SA power crisis: could hydrogen be the answer?

“The generator produces electricity in an environmentally friendly way, without pollution or noise,” said Piotr Bujlo, leader of the generator project and a technology specialist at HySA Systems.
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This is an alternative worth mentioning. It would be perfect for residential use once they can increase the output to 5 kilowatts.
 
It has an advantage over nuclear power or coal power in that hydrogen can be produced on-site – using a water electrolyser – which means there is no need to pipe or truck the fuel in from somewhere else.
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Sustainability equals no monthly electricity bill. Almost too good to be true.
 
Scooby_Doo said:
How much would a system like that cost? If it was so super cheap I am sure we would have them already...
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It seems that they are still in the testing phase. I believe it will be cheaper than solar because it wont need batteries to store power.
 
“Hydrogen fuel cells could be commercially available in South Africa as soon as the local industry, government departments and other stakeholders see the benefits of the technology: low cost, high efficiency, clean performance,” he said.
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Well that stuffs that idea up then .... They cant even manage our established power supply utility.
 
Some guy in England used cow farts to run his generator.
 
Making hydrogen isn't an issue. You need a fuel cell to react it electrolytically with oxygen in the air to make electricity and water. The fuel cell is difficult to produce and extremely fragile and can break easily if contaminated from the air inlet stream - so you need an advanced air filter - which implies it must be maintained often. There are too many steps in generating power this way making it expensive to produce/run which is why most people ignore it.

There are, however, a couple other ways to generate power that we're working on. All the energy on the planet has come from the sun - so why not cut out the middleman and extract energy directly from solar power? (PVs isn't that efficient; what you need to use is all that heat energy *cough cough*)

Watch this space.
 
chrisc4290 said:
Some guy in England used cow farts to run his generator.
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More likely he is using an anaerobic digester to produce methane and run his genny off of that. Works quite well the couple setups I've seen. A farm can easily be self-sufficient, and if you get a little electrical engineering involved with step-up and step-down transformers, you can power a couple of the neighbours' too.
 
agentrfr said:
Making hydrogen isn't an issue. You need a fuel cell to react it electrolytically with oxygen in the air to make electricity and water. The fuel cell is difficult to produce and extremely fragile and can break easily if contaminated from the air inlet stream - so you need an advanced air filter - which implies it must be maintained often. There are too many steps in generating power this way making it expensive to produce/run which is why most people ignore it.

There are, however, a couple other ways to generate power that we're working on. All the energy on the planet has come from the sun - so why not cut out the middleman and extract energy directly from solar power? (PVs isn't that efficient; what you need to use is all that heat energy *cough cough*)

Watch this space.
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Photo voltaic .... sure ... but, what about the sea? It runs day and night ... convert kinetic energy into electrical energy?
 
We need to pop in a few million worthless people in a huge chamber like in the matrix, and use their bodies to produce electricty.
 
TEXTILE GUY said:
Photo voltaic .... sure ... but, what about the sea? It runs day and night ... convert kinetic energy into electrical energy?
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No, not PV. PV is expensive and inefficient. You need a cheap per watt construction price, reliability (zero maintenance for 5+ years) in design, distributed production (no good if only my factory can make it - the money for the business can be made by licensing the technology) and most importantly scalability (modularised design - you can power a single household, a whole block or a small community by adding more in parallel). If it is cheap enough, you dont need to worry about a cloudy day - you just install 3x the needed capacity and feed into the grid. Someone somewhere else can power you if the is a cloud over your head but not above them. Give us about 6 months and I'll post a link in the Science section on it.

On the other hand sea power is a good idea, especially underwater turbines (did some computer modelling for putting a turbine within one of the oceanic currents off the coast of durbs). Fantastic, but only works if you are on the doorstep of the ocean. Corrosion is an issue you need to deal with too by the seaside.
 
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LaraC said:
Sustainability equals no monthly electricity bill. Almost too good to be true.
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How are they producing the hydrogen? If they are not bringing any fuel onto site then the only way is through a process that uses electricity.

Where does that electricity come from?

This is definitively flirting with too-good-to-be-true.
 
agentrfr said:
On the other hand sea power is a good idea, especially underwater turbines (did some computer modelling for putting a turbine within one of the oceanic currents off the coast of durbs). Fantastic, but only works if you are on the doorstep of the ocean. Corrosion is an issue you need to deal with too by the seaside.
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Corrosion - no problem with Aramid / glass / Basalt composites ... maybe we should hook up some time and solve the energy crisis? :)
 
ambo said:
How are they producing the hydrogen? If they are not bringing any fuel onto site then the only way is through a process that uses electricity.

Where does that electricity come from?

This is definitively flirting with too-good-to-be-true.
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Yeah this article really isn't clear that HFC is not a way of initially generating electricity. It lets you have clean and quiet mobile generators, but you still obviously need another source of power to initially crack your water into hydrogen and oxygen.

It has an advantage over nuclear power or coal power in that hydrogen can be produced on-site – using a water electrolyser – which means there is no need to pipe or truck the fuel in from somewhere else.
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Mixing in primary energy systems like that makes it sound like it can generate its own power, and it can't. You would need to hook it up to your own PV or wind power to allow it to produce hydrogen.

HFC solves the problem of batteries being rubbish and generators being noisy and using a non-renewable fuel. But in no way does it "make" power.
 
Breaking water down into its basic elements is not energy efficient at all. More energy is required to produce Oxygen and Hydrogen than is achieved by burning the Hydrogen again with the Oxygen.
This is mostly due to the resistance of water and conductors used in the electrolysis of distilled water.

In a perfect environment the same amount of energy would be generated as what would have been needed to separate the elements.

This together with the fact that hydrogen can't be compressed into tanks by any person makes it a iffy fuel source.
Maybe Deuterium 6 Hydride could be used but that is not viable thanks to terrorism.
We are no where near perfect yet and it is going to take some time.

Fossil fuels are reliable,cheap and abundant for the time being. Until we are forced to advance to the next fuel source.
My 45c
 
TEXTILE GUY said:
Corrosion - no problem with Aramid / glass / Basalt composites ... maybe we should hook up some time and solve the energy crisis? :)
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Haha. I might just drop you a PM in the future :p

Magnum said:
Breaking water down into its basic elements is not energy efficient at all. More energy is required to produce Oxygen and Hydrogen than is achieved by burning the Hydrogen again with the Oxygen.
This is mostly due to the resistance of water and conductors used in the electrolysis of distilled water.

In a perfect environment the same amount of energy would be generated as what would have been needed to separate the elements.

This together with the fact that hydrogen can't be compressed into tanks by any person makes it a iffy fuel source.
Maybe Deuterium 6 Hydride could be used but that is not viable thanks to terrorism.
We are no where near perfect yet and it is going to take some time.

Fossil fuels are reliable,cheap and abundant for the time being. Until we are forced to advance to the next fuel source.
My 45c
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You are indeed correct, however research has been done in alternate transport mechanisms of hydrogen. One specifically is by dimethylether: It can transport six hydrogen atoms per molecule and at 30 C is a liquid at 7 bar, meaning that we can use already in place petrol, natural gas and fuel lines to transport it. Fuel cells can then break off the hydrogen from the DME, react with oxygen in the air and bob's your uncle. There is of course some CO2 formed by the carbon used to transport it, but producing CO2 and water in 2:3 ratio isn't that bad, and the system can be designed to be carbon neutral.
 
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