A Fully Distributed Power Grid?

rleyton writes "There's an interesting and topical black-out article on an "internet inspired" hydrogen powered energy network. The premise is homes, cars, factories and offices store up hydrogen when energy is available, and supply it into the new energy network when it's not. Certainly an intriguing idea, with some interesting comments on future power management. Feasible in the next "three decades"? Perhaps."

Re:Awesome Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Abundant? Really? Where? I don't see any. And as for CLEAN BURN, only with pure oxygen. Burning with air will yield nitrous oxides.
Face it, hydrogen is a pie-in-the-sky idea that wins over the uninformed public due to massive marketing.
Oh, and hydrogen is not as explosive as gasoline, because hydrogen has far far less energy density than gasoline.
I like peanut butter cookies.

Re:Awesome Idea

[GMontag]

First of all, hydrogen burns clean. It'a an abundant source of energy, and once again, BURNS CLEAN.

Yea, but so does natural gas and the energy value of what is burned off in the Gulf of Mexico, anually, is greater than the entire energy consumption of the US in 1,000 years.

But, I am way ahead of all of you [franceisoc...ermany.org].

Good idea, but why only H2?

[StressGuy]

I think the concept of many interconnected smaller power producing facilities could be more robust than fewer isolated larger units but why focus only on H2? I mean, I like hydrogen fuel cells. In fact, I have a stock portfolio that invest in sampling of all aspects of the fuel cell industry so I'd *love* to see this happen.

Even so, each local climate has one or more aspects about it that can be the basis of power generation. From what I understand, monster wind farms aren't working out as well as we had hoped, but smaller local farms could contribute and be easier to manage. Then there is solar, water, geo-thermal, combustable waste, bio-diesel, etc.

I see a possiblity to tailor power generation to the local environment while improving robustness and even national security. ...my 2 cents anyways...

power company controlling your thermostat?...

[zubernerd]

To quote the article:

An American company, Sage Systems, for example, has created a software program that allows utilities to "shed load instantly" if the system is at its peak and stressed to the limit, by "setting back a few thousand customers' thermostats by 2 degrees ... [with] a single command over the internet". Another new product, Aladyn, allows users to monitor and make changes in the energy used by home appliances, lights and air conditioning, all from a browser.

Would I really want to give the electric company the power to control my appliances? I understand the benefit of lowering the demand; but it is possible this system could be abused... by anyone with a browser.

(No I'm not paranoid... but my thermostat is my thermostat :) )

Flywheels?

[Daemonik]

Why not provide every homeowner/business with a flywheel [aeiveos.com] UPS. The flywheel could charge itself during off peak hours and provide the homeowner's peak energy needs without drawing excessively from the grid.

In the event of a grid failure, the house would draw power from the flywheel until the grid could come back up. The flywheel could also be used to regulate the power entering the house eliminating surges and brownouts.

Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.

H2 is a storage medium, not a fuel source.

[djh101010]

OK, so hydrogen burns clean. Yay. Now tell me where you plan to get it? The only way to get it in any quantities, is to make it...by using energy. Electrolysis of water is most common, but no matter how you're going to do it, you have to spend energy to break the hydrogen away from whatever it's attached to.You aren't going to get more energy by burning it (turning it back into H2O) than you spent in getting it (by taking it out of H2O). All you're doing is making that energy portable.

The article mentions "a powerplant in every home" or noises to that effect. This is effectively the same thing we have today; anyone can buy a gas-powered generator and stick it in the back yard. Yes, fuel cells might be a way to go for some things, but distributed backup power isn't one of them. How many people are going to want a tank of hydrogen hanging around? Yes, it can be stored safely. Yes, it's no more dangerous than, say, gasoline or propane. But, it also doesn't give any benefit that those fuels do not.

The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement - biofuels, wind, solar...that's where independance is, not in going from one type of fuel to another that has the same or worse problems.

Hydrogen may be a really interesting technology for some things, but this isn't one of them.

Google For "Cogenerating"

[istartedi]

We already have the beginning of a distributed power system where industrial customers cogenerate their power. Nevermind hydrogen. It's a red herring. It's just another way to store energy, with advantages and disadvantages just like all the others.

I don't think it will take 30 years to scale cogenerating down to home use. IIRC, GE introduced some cogenerating appliances for home use a couple years ago. There's was no big push on it, but the tech isn't lacking to get these things in the home.

What's needed (as usual) is the right kind of marketing. It's a bit more expensive at the outset to set up cogenerating from your house, and there's some red tape with the electric company, but solar people have been selling back to the grid for years. At optimal times, some solar homes actually get credits on their bills.

In our area, I think the best way to sell this would be "if the power goes out, you've got a clean, quiet natural gas powered backup generator in your basement".

Our cars can be a distributed power grid

[HiKarma]

Felix Kramer of calcars.org has some interesting ideas. In particular, pushing hybrid cars with more batteries than a typical hybrid but less than a full blown electric.

And while most people think one advantage of a hybrid car is you don't have to plug it in, his idea is that you would plug it in, to charge the batteries at night, and, conversely during a period of high-power need during the day, running the generator to provide extra power for your house and for the grid.

Now with gasoline that would be more polluting, but it still has a lot of merit in that power plant contruction is all about hitting that peak load, and it may be OK to pollute a bit more just at those very peak load times if it cuts grid usage and power production at other times -- nukes, hydro etc.

I would combine the ideas as follows. If you had hydrogen hybrid cars you could use them as generators to take the peak load off the grid as well, with no pollution.

And another Idea I have not seen much talk of is putting Stirling engines in hybrid cars. Sterlings are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, but nobody puts them in cars because they take several minutes to come up to boil, and people don't want a car that won't go until several minutes after you start it.

With a hybrid car with a 10-mile battery, you can go right away while waiting for the Stirling to heat up. Plus any energy put into the engine goes into battery charging so it is not wasted.

Generating is not the problem.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

There is no shortage of "small generator" capacity. The problem is with the local power grids.

We [xand.com] have three megawatts of power generation capacity, but we don't need all of it (our power needs are less than 1.5 megawatts; two generators are present for N+1 reliability). So we wanted to sell power back to the grid, and the power company wanted to buy it. But it couldn't happen, because the local grid in this area is not capable of accepting a backfeed. This is the problem in most places. There are probably tens of thousands of places with local backup generators that would be capable of supplying power to the grid, but until the local grid is upgraded to handle backfeeds, it simply can't happen.

What does happen, though, is that on days of very high demand, the utility will provide cash incentives to companies with their own generators, to voluntarily get off the grid and run on their own power. We did this for a couple of years. But ever since "deregulation" put utility prices through the roof, it's actually been cheaper to just run the generators 24/7. Diesel fuel is less expensive than the utility, which IMHO is proof that deregulation doesn't work... at least not when the White House is inhabited by someone who cares more about the welfare of energy companies than about the citizens.

Re:H2 is a storage medium, not a fuel source.

[F34nor]

Q: Where to get electric power?
A: Gyromills

Q: Power plant in every home?
A: No. A flywheel battery in every home.

Q: Bio-diesel?
A: Fuck no. Why re-convert forestland back into soybean fields that deplete the soil?
*see changing the world technologies

Q: Wind?
A: Gyromills NOT windmills. Surface winds are slow and inconsistent.

Q: Solar?
A: Space based solar farms to phased array x-ray lasers. Surface solar radiation is weak and inconsistent.

THE MEDIUM IS UNIMPORTANT. Hydrocarbons, hydrogen, kinetic energy, light, nuclear, or antimatter its all in the energy density of the source, that and e=mc^2.

Re:Geez Louise

[dnoyeb]

Totally agree. Anything is better than suffering the wasted wattage lost in the lines today. If everyone generated his own power, we would save billions!. This of course presumes efficient generation. I dont think todays consumer level equipment is near the efficiency of the big generators.

Anyway, I will be using solar energy in my next house. Though its not that big in Michigan.

What's stopping you?

[Trigun]

Check out Bob Vila [bobvila.com] for a little bit of insight, or even here [oksolar.com] for a little bit of information on photovoltaic shingles. You can easily patch them into your power grid via a grid interactive controller, or run them off of car batteries [oksolar.com]

The curse comes from elsewhere

[Spamalamadingdong]

Are we cursed forever to avoid using the single most commmon element in the universe, one that will burn clean, simply because someone burned a balloon with it once decades ago?

If only it were so simple. Safety is not the issue in public consciousness (how many million dead in automobile crashes, yet people barely give safety a second thought most days?) Instead, the use of hydrogen presents a ton of problems that are far less tractable:

1. Current production is almost entirely non-renewable. Signatories to the Kyoto treaty will not be able to make their targets by "switching" to hydrogen if they make it from natural gas (or, heaven forbid, coal).
2. Production is highly inefficient. Whether it's made from hydrocarbons, carbohydrates (polysaccharides such as wood) or electricity, the hydrogen only embodies a relatively small fraction of the energy which goes into the process. This further increases the cost, as well as CO2 production if the raw material is any kind of carbon-based fuel.
3. Production is costly, relatively speaking. Storing energy as hydrogen appears to cost several times as much as gasoline.

For these reasons, it looks like not such a good idea to plan an economy around this. AAMOF, it looks like a diversion by enemies of change; they can point to hydrogen as the panacea, but use all the very real difficulties as excuses for the glacial pace of achievement.

Now compare that to our current state of affairs: the vast majority of our electricity coming from coal or gas, much of it imported; our cars running on gasoline, almost all of it imported.

Now try and tell me it doesn't make sense to switch.

Oh, it does.... but not to hydrogen. Batteries (such as lithium-ion) are far more efficient and have much lower costs already. If you want to power a transportation system, using a Calcars [calcars.org]-style system of grid-feeding hybrid vehicles would do a much better job, for less, using today's technology. Such vehicles would have no problem stabilizing the grid [acpropulsion.com].

... until you look at it closely

[Spamalamadingdong]

I'd rather be around a leaky hydrogen tank than a leaky propane tank.

Maybe your neighbors would prefer the reverse. Hydrogen is a fairly stable molecule, and would drift upwards until it reached the upper stratosphere where high-energy UV could crack it. There it would form water, much higher in the atmosphere than water normally forms. The resulting high-altitude ice crystals would form great surfaces for the catalytic breakdown of ozone, which your neighbors would probably not appreciate very much.

A world which uses H2 heavily might not be quite as much of the eco-paradise as some paint it.

Re:Geez Louise

[donutz]

Ah, yes, the old Hindenburg chestnut. Are we cursed forever to avoid using the single most commmon element in the universe, one that will burn clean, simply because someone burned a balloon with it once decades ago?

You call it clean burning; some say it will use up all of the earth's breathable oxygen! [byzantinec...ations.com]

Re:Geez Louise

[Jeff DeMaagd]

One concern I've seen with Photovoltiacs is that they require as much energy to make one as it would produce in its lifetime.

Has this changed?

Re:Geez Louise

[Trinition]

There are better ways to handle this. I Recently read in a Discover or Popular Science about Energy Innovation's [energyinnovations.com] producuts, such as the Sun Flower 250. They are basically thermal-solar-powered Sterling engines used to generate electricity. Their newest and most economical model costs $1/watt to purchase the actual unit, and that's it.

You could just stick one of these babies under a plastic (or whatever) shell to physically protect it from the elements while allowing the energy in to do the work.

So, let's not stop at photovoltaics when it comes to solar power.

Ha - AZ off-grid solar subdivision opens today.

[WOV]

66greenwood.com [66greenwood.com] - outside of Kingman, Arizona.

I've seen it done in Japan, but never the US - great timing as far as this article goes. 487 home housing development, not connected to the grid...

Amory Lovins

[fatcat1111]

Amory Lovins [rmi.org] of the Rocky Mountain Institute [rmi.org] has been proposing something like this for a while now, but with an interesting bootstraping step. Quoting a bit from Natural Capitalism [natcap.org] (full text is available online):

A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.

Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.

Re:Geez Louise

[tmortn]

Great comment about the Hindenburg fiasco. However I am going to have to take some exception to much of the rest of your comment. If you take the average roof for your average suburbanite yuppie with 2.1 kids a white picket fence and dog mixed with average exposure to sunlight IE not optimal what your suggesting is a pipe dream without a serious decrease in power usage. Also there is the small problem of efficiency of conversion. You get roughly 1hp of energy per square meter of sunlight as I recall.. IE 750 watts but solar panels only claim about 15% of that for roughly 112 watts. You only get about 4 hours of peak sunlight on average so thats almost one hole half kw of energy per square meter per day. With 10 square meters thats roughly 5kw hours.. lets be really generous and call it 6kw hours. At $3 a watt that array will cost you around 1120 * 3 or ~$3300.. plus inverters, battery bank and for electrolysis an electrolysis rig and hydrogen storage tanks... Aaaaaannnnndd lets not forget the fuel cell to convert your hydrogen back into energy. Lets be optomistic and call it 5k for the whole system with economy of scale, and yes that includes a cheaper per watt cost on the panels. Thats not very big, but to cover the whole roof gets really pricey.

Hydrogen and electrolysis... OK lets be generous and say you store 80% of your 6kw hours via electrolysis. That gets you 4.8kw hours of stored energy on average per day. Converting that stored energy back to useable energy nets you another conversion loss, again 80% so you wind up with 3.84kw/hr of net energy on average. Typical home power consumption is around 15kw/hr day. Efficient appliances and less power hungry lifestyle can easily get around 10kw/hr and perhaps even less, but to cut much under that you have to seriously curtail climate control IE A/C and heat. THey are you big guzzlers in the house, normally A/C Heat and Fridge account for 75% or more of your power consumption.

Now obviously you use some of the direct solar energy during the day but at $5k for a system your going to have limits like little A/C, lukewarm water, no big TV, limited lighting and we havn't even begun to talk about replacing your cars engine with an electric motor driven by hydrogen... much less the average two cars per family now a days. You could make the system roughly 10 times bigger for a $50k system providing 38.4 net kw/hrs per day which is about where it becomes practical for a distributed grid ( regarding home power use ) but it still dosn't even come close to providing for cars, those suckers are seriously power greedy. Even efficent ones. Think of it this way. Average household consumption is 15.5kw/hr a day. An average car engines weighs in at around 200hp which is roughly 150kw. Even considering you average about 30% power rating when driving means an hour of driving uses ~45kw/hr. A geo metro or some other glorified go kart is only marginally better, in terms of average power consumption they will use 75% of what an efficent V-6 car will use ( their efficiency is related much more strongly to their light weight than to their underpowered engines ). SO to have enough hydrogen to fuel 2 hours of driving per day for a single decently powered car ( ie one people want to own ) and an average home you need 45*2+15 or 105 kw/hr average per day. Or 105/3.84 or about 27 of those 5k systems. With economy of scale lets say you can build that system for 75k instead 100k+ or in other words the cost of a small home. Even if the house and car are 50% more efficient you still need a system that provides around 50kw/hr net energy per day which still is going to cost a serious amount of money, more than houses in some areas... and keep on adding for additional cars.

Distributed power is a good idea, I like it and would like to see it. However Solar is not a very reasonable PRIMARY source of power at this time. Small supplamental systems could help but I doubt they could be made cost efficient enough to also include the ability to electrolize water and store the hydogen for

good for the economy of the US

[pensivemusic]

any reasonable person knows that if the US government backed a domestic energy program, two things would hapen. 1 - the oil and gas companies would gradually become involved out of a sense of survival needs. 2 - the public would be benefited by the compounded ROI of recycling the infinite petrodollarimport funds back into the local economy, not the rest of the world, each year. oh, there is another point! 3 - after a while, people would get better at managing hydrogen. i mean, somehow, most people can safely handle 10 - 20 gallons of high test gasoline in close proximity to their abodes. survival of the fittest.