New Fuel Cell Twice As Efficient As Generators 246
Hank Green writes "A new kind of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell has been developed that can consume any kind of fuel, from hydrogen to bio-diesel; it is over two times more efficient than traditional generators. Acumentrics is attempting to market the technology to off-grid applications (like National Parks) and also for home use as personal Combined Heat and Power plants that are extremely efficient (half as carbon-intensive as grid power.)"
Let's see.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Your traditional generator is designed to be cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
Check their "Test Stand" (Score:3, Interesting)
That looks interesting. I couldn't find a price though. According to their FAQ a 5kw unit costs 175,000 dollars, I think the test unit should be less though since it has fewer tubes.
It's small enough that you could put it in the corner of your garage.
The website describes it as a tool for learning about fuel cells etc., but I think that would be limited by virtue of the tubes being manufactured (and sealed I assume). But it would be useful for "complete system" prototyping and experimentation.
Re:Not perfect ... (Score:5, Interesting)
How do they clean the fuel cell elements? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Your traditional generator is designed to be ch (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not perfect ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let's see.. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the only possible course is this:
Found company "Example A limited" on the cheap, stock capital 1$. You are of course owner and CEO of that company, filing your patent with the USPTO. The sole purpose of this company is licensing this single patent, the only employee is you and its only asset is your invention.
Then found company "Example B limited". Same procedure, you are owner and CEO. The purpose of this company is producing useful merchandise from your invention, which is of course only licensed (for 1$/year) from company A.
If you have 300$ to burn, you could even create a small holding structure, with "Example holding limited" as the "root" node becoming the owner of company A and B, further protecting you against liability and lawsuit risks, which always arise when dealing with start-ups in fierce competition and a 2 ton gorilla in the market.
Whatever happens to company B doesn't affect A in any way under most circumstances (except for malice and severe negligence, I think). And as company A doesn't do anything other than holding a patent and licensing it to anyone who wants, it won't go down easily.
If the worst case happens and B goes bust, you could still license your patent through A on your terms, for 1$/year for everyone except BigOil Inc., who would have to pony up, say, half a billion per month. Your patent, your terms.
Sticking it to The Man for fun and profit. Behave responsibly
Re:Not perfect ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The spec sheet: http://www.acumentrics.com/243ebdc5-db1f-410d-991
The home version: http://www.acumentrics.com/6d853cb3-92b2-46f3-b7f
Re:Any kind of fuel?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:To clear up a few questions (Score:3, Interesting)
That's where the hybrid-car equation breaks down; producing the fuel cells for those cars is so environmentally unfriendly that it takes many years to break even. By the time the current generation hybrid-cars is about to break even, most likely it'll be more environmentally friendly to buy a new car with the latest technology at that point in time.
Re:Not perfect ... behavior under partial load? (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, from Acumentrics FAQ:
That means you can shut it down about 100 times. Any more shutdowns and you may start to damage your unit. So if your nighttime load is near zero, sorry unlike a diesel, no cutover to batteries. You gotta keep the generator hot. This is gonna adversely affect the efficiency of home use.Re:Not perfect ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Product Page (Score:5, Interesting)
So where 175k may be way over the top at 50k these could sell like hot cakes.
Re:Let's see.. (Score:3, Interesting)
if you are (even temporarily) successful, file (some) eerily similar patents and found a NEW tiny company for everyone of them. Then shift your manufacturing/moneymaking business along to using the "new" patents. Every "new" patent is a layer of armor around your initial invention and a large "I am an industrious and successful inventor"-sign above your head, attracting and safeguarding investors and partners.
(Which of course must only invest in company B, not in your patent "holding cells" and never in company A!)
If you make new or really improved inventions, use the same template: one company for one patent and let the competition wear themselves out when they try to strike them down one by one. Make a nice and thick network of companies belonging to each other without anyone other than you knowing who owns what, keeping your legal enemies in the dark about where and whom to attack, forcing them to file hundreds of requests to patent offices and company registrars.
(This model is simplified and idealized, but it's a lot better than nothing. And orders of magnitude better than just starting your company with full liability with patents and manufacturing processes together.)
Blue-collar (Score:2, Interesting)
--
US job growth through solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Re:Blue-collar (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember the boom for computers? Gary Geek was the only guy in town that knew computers. In the 1980's, he set up a store, sold Geek Brand Computers that he built in the back. Wrote a small flat-file system to catalog the local radio stations music, and opened a BBS with 4, count them 4 modems.
By the mid-80's, he was taking mail order for the computers he advertised in Byte and Computer Shopper.
By the late 80's, he had closed his store front. Spun off his programming operations, and was building and shipping computers across the country. And his BBS operation was covering much of Southern California.
By the mid-90's, Gary Geek was a millionaire, his BBS had become an ISP that got gobbled up by the local telco for a huge amount of money. His mail-order PC business boomed and became a huge success with a web based "you build it" service.
By 2007, Gary Geek was getting ready to be launched into space and then return to his undersea habitat he's had built off the coast of Corpus Cristi. And has built the worlds first "Xena" museum in Seattle and charges $24 a pop for entrance. He also owns a basketball team, a football team, and a hockey team, all as tax shelters, cause lord knows that they aren't winning.
Oh, and the high school bully that gave him a hard time, is taking a his MCSE courses paid for by the State, cause he is an underemployed truck driver.
Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to start backing them now. Subsidize them, let them get a good base then buy them out.
Re:Somewhat offtopic but (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, concrete production emits a lot of CO2.
But that hardly makes a nuclear plant 'carbon intensive' because a 'lot' of concrete is used in it's production. Carbon intensive would be for things like coal - which produces carbon dioxide day in and day out in massive quantities to produce power.
For one thing, any large power plant is going to use a lot of concrete. I'd be suprised if your standard nuclear plant uses 20% more concrete than a similarly sized gas or coal plant in the same location would.
For another, the amount of concrete involved in building even a nuclear plant is a tiny fraction of concrete construction each year. Think about all the miles of road built each year. All the foundations poured. Many lar
Hoover Dam: 4.5 million cubic yards.
Nuclear Plant [nuclearalliance.net]: 400 thousand cubic yards
Pentagon: 400k cubic yards
Green Building [cemexusa.com]: 15k cubic yards, for a nine story, 293,000 square feet structure.
I was unable to find a figure for roads, but I did find that a concrete truck can carry 10 cubic yards, and one of them only gets you a few feet of road. 165 cy for a bridge of unknown size, but assumed small(as they were building a lot of them).
Re:Limited amount of "fuel" (Score:2, Interesting)
The U.S. people should absolutely want to move to a new fuel source that has lower or no carbon emissions for environmental reasons and should want to cut the lifeline with OPEC for political and environmental reasons. Energy independence is a wonderful thing, especially if its environmentally responsible as well, but using the populist argument/scare tactic of "we're going to run out of fuel; the apocalypse is upon us, oh no!" is every-bit as harmful to rational debate as the big oil companies who run ads about happy children and oil making the future brighter.
Re:The Product Page (Score:3, Interesting)
At $175,000 for only a 5KWh system...it would have to generate not only 5KW of electric power but also produce 5 gallons/hour of fuel before anybody would take one. And for crying out loud, Bush created this hydrogen/fuel cell hype six years ago and still there's not even progress enough for small scale use? Are we talking promises of the Holy Grail here or what? I wonder what other pie-in-the-sky hack he'll propose to the public before leaving office to prevent any movement toward fuel efficiency technologies based on fossil fuels? This hydrogen/fuel cell plan has worked great for he, Cheney, and gang. IMO.
LoB
Re:Not perfect ... (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd only use such a generator when you want heat and not when you just want electricity. The rest of the time you'd use mains electricity.
Legal Incentives Required (Score:3, Interesting)
The argument that cost is the sole factor is a lot of bull anyway - I've got a $23000 Prius on the road that cost less than the gas guzzling SUVs and trucks beside me on the highway. I've got better resale value than any of them as well - so clearly, it's not "just cost." At least some people throwing that excuse out use it to avoid feeling guilty about not having even looked into being environmentally responsible - or not admitting they could care less.
Re:The Product Page (Score:4, Interesting)
Awareness of the coming energy crisis and our pernicious dependence on foreign oil has sparked an increase in R&D and general interest in alternative energy that is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever witnessed before. As this page [energy.gov] demonstrates, yes, there has been sporadic research on SOFCs dating back to the 1930s, but all of it pales in comparison to the infusion of human and financial capital we're now seeing. The capitalist incentive to develop alternative energy never existed so long as oil was basically free, and of course miniscule amounts of government funding would never amount to much. But that was yesterday. This is the tipping point.
Re:The Product Page (Score:3, Interesting)
It was pretty obvious that he was talking about fuel that we pump up from the ground, not the end of all stored energy period (i hate when someone assumes a ludicrous position of their opponent so they can swear its wrong). This is fuel with the obvious advantage that we didn't need to spend any energy to create it, only to go get it. If we've gotten to the point that we can efficiently make enough synthetic fossil fuels to serve our daily needs, then we've also probably switched enough of our power infrastructure to new technologies that we could consider abandoning fossil fuels entirely anyway. If we're using fusion as our energy source, why would we bother creating carbon-releasing fuels instead of using the same electricity to charge fuel cells or whatever energy storage technique we come up with? Petroleum makes sense now because 1) it's a huge energy density for something we didn't even put most of the energy into making and 2) any electric alternative probably comes from coal anyway so while there may be some environmental advantages due to scale they are slim.
Re:The Product Page (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think it's a given at all. As oil becomes more expensive alternatives will become competitive and the price stabilizes, increases more slowly than predicted, or even falls as the alternatives become more efficient. Just sticking with alternative sources of petroleum and ignoring alternatives TO petroleum there is a LOT of other recoverable oil out there not (usually) included in estimated reserves. At the new higher prices and with better extraction techniques (developed to take advantage of high prices) Canadian tar sands are already cost competitive and have recently been added to Canada's estimated reserves. This has changed their estimated reserves from 5 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels (making their reserves bigger than those of any middle eastern nation other than Saudi Arabia). It's likely that eventually Venezuela's Orinoco tar sands will also be taken into account taking them from known reserves of a little under 80 billion barrels to 350 billion barrels & making their reserves significantly larger than the Saudi's. Things really get fun if the price of oil hits a sustained price between $75-85 per barrel and Oil Shale becomes competitive. At that point the USA goes from it's current ~20 billion known reserves to 800 billion barrels(!!!) That dwarfs the entire middle east's current conventional reserves. Around that same price point (IIRC) using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to petroleum also becomes competitive further increasing the USA's (and the worlds) petroleum reserves. These are all proven resources and the known techniques to extract them. Nothing significant needs to be invented, no undiscovered resource needs to be found (though it's likely that a lot more Oil Shale exists out there to be found, because it's not yet competitive nobody has bothered too much to look for it).
The key point though is that as we start to exploit those resources we'll become more efficient at doing so. It's currently estimated that it would take a price of over $75 per barrel for Shale Oil extraction to be profitable BUT that once we do the cost per barrel would drop to less than half that... so the price of oil could initially peak and then drop as new resources entering the market at the higher price become more efficient.
Re:Legal Incentives Required (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/hippies/make-your-