The first solar-hydrogen powered house
While I’ve been studying a lot on hydrogen fuel cells and other ways of alternative power I found the article titled ‘His energy bill is $0.00‘, published on Yahoo News pretty interesting. As everyone by now just has to know; the fossil sources of energy we’ve been using in the past hundred year will dry up some day and before that moment it’ll only become more expensive, denying that is simply ignorance, even politicians seem to get that by now.
The interesting part of this news article is that the civil engineer Mike Strizki, who lives in the USA, doesn’t only power his house using solar energy, but he’s also using the waste power for another purpose. This purpose is the generation of hydrogen out of water, in his ’system’ Mike doesn’t just use this as some sort of ‘battery’ to save power for days he might not be able to supply himself enough, but also to power his vehicle, allowing him to drive pretty ‘green’.
As the more technology savvy might understand, this way of saving power is pretty inefficient; not only his fuel cell has quite some losses, also his electrolyzers are only 50% efficient, wasting a whole lot of energy. According to the Dr. Boehm, who was interviewed, this way of saving energy is only interesting for those who are living in somewhat isolated places, not being able to supply the power back to the power grid as that method has smaller losses and doesn’t require the same (expensive) electrolyzers and gas tanks.
I’m really starting to wonder if the ‘hydrogen economy’ is really about to get started; even though there is more and more attention for it, I still haven’t seen too many practical and commercial uses of it yet. This lack of visibility makes hydrogen for consumers look a bit like the famous ‘vaporware’ (computer related things that do get a lot of promotion but eventually doesn’t seem to appear in-store) we’re already used to on the web, too bad!
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