Whatever you use, it must be sufficient to handle your peak energy usage condition.
No it doesn't. If you need more power than your fuel cell delivers, you can pull it from the grid. If you have excess power, you push it to the grid. A home fuel cell only needs to be sized for the average load.
you do realize there were very few republicans dissenting against bailing out those companies.
Let's look at the facts:
Number of Republicans voting NO for both bailouts: 13
Number of Democrats voting NO for both bailouts: 1
Number of Republicans voting YES for both bailouts: 6
Number of Democrats voting YES for both bailouts: 35
Electric outage frequency really depends on your local weather and infrastructure. Neighborhoods with buried lines have a lot fewer outages than those with above-ground lines, for example.
Electricity is still far less reliable than gas. A lightning strike can send a voltage surge for miles, up and down trunk lines. There is nothing analogous for gas. With gas, any break can be quickly isolated. Electricity has to be delivered within a narrow voltage range, but gas pressure can fluctuate much more widely. If you have one of these dishwasher sized fuel cells, you could also install a gas storage tank that could store a day or two of gas, so even if there was a gas interruption, you could keep the fuel cell going.
I'd be interested in seeing this scaled up to power plant size, and then using its heat output to run steam turbines for MOAR POWAH!
Good luck running your turbine with steam at 160C. You might want to read up on the second law of thermodynamics.
If that's a concern, then I recommend you stop voting GOP. They're the ones that tend to be very vocally opposed to anything that might harm corporate profits.
Exactly! It was the Republicans that voted for the bank bailout
(1) The pipe is as easy to break as the power line
My experience:
Frequency of electricity outages: About every six months. More when I lived where thunderstorms are common.
Frequency of gas outages: Never. Not even once. In my entire life.
(2) It's more efficient to generate power on a large scale
This is only true for generators. It is NOT true for fuel cells, which is what this article is about. Fuel cells benefit little from "scale", and not enough to offset the transmission losses you avoid with local generation.
Someone is going to have to prove it.
Yes, but Elon Musk has made it very clear that someone will not be him.
But I don't think the focus should be on the SF to LA link. It would be far more useful to build something like this for commuting between, say San Jose and San Francisco. That is far shorter, and would be useful to far more people. You can take the Caltrain from SJ to SF, but that is slow and expensive. It is faster and cheaper to just get in the car and drive. Maybe the hyperloop could change that.
Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service
Do they? Have you read the contract? It is possible that the contract has a termination clause in the event of death. It is also quite likely that advocating or promoting suicide is a violation of the terms of service. Contracts have fine print for a reason.
If it weren't for CHP, I'd make it in five, every time, no problem...
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes. To do this in 3 hours, on existing roads requires an average speed of 382/3 = 127 mph.
Keep in mind that the SF-LA high speed rail is scheduled to be under construction for thirty years before it is operational. By that time we will almost certainly have self driving cars that can do 127mph safely. We could build streamlined self driving buses that could go from SF to LA in three hours on existing interstate highways for about 1% of the cost of the HS rail boondoggle.
If the technology is all ready then why doesn't he build a test track out in the desert to prove it?
Because he is busy running Tesla and SpaceX. He just proposed the idea, it is not his duty to "prove it". If it is a good idea, it should be adopted regardless of who proposed it.
Personally, I think neither HS-Rail nor Hyperloop should be built. They are both decades away, and by that time we will have self-driving electric cars. It would be far cheaper to build a streamlined self-driving bus that can do 120MPH on existing road infrastructure. It could go from LA to SF in about three hours. That is "good enough" and would be about 1% of the cost. The other 99% of the price tag for rail could be used to pay down our 14 trillion dollar debt.
It will be utterly insignificant just like increasing CO2 concentration in atmosphere from 0.00034 to 0.00040.
Wrong. If "h" is heat, then this is increasing h. But adding CO2 is increasing the derivative of h, or dh/dt.
We have no idea what this is going to do to the local ecology,
Yes we do. Natural ocean currents produce millions of cubic miles of upwelling every year. This is utterly insignificant by comparison. There would be far more adverse effect on the environment if they didn't do this, because China would otherwise burn coal to generate power. Deep ocean water is very rich in nutrients, so after the heat is exchanged, the warmed deep water can be dispersed on the surface to improve fishing yields.
Been hearing so many wonderful things about exotic forms of carbon but when do I get something I can buy ( at a reasonable price )?
Like a trip to the moon. They should use this stuff for the space elevator.
There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species.
There may be a reason that we age and die, but this certainly isn't it. Evolution just doesn't work that way. Individuals don't die for "the good of the species", they die for "the good of the gene."
I don't have any major problems with Jobs removing the program when the company was struggling. I have a problem with him not reinstating it when Apple got back to sound financial footing.
Or maybe he understood that the money belonged to the shareholders. If the shareholders wanted to give money to charity, they were free to do so. They didn't need a corporation to do so on their behalf. There is nothing admirable about being generous with money that doesn't belong to you. If you want to criticize Jobs for being uncharitable, you should point out that he gave away very little of his own fortune.
Friction is a drag.
