Re: OT: need some help with fuel cells
Technomage-hawke wrote: On Thursday 24 April 2008, Stephen P Rufle wrote: I remember reading about this guy in Wired magazine. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/play.html?pg=9 http://www.siei.org/mainpage.html The cost of his system seem a bit high, but maybe it would be a good place to start for the feasibility of different ideas. read that one. and no, I don't have $50,000 to spend. I was hoping for something more along the lines of $1,000 or less. Interesting... I thought I read about that guy before and that his total system costs were closer to $500,000, not $50,000. Maybe it's a different guy doing the exact same thing. In any event, I can't imagine that any non-toy system could be made for under $1000. Each of the components necessary are typically pretty expensive. A solar system approaching the kilowatt range (less isn't very useful except for playing around) is in the multi-thousands by itself. Electrolysis machines aren't cheap, either. And what about storing the hydrogen? That's going to take some huge tanks unless you have even more (expensive) specialized equipment. All that said, if you can figure out an inexpensive way to do it, I would absolutely love to hear about it! I've been researching alternative energy solutions lately and am only recently getting over the initial shock of finding out just how expensive they all are. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: OT: need some help with fuel cells
On Thursday 24 April 2008, koder wrote: Recreational vehicles and yachts use solar panels to power some decently sized storage batteries. If you put up enough of them you can run a computer system. batteries are all fine and good, but require frequent replacement (every 1-2 years down here in the desert), and have hazardous materials in large quantities. Unfortunately the cost of solar is escalating. My original system cost under a thousand dollars. Today it would probably be twice that. yep. that makes it harder for those on a fixed income to get anything worthwhile out of such systems as well (cost higher than cash available).I am sure I could build a full sized panel over time (by adding smaller modules to it). Of course when I build the next one I will ask it to do more with the additional expense. My wish list consists of more panels, bigger batteries, and a wind powered generator for cloudy days. same here, except I would like to build all my stuff from easily available materials. call it a poor man's energy policy. :) There are a number of sites in the net dealing with the topic of solar direct to batteries. They are far from complete. You will have to supplement with written material. I'm already getting that and worse. a lot of the diagrams online for any fuel cell are of the simple overlay type that are meaningless to those of us who want to build such a unit. so far, I have found NO technical diagrams or even any materials lists for something as simple as a PEM fuel cell. Now I have found plenty of places that sell individual parts for such (such as the backing plates, the PEM material itself and the field flow plates). This is some different from the fuel cell systems you asked about, but the fuel cells are using battery and solar and adding in the inefficiency of the hydrogen. The hydrogen is great for energy containment and transportation such as powering your car, but the equipment is a bit pricey. actually, from my reading, hydrogen is very efficient (unless you burn it in a system similar to internal combustion engines, then you are stuck with the waste heat, mechanical losses, etc). Direct conversion to electricity is 5-6X more efficient at a minimum (unless you are having to convert carbon heavy fuels using a reformer, then it drops below 50%). Cost will be directly related to how much electric you intend to use and store. You can start with part of it and expand as budget, knowledge and goals expand. well, from what I have been able to determine, one can get (from a properly designed fuel cell) approximately 3 watts/cm^2 of fuel cell surface area. that means that you don't need something monstrous to power a house. a fuel cell stack made up of plates 10x10 cm 10 cm deep will give you roughly 3 KW of usable energy. This is not theoretical, its the same type of units they use on the space shuttle. If you want to go further let me know. There are several people in the area working on this. I definitely do. hey, if it means getting a paying job to do this as well, I'm all in! --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: Proprietary elegance good enough? (Was: Re: OT: notebook shopping)
Craig White wrote: never missing an opportunity to pile on... [snip] I honestly think that the reason Apple has customers is because the people who buy Apple think the only alternative is Windows. Which is why so many Linux people I know also have Macs wait, that doesn't follow at all. Apple has so many customers being OS X on a Mac works so incredibly well for what it was designed to do. It is unparalleled as a consumer or desktop OS. More than any other OS, it Just Works(tm). Alas, it often does so in a very MS-like proprietary manner. The iLife suite, for instance, works together wonderfully. It's almost worth buying a Mac just for iLife, if that's what you do with computers. But it does so in a completely and totally locked down fashion. All files are sucked in, converted to the iLife formats, and good luck ever trying to get them out again. It can be maddening if you use media files in a multitude of players and editors spanning multiple OSes. It goes back to Alan's question (paraphrased) on whether one can justify being proprietary if the end result is elegant enough. In the case of Macs and (in particular) iLife, the answer for a lot of people is yes. Personally, I do all of my video editing in iMovie. I capture my video and store it on my Linux server, managed mostly by digikam (which I really wish had better video support... c'est la vie). I then mirror the files to an external drive formatted in NTFS (going down the rabbit hole already) which I bring over to my iMac. I then import the entire tree into iPhoto and it does it's proprietary magic. At this point, when I pull up iMovie, it can see and use any of my videos. I then export the result into a variety of formats when I'm done (some more proprietary than others). So for me, as long as my original files are free, then I'm willing to bend any absolute principals to get the level of elegance that only a Mac can (or does) give. Kurt signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: OT: need some help with fuel cells
On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 13:22 -0700, Technomage-hawke wrote: On Thursday 24 April 2008, koder wrote: Recreational vehicles and yachts use solar panels to power some decently sized storage batteries. If you put up enough of them you can run a computer system. batteries are all fine and good, but require frequent replacement (every 1-2 years down here in the desert), and have hazardous materials in large quantities. Unfortunately the cost of solar is escalating. My original system cost under a thousand dollars. Today it would probably be twice that. yep. that makes it harder for those on a fixed income to get anything worthwhile out of such systems as well (cost higher than cash available).I am sure I could build a full sized panel over time (by adding smaller modules to it). Of course when I build the next one I will ask it to do more with the additional expense. My wish list consists of more panels, bigger batteries, and a wind powered generator for cloudy days. same here, except I would like to build all my stuff from easily available materials. call it a poor man's energy policy. :) There are a number of sites in the net dealing with the topic of solar direct to batteries. They are far from complete. You will have to supplement with written material. I'm already getting that and worse. a lot of the diagrams online for any fuel cell are of the simple overlay type that are meaningless to those of us who want to build such a unit. so far, I have found NO technical diagrams or even any materials lists for something as simple as a PEM fuel cell. Now I have found plenty of places that sell individual parts for such (such as the backing plates, the PEM material itself and the field flow plates). This is some different from the fuel cell systems you asked about, but the fuel cells are using battery and solar and adding in the inefficiency of the hydrogen. The hydrogen is great for energy containment and transportation such as powering your car, but the equipment is a bit pricey. actually, from my reading, hydrogen is very efficient (unless you burn it in a system similar to internal combustion engines, then you are stuck with the waste heat, mechanical losses, etc). Direct conversion to electricity is 5-6X more efficient at a minimum (unless you are having to convert carbon heavy fuels using a reformer, then it drops below 50%). Cost will be directly related to how much electric you intend to use and store. You can start with part of it and expand as budget, knowledge and goals expand. well, from what I have been able to determine, one can get (from a properly designed fuel cell) approximately 3 watts/cm^2 of fuel cell surface area. that means that you don't need something monstrous to power a house. a fuel cell stack made up of plates 10x10 cm 10 cm deep will give you roughly 3 KW of usable energy. This is not theoretical, its the same type of units they use on the space shuttle. If you want to go further let me know. There are several people in the area working on this. I definitely do. hey, if it means getting a paying job to do this as well, I'm all in! A paying job? Argh, that is a supreme sacrifice. I am seeing fuel hydrogen cells offered for about $10.00 per watt of output. Larger models will lower cost per watt. The thing is how to obtain the fuel for it. If you are going to use solar panels you will need a lot of them. It can be done, but it will cost. Hydrogen, if you are going that route, will be just a storage medium. You lose degrees of efficiency each time you convert from one type of energy to another. A system designer needs to sit down with their slip stick and figure out how much power they want to supply for what. How you are going to store if for times the sun is not out, and how you are going to get it back out of storage when you need it. When you do your calculations don't forget that the difference between 12 volts and 120 is a factor of ten. A single digit slip like that will cause yo a great deal of embarrassment and grief. Heating and cooling will use astounding amounts of energy. Harold --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
