Subject: The Hydrogen Energy Power Cell (Gordon).
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 094910 -0600
From: Roy Beavers
To: guru
--------------------------------------------------
........From EMF-L.......
.......Here is an item from New Scientist magazine which is not entirely
new to me.....Keep in mind that water is a plentiful source of hydrogen.
I knew about this concept during my years in the electric utility industry.
I recall that the BIG $$$$$$$ electric utility companies were not very
enthusiastic about it......
The surprising thing to me in the story below is that it is EPRI -- the
BIG $$$$$$$ electric industry research institution -- that is pushing
the idea..... EPRI did NOT invent it.....
I do not really see it being put into practice on a large scale in the
foreseeable future. The vested interests in the present technology system
(central station power plants connected by a huge transmission grid)
have too much political power and $$$$$$$. They also have a HUGE $$$$$$
investment in their existing system. They will likely block it ...
or delay it inordinantly.....guru......
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: (fwd) Green Files #15: The Joe Energy Cell + People power
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 06:40:48 -0500
From: Jeff Gordon
To: roy@emfguru.com
----- Forwarded message from jean hudon -----
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 00:00:11 -0500
From: globalvisionary@cybernaute.com (jean hudon)
Subject: Green Files #15: Urgent Action to Cool Down Global Warming
Hello everyone
Lots of important and urgent stuff in this Green Files #15.
[big snip]
* * * * * * * * * * *
From: "lilweed"
Subject: Subject: Global Manipulators Move Beyond Petroleum
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000
* * * * * * * * * * *
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000
From: Mark Graffis
Subject: People power
Forget big generators, in ten years' time we could be making and even
selling our own electricity. We might even save the planet
LONDON's fabulously successful Tate Modern art gallery has wowed the
public. Now it seems that the gallery, housed in the disused Bankside power
station, has captured the industrial zeitgeist, too. Power stations, the
behemoths of the industrial age, could be on the way out.
As politicians in the Hague this week thrash out ways of limiting the
amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, industry strategists are
forecasting the demise of giant, centralised generating stations. The
environmental benefits could be immense.
The people that spread thousand-megawatt power plants across the planet now
see the future in small generators, each little more than a millionth as
powerful, in basements and backyards round the world. One of the biggest
enthusiasts is Karl Yeager, who heads the US industry-funded Electric Power
Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. By 2050 he thinks that most of
our electricity will come from millions of microturbines, solar panels and,
most importantly, hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
"Within five years I'll be able to go down to Wal-Mart and pick a
microgenerator off the shelf to power my house," says Yeager. "I will take
it home and connect it to the gas pipe. It will generate power as well as
heating my house and producing hot water. And it will be much cheaper than
using the power grid."
Existing national power grids won't disappear. But Yeager believes they
will operate more like the Internet, as part of a complex web through which
people will supply electricity as well as downloading it. And countries
that don't have large-scale power networks will cease to need them. The
result will be greater efficiency, less pollution and an end to power cuts.
Dan Rastler, a researcher at the EPRI, thinks his boss is being
conservative. He notes that natural-gas fuelled microgenerators for the
home are being tested this year. "I anticipate some market penetration as
early as 2002," he says. The cost of a 5-kilowatt kit--which would provide
more than enough power for most houses--will be about $2500. Some will buy
bigger and sell to the grid; others will buy smaller and top up from the
grid when they need to.
Seth Dunn of the Washington environmental think tank the Worldwatch
Institute shares Yeager's vision. In a new pamphlet, Micropower: The next
electrical era, he writes: "An electricity grid with many small generators
is inherently more stable than a grid serviced by only a few large plants."
And it will be the perfect way to introduce renewable energy. It will also,
as it happens, be much like the world Thomas Edison envisaged when he
opened his first power plant in downtown New York in the 1880s and forecast
that soon every community would have one.
Two technological developments are driving the revolution. First, the new
generation of clean and cheap electricity generators small enough for
domestic use. Second, the emergence in recent years of "intelligent" grids
able to collect as well as distribute electricity at every node. These will
allow people to sell their surplus electricity or even trade regularly in
electricity.
Besides natural gas-powered electricity, the world is on the verge of
adopting cheap fuel cells, electrochemical devices that combine hydrogen
and oxygen to produce electricity and water. A big thrust for this research
comes from car manufacturers looking for a more efficient, less polluting
alternative to the internal combustion engine.
Yeager sees the involvement of the car industry as a big plus. Its
manufacturing capacity dwarfs that of the electricity generators. Every two
years it makes internal combustion engines with a combined power capacity
equal to all the world's electricity generating stations. Replace those car
engines with fuel cells and it takes no great leap of the imagination to
envisage millions of similar cells being manufactured to power homes. The
fuel cells will run on hydrogen, and Rastler says he sees homes receiving
piped supplies.
It is even possible that cars and homes might share the same power source.
"When you get home at night you will be able to drive into the garage and
plug the fuel cell into the home circuit to power the microwave and the
TV," forecasts Yeager. "There is no reason why the auto shouldn't be a
power source for your home when you are not driving it. In fact, vehicles
could provide an extensive power generation and storage network." A million
fuel-cell vehicles plugged into the grid could generate up to a tenth of US
electricity needs.
Hydrogen will have to be manufactured, of course, and for this there are
two routes. One involves splitting water molecules using electricity. It
requires much more electricity than you'll get back from the fuel cells, so
the gain only arises if that electricity is made using non-polluting
sources, such as solar, wind or hydroelectric power. The alternative is
extracting hydrogen from a hydrocarbon such as oil, methanol or natural
gas. Either way there can be real environmental gains in terms of carbon
emissions into the atmosphere.
On top of that, a big spur is the growing problem of power cuts. The ageing
and underfunded grid system in the US is creaking. Dunn estimates that
power cuts cost the country as much as $80 billion a year. Losses of power
lasting as little as a few hundredths of a second can cause mayhem, says
Yeager, "crashing servers, computers, life-support machines and automated
equipment".
"In the digital economy you need ultra-reliable power," says Dunn. "It's
got to be better than 99.9999 per cent. Conventional utilities just cannot
do that." That's why, says Yeager, California's computer companies are all
developing their own power systems. No wonder share prices for the pioneers
of micropower and fuel cells surged earlier this year in the US.
Countries with national power grids will continue to find them useful as
devolved power networks. But places that don't have extensive grids--like
much of the developing world--shouldn't bother building them. Currently,
1.8 billion people, almost a third of humanity, don't have access to any
more electricity than they can get from a car battery. Rather than copying
20th- century technology--as many countries are often expensively and
inefficiently attempting to do--their governments should "leapfrog to the
higher efficiencies of the digital age", says Yeager. Local networks
running on solar cells will provide all the electricity that most consumers
need, says Dunn.
But the biggest gain for the world could be in curtailing global warming.
EPRI researcher Steve Gehl anticipates that by 2050 disconnected
communities will gain access to basic electric power of the kind available
to Americans in the 1920s. Taken together with trends in the rich
countries, that would require a global generating capacity totalling three
times today's. Doing the job the 20th-century way would mean building a new
1000-megawatt power plant somewhere in the world every two days for the
next 50 years. And that would send carbon dioxide emissions soaring way out
of control.
The world's governments know that they need to do vastly better than the
Kyoto agreement if they are to prevent CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere
exceeding the safety ceiling of 550 parts per million being suggested by
the world's scientists. That's twice pre-industrial levels and 50 per cent
above today's. It is not consistent with a business-as-usual electricity
industry.
Yeager says it is possible to electrify the poor world while staying below
the 550 ppm ceiling. But it will require drastically cutting the volume of
CO2 emissions for every unit of electricity generated. He says that by 2050
we must cut average emissions to a fifth of those from a modern, efficient
coal-burning power station and to less than half those from natural-gas
plants. And to remain below the ceiling till the end of the century will
require moving to an essentially carbon-free energy economy.
Some people don't believe the job can be done without massive disruption to
the world economy. Yeager and Dunn both say it can be--and the first step
is to overthrow the tyranny of the multi-megawatt power station. Fred
Pearce
>From New Scientist magazine, 18 November 2000.
http://www.newscientist.com/
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[snip]
----- End forwarded message -----
--
-- Jeff --
"There's nothing left in the world to prove. All that's worth doing
is to love one another, using whatever means are available to serve."
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com