ERD50
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Much better info now. I'm a little surprised by the 50% eff, was expecting more. I think most power plants are > 25%, even after transmission losses. I've seen an 8% number quoted many times for average transmission losses, remember that is 8% loss of the transmitted energy, so for a 35% eff plant, .92*35% = 32.2% delivered.
I wonder if they just didn't detail out the inverter, or if these new materials can be modulated at a 60 cycle rate? That would be interesting. The old Ballard FCs had a time constant of several seconds - a battery pack was needed in a vehicle to provide acceleration. I know an engineer that was working on a Ballard system for a bus. 10-15 years ago though.
I didn't see cost info, or anything on home units. TBD I guess. But even @ 50%, if they meet their cost projections, the payback looks attractive. And I like the idea of diversifying our energy supply (assuming we have enough NG available - I thought we had a shortage a few years back). I also like the fact that these seem to be easy to site, so they can be scattered around an area, less dependency on a big grid. I sure wouldn't mind having a few within miles of my house, to reduce susceptibility to black outs. Same with those small Nukes from Toshiba.
Looks pretty good, much better than the journalistic pseudo-science, I wonder when we will hear more?
Hah, I was also wondering if these could run on waste veggie oil? There isn't enough around to make a dent nationwide, but it would be interesting if a restaurant could power themselves on their old oil. I would think the plates would get contaminated if it wasn't purified though.
-ERD50
I wonder if they just didn't detail out the inverter, or if these new materials can be modulated at a 60 cycle rate? That would be interesting. The old Ballard FCs had a time constant of several seconds - a battery pack was needed in a vehicle to provide acceleration. I know an engineer that was working on a Ballard system for a bus. 10-15 years ago though.
I didn't see cost info, or anything on home units. TBD I guess. But even @ 50%, if they meet their cost projections, the payback looks attractive. And I like the idea of diversifying our energy supply (assuming we have enough NG available - I thought we had a shortage a few years back). I also like the fact that these seem to be easy to site, so they can be scattered around an area, less dependency on a big grid. I sure wouldn't mind having a few within miles of my house, to reduce susceptibility to black outs. Same with those small Nukes from Toshiba.
Looks pretty good, much better than the journalistic pseudo-science, I wonder when we will hear more?
Hah, I was also wondering if these could run on waste veggie oil? There isn't enough around to make a dent nationwide, but it would be interesting if a restaurant could power themselves on their old oil. I would think the plates would get contaminated if it wasn't purified though.
-ERD50