Group items tagged

Hydrogen has the highest energy content of any common fuel by weight,

FCVs run on hydrogen gas rather than gasoline and emit no harmful tailpipe emissions.

The cost of hydrogen per mile to power a fuel cell electric vehicle is approximately competitive with the cost of gasoline at $2.30/gallon. This assumes that the hydrogen is made by reforming natural gas at the fueling station with existing commercial hydrogen fueling equipment in low production volumes (10 units). With larger scale production, we estimate that hydrogen will cost less per mile than gasoline selling at $1.50/gallon.

A valuable feature of photovoltaic systems is the ability to connect with the existing power grid which allows owners to sell excessive electricity back to the utility with a plan known as (5) Net Metering. At times when you are not using all of the electricity produced by your system, your meter will spin backwards selling the electricity back to the (6) utility power grid at retail rate.

Renewable electrolysis is a process that uses renewable electricity to produce hydrogen by passing an electrical current through water. Renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, wind, biomass, hydropower, and geothermal can provide clean, sustainable electricity for our nation

Wind turbines can be used to produce hydrogen through a process called renewable electrolysis.

Because solar electricity is so expensive, you would normally go to great lengths to reduce your electricity consumption. Instead of a desktop computer and a monitor you would use a laptop computer. You would use fluorescent lights instead of incandescent. You would use a small B&W TV instead of a large color set. You would get a small, extremely efficient refrigerator­. By doing these things you might be able to reduce your average power consumption to 100 watts. This would cut the size of your solar panel and its cost by a factor of 6, and this might bring it into the realm of possibility.

From our calculations and assumptions abo­ve, we know that a solar panel can generate 70 milliwatts per square inch * 5 hours = 350 milliwatt hours per day. Therefore you need about 41,000 square inches of solar panel for the house. That's a solar panel that measures about 285 square feet (about 26 square meters). That would cost around $16,000 right now. Then, because the sun only shines part of the time, you would need to purchase a battery bank, an inverter, etc., and that often doubles the cost of the installation.If you want to have a small room air conditioner in your bedroom, double everything.

A "typical home" in America can use either electricity or gas to provide heat -- heat for the house, the hot water, the clothes dryer and the stove/oven. If you were to power a house with solar electricity, you would certainly use gas appliances because solar electricity is so expensive. This means that what you would be powering with solar electricity are things like the refrigerator, the lights, the compute­r, the TV, stereo equipment, motors in things like furnace fans and the washer, etc. Let's say that all of those things average out to 600 watts on average. Over the course of 24 hours, you need 600 watts * 24 hours = 14,400 watt-hours per day.

Producing Hydrogen for Fuel-Cell Vehicles

Cleaning Up Oil Spills

Generating Electricity

One of the main disadvantages is the initial cost of the equipment used to harness the suns energy

A solar energy installation requires a large area for the system to be efficient in providing a source of electricity

pollution can degrade the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Clouds also provide the same effect, as they can reduce the energy of the suns rays

The sun delivers about 7000 times more energy than we currently consume globally. However, we cannot cover the whole surface of the Earth with solar energy collectors. How much of this energy can we collect? Will it be enough to replace fossil fuels?

Our global consumption of electricity in 2005 was 15,182 TWh/y (see The Little Green Handbook). However, 9,541 TWh/y of electricity was produced by fossil fuels and 2,555 TWh/y by nuclear power, or the total 12,096 TWh/y. Assuming the lowest solar potential and the lowest efficiency of solar cells we can calculate that we could produce 35 times more electricity than produced by fossil fuels and nuclear power. The additional advantage is that solar power is clean and last practically forever.

Even if we used only 1% of unused land area we could produce nearly 4 times more electricity than we produce using fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Figuring out an inexpensive and carbon-neutral way to produce an abundant amount of hydrogen will be key to the success of fuel cell vehicles

In the hydrogen economy, there is no storehouse to tap into. We have to actually create the e­nergy in real-time.

There are two possible sources for the hydrogen: Electrolysis of water - Using electricity, it is easy to split water molecules to create pure hydrogen and oxygen. One big advantage of this process is that you can do it anywhere. For example, you could have a box in your garage producing hydrogen from tap water, and you could fuel your car with that hydrogen. Reforming fossil fuels - Oil and natural gas contain hydrocarbons -- molecules consisting of hydrogen and carbon. Using a device called a fuel processor or a reformer, you can split the hydrogen off the carbon in a hydrocarbon relatively easily and then use the hydrogen. You discard the leftover carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

To have a pure hydrogen economy, the hydrogen must be derived from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels so that we stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Having enough electricity to separate hydrogen from water, and generating that electricity without using fossil fuels, will be the biggest change that we see in creating the hydrogen economy.

Advantages

Solar energy is free - it needs no fuel and produces no waste or pollution.

Handy for low-power uses such as solar powered garden lights and battery chargers, or for helping your home energy bills.

Applications These wind turbines near Lamar, Colorado, are part of the 162-MW Colorado Green Wind Farm. Each turbine produces 1.5 megawatts of electricity. Wind turbines can be used as stand-alone applications, or they can be connected to a utility power grid or even combined with a photovoltaic (solar cell) system. For utility-scale (megawatt-sized) sources of wind energy, a large number of wind turbines are usually built close together to form a wind plant. Several electricity providers today use wind plants to supply power to their customers.