Australia is a curious place.  The cities are well defined.  Stand at the edge of Melbourne and on one side of the road are houses tightly packed together, on the other side Eucalyptus trees and bush as far as the eye can see, and that is very far indeed.  It is so flat there.

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.

Biodiversivist wrote:
<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.

Its full of dogs, full of dirt and grit.  Did I say dirty?  Upstairs is clean and we call it the museum, full of antiques.  The attic is wood, green, with a guest bed.  It looks like a farm house.

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.

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.

The mirrors reflect low winter sunlight into the basement.  We get summer-like overhead sun in the winter.  Summer sun in the cold winter is very nice!

We close it on winter nights and partially close it on hot summer days.

We made no effort to conserve power.  The possible differences may be hot water.  There are only two of us, all the water is preheated in the warm floor so we do not need to add much hot water into the mix, and we wash clothes in cold water.  We do not have a clothes dryer, use swirl lights, the refrigerator is efficient, and we do not have a furnace fan.

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.

It gives me another chance to tout my solutions.

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.

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