Here is a fun article from The Green Wombat retelling the "solar-to-hydrogen" car story for the millionth time. I read stories like this in Popular Mechanics decades ago. The article talks about using solar panels to store sunlight as hydrogen to burn in internal-combustion-powered cars. Australia has a lot of sunlight and summers can be hot. It would be far more efficient to use that sunlight to power swamp coolers to air-condition homes than to throw 90% of that solar energy away converting it to hydrogen and then burning it in a 30% efficient internal combustion engine. Passing hydrogen through a fuel cell to power an electric car or light a home would also be a lot more efficient.
Seattle has a very different situation. We have a surge of sun in the summer, very little sun in the winter, little need for summer air conditioning, but a significant need for winter heating. Ideally, the excess summer sun could be stored as hydrogen to heat a home with a conventional 95% efficient furnace supplemented with a passive solar hot-air system. More than once, I have looked into the feasibility of using solar panels to generate hydrogen to heat a home. Here is an old PDF that details just how complex that process is.
On one hand, this makes little sense. Why become a small player in the power-generation business? Then again, the thought of heating my home with hydrogen made with my own solar panels is appealing, so what would I have to do to pull this off? According to this article, you would need about half a million dollars for a 3,000-square-foot home. Which sums up the problem. Everyone wants something for nothing. Who needs a 3,000-square-foot home?
This project was put together by an engineer (nerd king) who wanted a hydrogen-powered house really bad and this was the only way he could get it. Anyone could have sat down with a pencil and paper and verified that it is possible to power a house of this size with sun and hydrogen. There was no need to actually build it. You can also go to the moon if you are willing to spend enough money. All he did was put a huge array of solar panels on his garage hooked to some commercial-grade hydrogen generator that also separated that hydrogen from the oxygen and then compressed it into ten gigantic gas storage tanks. He also got his hands on a herking big fuel cell to convert some of that hydrogen back into electricity. He hopes that with mass production, a house of this size could be powered with solar-generated hydrogen for as little as $100,000. That is unlikely to be so in the foreseeable future, but let's run with it. Assume his system is scaleable, and divide everything by an order of magnitude to get $10,000 to heat a 300-square-foot home. The problem, of course, is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Living off grid in a 3,000-square-foot home is never, ever, going to be feasible.
Coincidentally, 300 square feet is the exact size of the park model house trailer I lived in for four years after Boeing moved me out to Seattle from Purdue. I paid $4,000 for it (used), saved enough for a down payment on a small fixer house, and then sold it for $4,000. This suggests that for about $14,000 I could have lived in the Seattle area, almost off grid, with no mortgage. I also rode my bike the short distance to work, lugging a briefcase while wearing a jacket and tie. If I hadn't given up my life in a trailer, what would I have done with all of my extra income? This would make a good subject for another post.
I envision a future where most resources go into a home's energy system, instead of cavernous space and fine wood trimmings. Status symbols take many forms. There is nothing inherent about cavernous space being a status symbol. That can be changed, and small spaces, when well designed, are more conformable than big spaces, as anyone who lives in a medieval castle will tell you. Driving a Prius is cool for the moment, living in a trailer park is not. But what if you could make living in a small space cool? Living in that trailer with my girlfriend (now my wife) was one of the most enjoyable times of my young adult life, and I met some wonderful salt-of-the-earth trailer trash doing it. I will describe what it was like in another post as well.
Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power?
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Blowing up our clean energy future
Comments
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sunflower Posted 9:30 am
01 Feb 2007
There is absolutely no reason to have cars in Australian cities. In the bush one must stop and fill up at every gas station. Many carry extra engines because if something goes wrong the car will be abandoned in the outback. There are many lost and rusting cars out in the middle of nowhere. Not a good location for hydrogen cars.
Lots of sun in Seattle today, I've collected 20 kW passive solar energy all afternoon, its now a balmy 74 F. in here and the warm concrete will keep us comfy for a couple days. I don't have much use for Hydrogen toys.
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:46 am
01 Feb 2007
Sunflower's system is ideal for Seattle. Not so in Tucson where you need cooling. If a reasonably priced system for converting summer solar power into hydrogen existed, sunflower could heat on those many cloudy winter days with it instead of burning wood. Both methods have a fairly low carbon impact, but hydrogen would burn a lot cleaner and wouldn't require the collection and distribution of wood stove fuel. But for now, since hydrogen is basically a pipe dream, his system is much more cost effective for this part of the country. Wood stoves in Seattle are OK as long as they are few and far between. Smoke bans also tend to coincide with our coldest and sunniest days.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GRLCowan Posted 11:26 am
01 Feb 2007
It's only automotive fuel cells in general that are more than 30 percent efficient, chemical-to-DC; there's no particular one that is. Lower-specific-power air-breathing fuel cells have been known to hit 40 percent at beginning of life, and would indeed then, if hooked up to efficient lamps, be an efficient way of using hydrogen for illumination. But deep-cycle lead-acid batteries are much better for using sunlight of hours earlier for that.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:05 pm
01 Feb 2007
That one sentence was thrown out without much thought. You are right, a 30% efficient fuel cell driving an electric motor would be just as inefficient if not more so than burning the hydrogen in the ICE. And lead acids would be much better to store the previous day's surplus to use at night for lighting. I was thinking more about long term storage. You could fill a couple of tanks with hydrogen to use in cold months with little sunshine to heat with (95% efficient furnace) but you couldn't do that with lead-acids. They need to be used soon after they are charged. So, I guess hydrogen makes even less sense in Australia. It would have better application in Seattle, should it ever move beyond pipe dream status.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:16 pm
01 Feb 2007
<bockquote>Wood stoves in Seattle are OK as long as they are few and far between.
...As long as one does not mind creating few-and-far-between cancer alleys.
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sunflower Posted 2:51 pm
01 Feb 2007
My inspiration for the green building experiment came from my visit to the Lovins home.
Every building location has unique energy opportunities and limitations. The Snowmass, CO. high altitude Lovins site is a south slope with lots of winter sun. Our Fox Island, WA. site is a north slope in a tall fir forest. We get zero sun within 30 days of the winter solstice and only partial sun through the trees the rest of the year. If we could make passive solar work here then such an approach would have wide applications elsewhere. The rule I followed was that each energy subsystem, if new, must be cost effective or not employed. That meant no photovoltaic cells.
The components are simple off-the-shelf building materials and construction techniques -- 8 inch reinforced concrete walls, concrete floors, exterior polystyrene insulation, siding, windows with shutters, air to air heat exchanger, wood roof, SunFrost refrigerator, front loader washer, clothesline, plus electric heat (1.8 kW) and electric hot water for accurate energy input measurements.
Because the load supporting concrete walls were designed to be inside and dry (concrete thermal mass), the expected lifetime of the building was in excess of 500 years, I think much more, so our esteemed commercial engineers made it resistant to our big bi-millennium NW earthquake, lots of grade 60 rebar and concrete testing.
Our planned application was lab and shop ground floor, office and living upstairs, storage and guests in attic. The long-term plan is school or cave for future humans. We made no interior small rooms (except the bathroom under the stairs), so each floor is one big room. The foot print is 27 by 45 feet plus a 10 foot wide sun room on the ground floor. Only the sun room roof is above ground (45 by 8 foot covered skylight, 20 kW net solar input) because the house is bermed into the north slope. Our hot water is preheated from plastic pipes buried in the sun room concrete floor.
My construction budget was $40,000 (1994 USD) for everything. I got lucky at Boeing Surplus. All the foam insulation, siding, wood, electrical, plumbing, and roof came from recycled components. I did all the work.
Here are the numbers in average kilowatts hours per day total energy input.
With sun 12 kWh
Without sun 50 kWh (Dec.-Feb.)
Two or three hours of winter sun will heat one winter day.
After eight years, and a cold wet November, we had had enough data and bought a low-emission wood stove. We never use electric heat anymore.
Now every month is a flat 12 kWh per day average. (The electric hot water is the next target.)
We have had some 100 F days and extended heatwaves, especially last summer, but our insulated thermal mass keeps the home at 73 F all year, day and night, nice and steady. It is amazing so little energy can feel so comfortable.
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Palaces Posted 6:31 pm
01 Feb 2007
(1) Today 1700 MW PV
(2) Doubling installed reduces the price 19%
(3) Growth rate 25%/yr - 3 yrs to double
The date that the entire consumption of electricity from PV occurs can be projected to exact month in the future.
Download spreadsheet
http://www.hydrogenfreedom.info/scenario_1.xls
Tex...
Thirty-two years and six months, July 2039, 1,851,556,663 kW PV, cost will then be $1.01/watt
A double capacity is figured, which is accomplished in thirty-five years, and the cost will be 85 cents per watt.
Hydrogen Economy fourfold increase in PV, accomplished in 41 years, in 2058, cost of PV 60 cents per watt installed.
Three years later the production will have increased to double all the energy of every form currently used, costs will be 50 cents.
http:ecosyn.us PALACES for the People, H2-PV, PV-Breeders acres of PV, tons of Hydrogen
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sunflower Posted 1:52 am
02 Feb 2007
http://www.harbornet.com/sunflower/xhouse.jpg
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:57 am
02 Feb 2007
We make no real attempt to conserve it other than to turn off unneeded lights here and there. Typical of most because we have no real incentive to do otherwise. What people need are incentives, preferably, not coercive ones.
Sounds like you grab the sun with two huge sunrooms instead of flat plates. You essentially have a 45 foot long solar collector on your roof that stores heat in your concrete that can warm your house for short periods when the sun isn't shining. How do you keep your house from becoming a solar oven in the summer. Do you simply close off the sun rooms?
The beauty of your passive design is its simplicity and cost effectiveness. Government incentives for solar hot water created a spate of growth a few years back but many of those solar water systems have since failed and have been dismantled. They were too complex, consisting of pipes, antifreeze, valves, storage systems and the like. The return on investment proved not to be worth the effort for many.
I think the key to making solar more common in Seattle is to give people designs that make a statement. Throwing in a few obvious panels to supplement passive would do that. They would be badges of honor and become topics of discussion, raising awareness, creating competition. A mix of a few photovoltaics for show and as a kind of art sculpture, passive to grab winter sun, and a few flat plate air collectors to get warm air into parts of the house that passive can't reach, like the basement.
Obviously, photovoltaics make little sense in this part of the country at present costs. However, flat plate air collectors are simple and cheap. They do a great job heating a home on sunny cold days. Storing heat for night time use is where things get complicated and expensive. Conservation trumps all.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:03 am
02 Feb 2007
The whole point of using hydrogen is that it gets people away from this whole "rigging it up" in your backyard mentality for solar.
Don't you get it? Hydrogen frees the panels from the power target. It's a carrier! Putting the hydrogen generator in your garage is like making Yahoo put its server into your garage so you can "access the web". There's no need!
You put the solar panels where the sun is, where it's the most powerful and generates the most energy...then you pipe in the hydrogen to fuel cells at your home.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:06 am
02 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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sunflower Posted 2:18 am
02 Feb 2007
We close it on winter nights and partially close it on hot summer days.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:24 am
02 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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sunflower Posted 2:33 am
02 Feb 2007
The house service is only a 30 amp line so I built a micro to control discretionary loads - the electric hot water is switched off automatically when the microwave oven and Cassandra's hair dryer demand power.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:43 am
02 Feb 2007
We also have a 200 amp service.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 5:15 am
02 Feb 2007
Water and home heating with direct solar, passive as with sunflower's excellent design, and active as with a trough collectors heating a pumped fluid.
And really efficient appliances, like a dryer that uses stored heat instead of electric heat, and releases that heat back into the home.
In your case of cloudy, rainy winters a geothermal heat pump to do the rest of the heating. And really long term heat storage built into the home. Heat storage phase change salt in the basement maybe?
Solar electric power cogenerated in the same trough collectors. Extra electric power for home use from offshore wind/wave in your region. And from river current power, without hydroelectric dams. Backup power from biogas digestion of waste with the biogas used in solid oxide fuel cell/turbines.
Natural gas as the ultimate fossil emergency fuel, hundreds of years worth can be converted from coal deposits underground.
It's all possible. But powering a home with Hydrogen separated from water with solar electric power? Economically impossible for all but the very wealthy.
And a bad idea even then.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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