...from car batteries? As someone currently living in hurricane country, it looks pretty attractive to me. It would help a lot to get off-peak pricing, though.

Do these new batteries require any special chemical elements? I know it's a problem with fuel cells.

Also, the whole Electron Economy is what many people (many greens too) have been proposing as a possible future. Powered by nukes, wind, solar and hydro.

You wouldn't have any of the hydrogen economy's problems.

One problem is of course, can it be constructed before oil gets too scarce? And what about Uranium? Thorium breeders could be a possible answer here.

It's interesting that perhaps the single biggest improvement one could make is to expose (at least partially) the consumer at the end to the actual cost of electricity. Namely, have customers pay less during off-peak times and more (when electricity can ten times or more its off-peak price) during peak times.

I recall a recent story about a study in Europe that figured out that commercial cold storage could transfer considerable power from peak to off-peak times. Ie, they could cool during the off-peak time and stop during peak times. Apparently, it took a significant bit off of peak power. But they would already be doing that if they had to pay more during peak times than off-peak times (and maybe they were).

You can come up with all sorts of wonderful ways to save energy or to transfer use from peak to off-peak times. But if there's no incentive to do so, then users won't do so.

A little off-topic, but why aren't houses in places like FL already built with banks of lead-acid batteries for back-up power? It wouldn't cost much, the technology is simple, and with inverters you could keep most appliances running for days. And you could easily set up the system to accept a charge from an automobile engine or generator. This system would have some advantages over generator-only systems, which are noisy, subject to theft and usually aren't suitable for condos and apartments.

Perhaps the demand for back-up power systems just isn't very high.

I recall a story (didn't save the link) about a handy EE type who filled his garage with auto batteries and got a respectable rate of return on the investment by charging them off-peak and selling the power back to the grid on-peak (besides having a whole-house UPS).

The return was marginal enough that it might not make sense if you weren't building the system yourself, though.

Do these new batteries require any special chemical elements? I know it's a problem with fuel cells.

What special chemical elements do you think a fuel cell requires?

I hate it when people try to differentiate between fuel cells and batteries. Both are electrochemical devices, and work on the same principles. The advantage of a fuel cell is that it produces power as long as reactants are supplied, whereas a battery has to store all of its reactants within the cell. Fuel cells are displacing batteries in a number of applications because of weight advantages, durability, and less derate at high and low temperatures. The question of hydrogen supply is a good one, and it's quite clear that adding an additional step of hydrogen production to the energy storage process causes a net reduction in efficiency. However, the other advantages of fuel cells mean that they're starting to displace batteries based on the most important metric of all: total life cycle cost.

I looked through my old copies of Mother Earth but couldn't find the article.

A guy built his homestead complete with windmill and old Ford Pinto engine to charge his used car batteries. He was payed to haul the batteries away and found that many were serviceable. He used the Pinto engine to run an AC generator to pump water to a homemade tower and relied on gravity to eliminate his AC run in well pump for daily water needs. He dual wired his place and used DC for lighting and ventilation. There was much more than that but you get the basic idea. That was in the early 70's.

This sounds like the 21st century version. Personally I'm all about being green, because I want to keep as much of my hard to come by green as I can. I'm a tight wad environmentalist.

Once this application gets widespread enough to offset the MARGINAL producers of petroleum, I expect we will see a substantial reduction in oil prices.

I also expect that all the bi***ing about "Peak Oil" and AGW (or is it AGCC now?) will fade.

What will replace it? What will all the math-deficient intelligentsia use to attempt to flog the rest of us?

Unfortunately, there won't be any real retribution to the power-grabbers. There wasn't at the end of the Soviet Empire, and there won't be this time.

*sigh*

Steady-state thinking, i.e., wrong. The rest of the world doesn't stand still when something new comes along to take advantage of an inefficiency; it builds new structures to move the advantage around.

Off-peak power is cheaper because the electric utility has to build the generator to support the peak demand, and has to keep it running despite demand falloff because of the way it works. (Well, d'oh! Sorry; just making the premise clear.)

If we use some technology, regardless of what it is, to buy cheap off-peak power and store it for use during peak periods the peak goes away and the entire premise of peak/off-peak price differences evaporates. It's a technique that will only ever be usable by a small minority, because at the moment it becomes popular enough to do any good the advantage of using it disappears.

Furthermore, if the technique is usable, both technically and economically, by individuals it's also usable by the power supplier -- who doesn't have transmission-line losses to cut into efficiency, can afford to build a really big unit for economies of scale, and can use a technology like sodium-sulfur that it would be insane to deploy to the general public, especially for vehicles. The generator runs at highly-efficient constant load, the energy storage supplies the peak, and the energy customer no longer gets a peak/off-peak price differential.

Never assume you can keep making a profit because the other guys won't notice.

Regards,
Ric

Carl, some rare metals like platinum are used in fuel cells, and if widespread mass manufacture is ever to take place, the price of those metals will skyrocket (I think they have already risen in price). I've talked personally with a fuel cell researcher about it. They are a real problem.

There has been lots of research in trying to find alternatives but it doesn't look very hopeful.

All this is of course with the "if I recall correctly" caveat.

Otherwise too, the "hydrogen economy" has other problems besides the inefficient source of hydrogen: what about the distribution and storage of hydrogen? It doesn't seem that easy either.

With accumulators there are problems too. Think about tanking your car: you may drive with a 10 kW power for 500 km and 5 hours, then fill the tank back up in a minute, meaning the tanking operation fills 50 kilowatt hours in a minute or has a "power" of 3 megawatts.
You wouldn't want to handle those kind of voltages and currents (say, 3 kV and 1kA) with an electrical loading system. So the "refueling" or energy replenishment for electric vehicles has to be done much more often and much much more slowly.

I'm in fuel cell development, and the use of platinum catalyst has definitely been a big issue. I can't go into specifics because of commercial confidentiality, but there are a currently two ways of attacking the problem: reducing the loading required, and developing alternate catalyst materials. Total catalyst loading has been reduced significantly over the past 10 years, and the trend is still headed down. There's also a lot of research underway (and this is all stuff pursued in national labs, etc. so not confidential) into ruthenium-, cobalt-, and palladium-based catalysts. I think that the loading reduction will probably allow fuel cells to get through early commercialization without a supply crunch, and the longer-term alternative catalysts are likely to provide a solution for wide-scale commercialization.

Nobody's come forward to provide hydrogen distribution infrastructure yet, but I don't think it's an insoluble problem by any stretch. If we distribute hydrogen as a compressed gas, we're back to a pipeline system like the one used for natural gas. Materials will change somewhat for hydrogen compatibility, but gas distribution has been used on city-wide scales since the 19th century. (In fact, the 19th century London gas system supplied "water gas" or "coal gas", which was a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen produced from coal.) Liquid hydrogen is probably never going to be a practical solution because of the problems inherent in handling cryogens. Most people can't handle dry ice responsibly! Hydrogen production is another open question, but I think the important point to note is that hydrogen can be produced from any number of different sources, and the market will find the best solution. Personally, I favor widescale use of renewables like wind power and geothermal energy. Geothermal could be extremely cool if we get into transporting liquid hydrogen in the same way that we transport liquified natural gas. Iceland has always had an abundant source of geothermal energy - couple that with electrolyzer technology, and they could be a new Saudi Arabia. It's all pretty out there, I'll admit, but it's fun being on the leading edge of some sort of technology development. Hopefully it leads somewhere, but it beats treading old ground anyways.

> The advantage of a fuel cell is that it produces power as long as reactants are supplied, whereas a battery has to store all of its reactants within the cell.

How many fuel cells can be "charged" by applying power?

How many fuel cells can be "charged" by applying power?

Regenerative fuel cell systems usually have a separate electrolyzer, but perhaps flow batteries (in which the anolyte and catholyte solutions are sent through a fuel-cell-like stack to charge/discharge) would qualify?