diy solar

diy solar

WA tourist town of Denham to become zero-emission community powered by hydrogen

Fuel cells are old tech and have been around since the 19th century (ref). AFAIK, Fuel cells are only expensive because they're not mass produced (assuming you're not using platinum electrodes). But, AFAIK, they're not mass produced because the fuels tend to have impurities that foul the electrodes - so that made them impractical. Always seemed to me the way to go would be to have removable stacks that could be exchanged like propane tanks where a business "cleaned" them and sent them back. They're in a number of cars now, as those get wrecked there should be some appearing cheap on ebay. Might be great for a boat.
 
yes, fuel cell operation is costly, so the power obtained cost a lot more than other ways. But if you are in a space shuttle , this is not a problem.
 
Not to mention the embrittlement issues which are still unresolved and the costs for platinum adds up pretty quick. There is stuff "in labs" which so far seem to address these points BUT they are 10 years from a marketable product IF they get there. The other catch with Hydrogen, is at present 90% of it is sourced from Natural Gas processing which in itself is a terrible process. Fossil Fuel companies are pushing Hydrogen as a way for them to keep generating income...

There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis; which account for 48%, 30%, 18% and 4% of the world's hydrogen production respectively. Fossil fuels are the dominant source of industrial hydrogen.
Click to expand...

IF hydrogen could be made from Sea Water and cracked using Solar Power to create the oxygen & hydrogen (being tested now with few different processes) that it would become more "neutral". The material issues are being looked at with some really interesting ideas but none of them are practical yet.
 
in that case you should consider the hydrogen like a battery.
it is not a source of power, it is a load, because like battery, you will only get back what you put in the tank.
So yes, a cheap way to produce hydrogen is electrolysis (and you produce oxygen at the same time, so you can use it as brown gas) and if you have tons of unused solar panels it could worth the pain.
the other problem is to store the gaz, because you produce it at current floor pressure, so it will represent huge volume, and compressing hydrogen is not not an easy job.
the best way would be to use it to directly heat water, and store it for later use, or make a steam generator.
Probably using the the Panels to produce electricity would give a better yield and electricity is easier to store in batteries.
 
"What Horizon Power has found is that they've got poles and wire running 20–30 kilometres out to customers that might only produce $20,000 worth of revenue, and it's costing them $2 million a year, say, to keep those poles and wire in good shape," he said.

WOW...
I had no idea the grid required such maintenance costs...
 
that's what they said, but at the same time, you have California burning because they do not take care of their lines.
so they wait until the pole fall on the ground before spending any money for maintenance, you can be pretty sure.
 
I'm not sure how much of a problem they have with growth over there but here in the tropics on the east coast it's a real problem. A friend has a house in a small cluster of houses in a rural setting and has 11kV coming up to his property. The rate sapplings keep springing up means it's a never ending task for the electricity company. Keeping a corridor at least 30 metres wide clear of anything that is likely to grow within reach of 11kV lines in terrain with poor access isn't cheap.

Higher voltages warrant a wider corridor.
 
Some people are also forgetting a tiny little detail of great importance. Up until just a decade ago, Big Power Co's were spraying defoliants over transmission line routes & corridors to chemically manage growth. They were pretty well forced to stop because of the toxic & harmful nature of these chemicals. Heck in some places they were still using Agent Orange for cripes sakes.... Once they sopped that they never stepped up the manpower needed to do that same maintenance and now it's an after thought now.
 
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