen Fuel Cells (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.altenergy.org/2/renewables/hydrogen_
Great! (Score:4, Funny)
"You'll see it under Christmas trees or powering your Christmas trees by the end of the year," Ballard's Harris said.
Great, now all packaging will read "Hydrogen not included"
Unregulated? (Score:3, Interesting)
Only lasts 1500 hours. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is the case why do they list a 'Lifetime' of 1500 hours? That's only ~62 days.. definitely not as long as it is supplied with hydrogen
Not ready for primetime (Score:5, Informative)
However, there are number of issues that makes the short-term outlook for hydrogen difficult to justify running out and buying your own fuel cell...
In order to manufacture hydrogen in any meaningful quantity, "toxic" (environmentalist definition) by-products are an inevitable. To wit:
1. Electrolytic conversion from water requires electricity. The vast amount of electricity generated comes from icky dirty coal.
2. Extraction of hydrogen from fossil fuels still generates some toxic pollutants, and is still in relatively early stages of development.
No matter how meaningful quantities hydrogen are generated, greenheads will hate the fact that mother earth will incur vast amounts of greenhouse gases.
Shall we address the infrastructure problems associated with hydrogen? The costs of retooling fuel distribution channels to handle hydrogen?
Another issue conveniently ignored is the storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in its current form, is not particularly dense, requiring large tanks to store the equivalent energy stored in fossil fuels.
In the future, wind and/or solar power could provide the greenhouse gas-free hydrogen generation alternative to make it a sound fuel source from an environmentalist standpoint.
Advances in storage mediums, extraction and distribution should one day make hydrogen an exceptional fuel.
Re:Not ready for primetime (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, I got curious so, I decided to try and figure this out. I pulled some references and looked online, and the answer really surprised me.
This reference [chevron.com] gives the energy content of Gasoline as 115,000 BTUs/Gallon = 32 MJ/liter
This reference [ovonic.com] says that very cold, highly compressed liquid hydrogen has a density 71 g/liter
Adding to that my reference value of 918 kJ/mol for hydrogen combustion, I arrived at an answer of 130 MJ/liter, or 4 times that of gasoline. We should consider that it takes about 40 MJ/liter to compress and cool the hydrogen down to a liquid form (and more energy if you need to keep it cool for a long time), and also that tanks would likely be smaller in order to accomodate cooling and other apparatus. But that still leaves us with the surprising result that transporting liquid hydrogen is around 2-3 times more efficient than transporting liquid gasoline.
The key of course is that liquid hydrogen is so much more dense than room temperature gaseous hydrogen (by a factor of nearly 1000, 71 g/L vs 0.089 g/L gaseous at 20 C). Consumer uses will probably focus on compressed hydrogen or extraction from fossil fuels, since liqifying hydrogen is hard to do, but there is no reason energy suppliers couldn't ship liquid hydrogen if it really is that much more efficient than shipping gasoline.
Please do check my math since this was only just cobbled together.
Hydrogen and fuel concerns. (Score:5, Interesting)
The advantage to switching to hydrogen or another easily-synthesized fuel like methanol is that it centralizes the power generation, allowing you to switch to a different system (solar, nuclear, hamster wheels, or what-have-you) without requiring another upgrade to all of the cars and service stations on a continent. This is a very respectable accomplishment.
You can also generally install better scrubbers on a coal power plant than on a car, even before you start switching to alternate power sources.
Another issue conveniently ignored is the storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in its current form, is not particularly dense, requiring large tanks to store the equivalent energy stored in fossil fuels.
That's why I like the idea of using methanol as a fuel. You could handle it in existing service stations without too much refitting, and you could burn it in a conventional internal combustion engine (though you'd probably want a ceramic engine to avoid corrosion over time). Fuel cells can process it too, though with greater difficulty. Methanol's boiling point is low enough that you'd have to store it under pressure, like propane, but this isn't too difficult (we already have the infrastructure for it for propane).
Methanol can be produced by fermenting plants if you're desperate, or produced by direct synthesis if you have a source of power, hydrogen, and CO2 handy. Plunk a fuel plant next to a big city, and you have all three (water, exhaust, and the local power plant).
This gives us the advantages of a hydrocarbon fuel without having to short-circuit the carbon cycle or depend on exhaustible fossil fuel deposits.
Of course, we'll only really switch when fossil fuels become scarce enough to make this cost-effective.
More, Not ready for primetime (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true! Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan. Mirror/boiler schemes show more promise, but scraping togeter megawats from 22 watts per square meter is not easy and pilots worry they will be blinded flying over them! Do you want to get into the specifics of making and maintaining the millions of ugly little windmills that are needed to make windpower practical? Multiply your estimates to account for the fact that the wind generally blows when people don't need extra electricity. Do you really want to cut down trees to set up the farms? You did not mention biomass conversion as an indirect solar, but corn was made for eating! Cost = prohibitive on all of these options, so far about 10x the cost of normal generation.
The environmental future is in nuclear. No greenhouse and managable waste all nice and concentrated in a few very large plants. The infrastructure is in place for transmition, so no new scars are needed. The technology is well understood and the safety record is enviable.
Re:More, Not ready for primetime (Score:5, Informative)
Modern solar panels have 20 year warrantees.
The solar energy density at the Earth's surface is approximately 1000W/m^2, not 22W/m^2. The latter figure is for a particularly inefficient solar panel, say one from 20+ years ago.
Flying over a mirror/boiler facility shouldn't be much of an issue, because the mirrors are pointed at the boiler, not straight up.
Thousands of tons of organic matter suitable for generating methanol or methane are produced and collected in our cities every day in the form of sewage and food waste. All we have to do is collect it.
Re:More, Not ready for primetime (Score:4, Interesting)
The ugly little windmills of the late 70s and 80s are history (although some of the little buggers are still spinning.) Modern windmills are enormous, with blades the size of a 747's wingspan. New models can generate 2.5 Megawatts, but that's by no means a limit (output has jumped by 100-fold in the past 15 years.)
It'd still take a lot of those turbines to replace a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, there's a lot of development to be done (and lots of space in this country and offshore.) By the time we've finished building the next generation of nuclear plants, turbine output and efficiency will have increased significantly. When we're trying to figure out what to do with the first trainloads of waste, most non-nuclear countries will be building turbines and be generating power without fuel.
As to the ugliness... Well, I think they look pretty nice, actually. And if you've ever driven through the Great Plains, you'll probably agree that a few windmills aren't going to get in anyone's way.
5 year warranties and full of toxins? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you buy a solar panel new from a reputable manufacturer (say, Siemens) it will come with at least a 20 year warranty. That is, they will replace it if it falls 10% below it's rated wattage output any time within 20 years. And they pretty much picked "20" out of the air since they have no idea how long they'll last--all they're sure of is that it'll be more than 20 years.
Furthermore, depending on where you install it (Arizona vs Maine, say) it will produce the same amount of power required to build it in 2-7 years. In other words, however much toxins it puts out, it can clean them up before it's half-dead. A net gain. These are actual working numbers, not theory.
Solar power at ground level approx 1kW/m^2. Market available panels are 15-20% efficient which is 150-200W/m^2, not 22. And laboratory panels have been pumped up to 30% which would be 300W.
I'm not some whacko greenie that thinks nuclear power will kill us all. I'm just somebody that adheres to the KISS principle: the sun is already generating billions of times more power than we could ever use--why not tap into it with a simple collector rather than reinventing the wheel here on earth?
Also more info (Score:3, Interesting)
International Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
The long term solution would be to wean the USA off of an economy dependant of international oil supplies.
While many oil and energy companies may want to retain control of their assets in the area, solutions such as Fuel Cells may ultimately be the most elegant solution to the situation.
Fine, if they want to be poor, we can let them be poor.
This is something that I think the Bush Administration should go after Hard. Unfortunately, he may have some conflicts of interest given the support he has received from these very same oil companies.
Requires Alternative Hydrogen Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
A fuel cell is only truly zero-emission if it is catalyzing hydrogen gas from zero-emission sources. 95% of our current supply of hydrogen comes from natural gas. [h2fuelcells.org] So currently the fuel cell is only as clean as the natural gas reforming plant, effectively "burning" that gas and releasing CO2.
They're a great idea, but they're not zero-emission yet.
Re:Requires Alternative Hydrogen Sources (Score:4, Interesting)
solar or wind generation of electricity
electrolytic separation into H and O
low to med pressure gas storage
H O to fuel cell
Water back to gas generator
Sure it's elaborate but it is a clean way to store the day for nighttime use. I think we ought to use all these out of business fabs to make Si Solar cells.
And don't get started on how dirty fabs are...
It's not magic and it's not usable tomorrow (Score:5, Informative)
What to do about the terrorists (Score:4, Insightful)
The other day I heard the best suggestion yet on what we should do to "pay back" for what they did to on Sept. 11, 2001. We should invest the billions of dollars into products like this hydrogen fuel cell for our cars, and us breaking away from using OIL products/bi-products in our everyday transportation instead of spending billions in bombing a few people.
This way we get rid of the mid eastern funds of doing terrorists attacks and make the U.S. self sufficiant and able to use our own oil for the rest of our needs and not be dependant on other nations for anything.
Invest in the U.S.A. and running them out of their money.