The beauty of hydrogen vehicles comes when you park them in your garage. You see, hydrogen fuel cells are not batteries, they generate their own electricity. When you are not driving and your car is sitting in the garage, your car is sitting there still producing scads of energy. Just pull the cord from under the hood, plug it into your handy wall socket, and presto! you’re putting energy back into the grid. The amount of energy generated by your car is then taken off of your monthly electricity bill. Sorry that I don’t have any cites handy, but I do know that at any given time 25% of North American cars are “sitting in the garage”. With the amount of juice they’d generate (Generate! They are not batteries!) parked cars would pump out enough energy to account for over 90% of N.A. power plants. North America has a crap-load of cars.
Just think of it, a nifty future - a kind of Energy Internet with the family car as your own node. All the while, the only byproduct being what we can drink and breathe.
-Coffeeguy
Pardon me if I miss a tone of sarcasm, but the following is nonsense:
in fact it might actually take energy to store the hydrogen (if it’s kept cold), and there’s no way it would be advantageous to generate electricity from hydrogen like that.
No, seriously in the UK, there was a big thing recently when people with diesal engines found that they could run their cars without any loss in performance on cooking oil (mixed with a little paraffin).
You’re not getting free electricity here. It took X amount of energy to create the H2. Even if you never used your fuel cell you would never get more than Y amount of energy out (Y<X).
Honestly it would be easier to just redirect the energy used to create the hydrogen into my house way the current electric grid.
The soybean Motorcycle guy got me thinking…on another board we discuss the advantages and feasibility of using Biodiesel and Waste Vegetable oil.
We’re a grass-roots organization dedicated to using alternative sources of fuel to break our dependancy on foreign petroleum.
With Biodiesel, you take vegetable oil or lard and heat it, ad an alcohol (methanol or ethanol) add an alkali catalyst (lye or potash), shake it up and let it sit. After a few hours, a layer of glycerine and sodium/potassium (m)ethoxide settles at the bottom, with a high-cetane oil at the top. This process (trans-ester-ication)converts the thick oil into a viscocity thin enough to flow through the injector orifices.
Another process is to use straight veg oil…even waste fuel oil straight from the dumpster in back of a fast food joint!
his requires fabrication of hardware to convert the engine and gas tank. Basically, hot antifreeze from the radiator is piped aroind the gas tank and along the fuel line: this heat lowers the viscocity of the WVO down to that of regular diesel.
You must remember to start up the engine on regular diesel until the WVO heats up, and also shut down on diesel to purge the fuel lines, lest standing WVO in the lines coke up ang clog the works.
Another thing to remember is to create artificial petroleum from coal…the Germans patented a method of this in the 30s.
Well you come out and say that hydrogen fuel cells produce “scads” of electricity “generate” their own power and could replace 90% of the NA power plants. I’m hoping they also do dishes!
My point is that you need to generate electricity first to create hydrogen fuel cells which could then be used to provide power to homes. Why the middle step?
I’ll grant you that some plans call for fuel cells that use natural gas across a membrane to produce the hydrogen, but that wasn’t your assertion.
You’d be better off using hydrogen as an energy storage medium. For off peak hours the electricity is “stored” in hydrogen tanks.
Now, that depends on how you store it.
From what I have understood there are at least four ways of storing it:[list=1,2,3]
[li]Liquified under pressure, at room temperature.[/li][li]Liquified at almost normal pressure - requires very cold temperatures.[/li][li]Interstitially in a metal-hydride matrix.[/li][li]Under pressure as a gas.[/li][/list]
All these have problems. The first requires a very[strong container (=> heavy) The second requires a less heavy container, but constant cooling to keep it liqueified( => takes energy). Nr three is currently under some pretty heavy research, and might just be the solution, but it requires energy to get the hydrogen out of the matrix. Finally the fourth option is lightweight and passive, but takes too much space for the amount of energy.
What storage solution did you have in mind Coffeeguy?
Here’s a thread which discusses a potential method of storing hydrogen which doesn’t involve keeping it cold. And here’s a thread on steam powered cars which gets side-tracked into hydrogen powered cars for about a page or more.
