Wind and hydrogen combined - new study

[Chuck Morrison]

There's a new study being done to see how hydrogen can be efficiently used as storage for a wind powered system. It's being done at NREL in Colorado. Yes, these are they guys that got laid off two weeks before Pres. Bush came to visit to promote how his administration was pushing alternative energy. They got hired again really quick after the public put 2 and 2 together.

The link to the story is here (http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=46867).

[Rob Beckers]

Ultimately this comes down to the problem of finding a better battery (meaning that using electricity to create hydrogen, which is then used later to create electricity again, is also a form of a battery).

This hits the nail right on the head I believe: The holy grail of energy is not so much in creating it, but in storage IMO. The perfect battery.

There are several interesting developments in this field. One is in trying to use a very large capacitor as a battery. Two that I know about are the use of nano-tubes (http://www.physorg.com/news10525.html) (Here's another link at MIT (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/batteries-0208.html)), and a more conventional development (http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/15/technology/disruptors_eestor.biz2/index.htm) of greatly improving the capacity of a traditional capacitor through better insulators. EEStor received a patent not too long ago on their technology. Now let's hope one of these companies actually pulls off the production of these super capacitors. So far they are mostly 'dreamware'. Imagine the possibilities, even the more mundane kind: Throwing out all those very heavy, expensive lead-acid boxes and replacing them by cheaper and smaller capacitors that never need to be watered, and last virtually forever.

Here is an interesting little article (http://www.mpoweruk.com/alternatives.htm) on alternate forms of energy storage.

[Wilco Vercoelen]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/04/prince_edward_i.php

Hydrogen Village construction PEI

[Lion Kuntz]

There's a new study being done to see how hydrogen can be efficiently used as storage for a wind powered system. It's being done at NREL in Colorado. Yes, these are they guys that got laid off two weeks before Pres. Bush came to visit to promote how his administration was pushing alternative energy. They got hired again really quick after the public put 2 and 2 together.

The link to the story is here (http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=46867).

Why do we need any more studies?

It takes $1,000,000 per mile for transmission lines to carry the wind energy from North Dakota to the closest place anybody wants to buy it. Add that to the megabuck per megawatt of wind generator costs and is anybody left who doesn't understand why wind is not making all of our power right now?

You still have the same problem with hydrogen, negotiating a patchwork of right-of-ways to move the product to market costs lots more than the pipes.

Put it in cheap Hindenburg-sized air-barges towed at a safe distance, and not, this time, painted with rocketfuel or populated with people on board next to tons of diesel fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
200,000 m³ (7,000,000 ft³) of gas

Each one of these air barges can carry 179,200 kilograms of hydrogen to market, equal to 60-filled 3,000 gallon gasoline tanker trips of equivalent energy. It doesn't have to go to cities, just to the nearest trunk of the national pipeline grid. You can begin by using a 50% each mix of H2 + CH4 natural gas without even dedicated H2 pipelines. Pipelines themselves represent millions of kilograms of H2 storage: just increase the pressure a little bit on the 400,000 miles grid and you are storing weeks of usage supply.

Since the air-bag barges are unpopulated and unpowered, towed by Goodyear blimps, they are nothing but bags, literally, inflatable structures using gas-pressure cell-strutworks to give them aerodynamic form, they are cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
245 m long (804 ft), 41 m in diameter (135 ft)

1st approximation cylinder: Area = C x L
C = pi x D = 129 ft
L = 804 ft.
Area = C x L = 103,716 sq.ft. = 11,524 sq yds. fabric.

$86,430 outer skin fabric costs at $7.50 yard dacron. How much did you say the equivalent of 60 aluminum gasoline tankers were again?

These numbers can of course be refined -- I didn't locate volume wholesale pricing in a fast scan, nor have I considered the coating that keeps the leak-loss down to 1% per day for the average length air-miles tow-trip, but a 1st approximation shows that it is economical to pursue this pathway further.

Even at $1 million per air-barge it would be the same price as one single mile of high-power transmission lines on the ground. If it cost $1m/year it would take 1,000 years for ground lines to match the low cost for a 1,000 mile length ground electric transmission line. 1000 ground miles covered by straightline as-the-crow-flies air travel is 20 hours at 50 mph. probably more like 12 or 15 hours from take-off to drop off. The empty air-barge could be trucked or trained back for refilling in a folded state - 11,524 sq yds. dacron fabric, you could load 8 of them on a flatbed trailer for return trip.

That same flatbed truck coming back from the windfields of Dakotas could carry 7.5 acres of cast silicon PV ingot blocks, or 15 acres of sliced waferstocks ready for processing into cells for PV panels on the return trip. That's the cheapest form of transporting wind energy from the windfields to where consumption is: around 4 to 8 megawatts of PV peak hourly production per 18-wheeler trip.

It costs a billion dollars of infrastructure to get the first megawatt of electricity out of the remotest best windfields. One 18 wheeler truck can carry 120 megawatts of PV sliced waferstock per year if two drivers do one round trip of 2,000 miles every 3 days at an average driving speed of 28 miles per hour. You might want an armed escort because even at 2.5 cents a watt the load is worth $3m as completely fungible merchandise.

[Lion Kuntz]

Ultimately this comes down to the problem of finding a better battery (meaning that using electricity to create hydrogen, which is then used later to create electricity again, is also a form of a battery).

This hits the nail right on the head I believe: The holy grail of energy is not so much in creating it, but in storage IMO. The perfect battery.


Nope: H2 burned in Solid-Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC) or Molten-Carbonate Fuel Cells (MCFC) output eminently useful 400 degrees C steam, which gives both electric power plus valuable heat. You could use Kalina Cycle or Stirling Cycle or turbines to get more electricity, but a lot of electricity or equivalent energy is burned just to obtain desirable heat. Pizza hut could operate their dishwasher and hot water, winter heating and their ovens, plus light the restaurant just with intelligent fuel cell designs. You can even get air-conditioning and refrigeration out of heat energy sources.

One of the largest electric consumers in any house is the electric hot water heater. People can pay over $1,000 a month in the northwest heating their houses and electricity is the smallest of their energy bills. There's not just 33.5 kWhs of LHV in a kilogram of H2 but there's 114,000 BTUs. You don't need vented burners either. Actually, the HHV value of H2 is more appropriate in home heating situations: 135,000 BTU, BECAUSE you don't need the venting so the heat embodied in the (waste) steam product counts for heating or hot water if that's what you are really after in the first place.

All of the H2-PV accounting systems are fraudulent. If a barrel of oil made only gasoline and you threw the rest away, it would cost $20/gallon for high test. If cows were butchered just for steaks and you threw the rest away, a steak dinner would cost over $100 at the butcher shop.

Why then discount the 8 kilograms of O2 generated in electrolysis of 9 kilograms of water to get 1 kilogram of H2?

H2O2 can be produced at the rate of 17 kilograms per kilogram of H2 and that has a market value of $24 if you get the 40,000 gallon 50% dilute tanker truck volume discount.

H2O2 can displace dioxin-laden chlorines in water purification and sewage works, in pulp mills and fabric bleaching, and it makes a damn good rocket fuel in it's own right. The 365 mph land speed record for two wheel-vehicle is held by a two-wheeler on H2O2.

Medical O2 and pilot O2 is very pricey stuff.


I haven't checked to see if MCFCs can do electrolysis, but SOFCs certainly can, as can PEMFCs. That means your electric generator is making hydrogen from your PV while the sun shines, and you don't need two devices to pay for, because the SOEC is a SOFC in reverse. SOFCs use no precious metals and MCFCs only need cheaper nickel as catalysts.

When you cluster certain technologies together they become synergetic: the whole is greater than the sums added of each part. That means taking parts and doing accounting in isolation is totally bogus. There's a reason that petrochemical plants and refineries look like spaghetti mazes of pipes, and it's not because engineers are too dumb to make it neat and clean looking. The terms contraflow and heat exchanger means something. Every single industrial process squeezes the efficiency -- only H2 has to be accounted without opportunity to have equal efficiency clustering. That's not just "unfair", it's unreal.

H2-PV is NOT what Exxon PR agencies try to portray it. Exxon themselves is one of the world's largest producers of H2 every day, and they use every bit of it turning the scum at the bottom of the oil drum into more gasoline by "hydrocracking".

People have listened to Exxon's spin for so long they no longer know how to think about hydrogen without Exxon whispering in their ear "it's no good, fergeddaboudit."

Sunlight is so cheap I use it to illuminate 8 acres for hours per day instead of turning to the electric utility. PV is sand and sunlight with practically nothing else, a few parts per million of other things, some hairlines of silver-aluminum, some beercans, some wires. At 3O cents a watt it is overpriced more than ten times over. Hydrogen is nothing but PV and sunlight and water.

There's nothing in the entire universe made of more economical materials in super abundance all around you. You can store more hydrogen in a gallon of activated charcoal than you can in a gallon of liquid hydrogen, and you can store it in charcoal at room temperatures and normal pressures -- WHAT? Exxon didn't tell you that part? Why am I not surprised? And I suppose they forgot to tell you that you can store lots of it in zeolite-ZSM-5 or chabasite. Didn't Exxon's Mobil division INVENT zeolite-ZSM-5? I'll have to look that up, about 35 years ago if I remember correctly.

[Joe Blake]

The empty air-barge could be trucked or trained back for refilling in a folded state - 11,524 sq yds. dacron fabric, you could load 8 of them on a flatbed trailer for return trip.


Why even bother with doing that? Why not build the road vehicle chassis into the airship, and it could drive itself back. Fill up with hydrogen at the destination and it could be self-mobile. Fly out, drive back.

Since it's only going to be carrying the driver plus the empty bladder, it wouldn't need to be a big, heavily built chassis. Single seat, streamlined, possibly lots of carbon fibre, maybe even the size of a sedan car but much lighter. Just the engine and fuel tanks. Perhaps quick detach tanks. Drop off the empty tank(s) on landing, click in full ones, voila. Refill the tanks for the next barge.

Joe

[Lion Kuntz]

Why even bother with doing that? Why not build the road vehicle chassis into the airship, and it could drive itself back. Fill up with hydrogen at the destination and it could be self-mobile. Fly out, drive back.

Since it's only going to be carrying the driver plus the empty bladder, it wouldn't need to be a big, heavily built chassis. Single seat, streamlined, possibly lots of carbon fibre, maybe even the size of a sedan car but much lighter. Just the engine and fuel tanks. Perhaps quick detach tanks. Drop off the empty tank(s) on landing, click in full ones, voila. Refill the tanks for the next barge.

Joe

You realize I hope that my suggestion was just off the cuff and the product of maybe 30 seconds of lifetime thinking on the idea. I have no idea what kind of coatings exist that could hold in hydrogen for any length of time -- the Hindenburg coating worked but it would not be flexible to fold up like a parachute, and I don't know if anything could. I also haven't given any real thought about squeezing the thing like a toothpaste tube to get the gas out either.

All I know for sure is land rights are the stumbling block to getting the best windfields integrated into the power grids. Solar PV silicon may be the best way to export wind. 90% of all the high power consumption can happen in compact solar factories in the windfields. They are not really even the high-tech end of PV manufacture, just high power consumption. Using LOCAL H2 production and storage, plus fuel cells for power generation and you have the ideal high power supply cheap that PV needs to come way down in price. For that matter, It only takes a four more kilowatthours per kilogram to refine Aluminum from Alumina in the electrolysis process. The EMC casting furnaces can do either or both, since the electromagnetic levitation keeps either from contaminating the containment field, there's no cross contamination. EMC was used on aluminum casting for 20 years before it was first tried on silicon.

Both products use the same acids in large quantities, which could be integrated into the technology cluster, so that waste energy from one thing is scavenged for distilling, pre-heating, purifying.

It's rapidly getting too complex for one guy to keep straight, but it ought to be methodically researched how to get the most from the windfields without trying to export energy products. I'm starting to believe that every ton of PV will need another ton of aluminum casting inverter heat sinks. The silicon in a 2,000 sq.ft. roof is 116 kilograms, but the 24 kva inverter weighs 90, not counting the heavier transformer. Planning tons of PV production without planning tons of inverter production is a non-starter. Somebody needs to come up with some credible figures for how much wires is needed for one megawatt of PV panels while we're at it.

The more I think about it, the better I like my Eagle's Roost towers with homopolar generators making high-current DC. That's what you want for electrolysis of Aluminum or H2 production from water electrolysis and the construction is cheap and simple. No windings at all. No driveshafts. No gears. Really, basically, just one composite moving part is essential, and that's protected from the worst of the weather giving lots of freedom to choose materials. The towers themselves are cheap, made essentially of one repetitive building block used over and over and over, stacked as high as you dare go.

Check it out, if you haven't seen it:
http://h2-pv.us/wind/Introduction_01.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/Big_01.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/strip_mining/strip_mining.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/towers_prior_art/towers_prior_art.html

At the time I made those pages I was considering patenting the structure, so I wasn't very descriptive. A year has passed since first disclosure and I let it slide into public domain. I still have some ideas for the working parts inside that I haven't let go of yet. Maybe I will, but not yet. Anyway, nothing is disclosed on those pages about the works, other than that each horizontal repetition is another generator independent of all the ones above or below it. You can let your own imagination run wild.

It could be the world's first 100 megawatt wind tower, or 500 MW

Did I mention that could be bottom anchored at sea or semi-submersible floating buoy design as well? They could serve as hub stations for deepwater net aquaculture operations, or navigation radar posts or lighthouses as beneficial extra duty. They also could fill air-barges, or pipe gas onshore like Gulf gas platforms do now.

If I didn't have more important things to think about I would toy with these ideas some more. The clock is ticking: universal worldwide H2-PV in ten years.

[Joe Blake]

http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/1740/

Aerogel. I wonder how permeable that would be to hydrogen? Insulate against heat, certainly. Flexible? Possibly not. Looks like it's ultimately disposable, so "once-only" use. Generated on site, and painted on the inside of a fabric skin? I wonder.

Speculation merely. Generate some lateral thought.

Joe

[Lion Kuntz]

http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/1740/

Aerogel. I wonder how permeable that would be to hydrogen? Insulate against heat, certainly. Flexible? Possibly not. Looks like it's ultimately disposable, so "once-only" use. Generated on site, and painted on the inside of a fabric skin? I wonder.

Speculation merely. Generate some lateral thought.

Joe

Now that you remind me, I recall somethings about glass microspheres being used for hydrogen storage. If they weren't very leaky, than an unlined dacron (kite fabric, ultralight aircraft cloth, parachute cloth) sausage filled with microspheres would solve the unloading, and folding issues both. I have to rummage around. Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of moving -- a two month process eventually, and lots of data was packed into zip files and is not instantly online -- I have 1,100 gommint PDFs on H2-PV-Wind that I could search.

Ah yes, here it is in my list:
http://h2-pv.us/H2/PDFs_Dloaded.html (239 kb)

Glass Microspheres for Hydrogen Storage stp_47_hall.pdf (298 kb)
http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/review05/stp_47_hall.pdf


By the way, if anybody wants a DVD-ROM copy of those 1,100 PDFs for $5 copying charge, let me know. It takes quite a while to dload more than a gigabyte of PDFs, I know from experience. There are several CDROMs compacted as zip files in the bunch.


Since microspheres may theoretically contain hydrogen at 350 (5 KSI, 35 megapascals), the volumes of gas transported can be very much higher in a much smaller air-barge sausage. I haven't even begun the math to try to find out if the cargo is even air-bouyant -- maybe 50-50 ratio of microspheres cargo in free gas contents?

[Lion Kuntz]

http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/1740/

Aerogel. ... Looks like it's ultimately disposable, so "once-only" use. Generated on site, and painted on the inside of a fabric skin? I wonder. Joe

About the disposal, glass microspheres are rechargable, but they are raw materials in lots of products: low-density concrete, or they could be made into glass at/near the destination. I have a vast collection of patents involving concretes with glass admixtures, so I know that every penny of their production cost in the windfields would return as dimes sold for products in civilization.

This might start a whole new gold rush in the Black Hills. I hope the indians jump on it first.