Hey guys...
Tomorrow's New York Times...
Latham test... a house will be powered by fuel cell technology...
IMG is in on this...
Fuel Cell Will Supply All Power to a Test House
By MATTHEW L. WALD
1402 Words
9980 Characters
* 06/17/98
The New York Times
Page 28, Column 4
c. 1998 New York Times Company
WASHINGTON, June 14 -- For the first time, an energy technology
called a fuel cell will supply all the power to a suburban house,
another sign that the innovation is on the verge of breakthrough as an
economical alternative to traditional energy sources.
The idea of fuel cells, which convert liquid fuel into electricity
through a chemical reaction rather than combustion, has been around for
more than 100 years. But until recently, fuel cells were so expensive
that they were was practical only for specialized use on space missions.
But the cells being tested now are powerful, flexible and reliable. And
although they are still expensive, confidence that new designs can be
mass-produced at reasonable costs is growing.
On Wednesday, a team of engineers will cut the electricity from the
local utility to a brick ranch-style house in Latham, N.Y., and switch
on a device that looks more like a home central air-conditioning unit
than the small chemical plant it really is.
Developments in the past few weeks include the first commercial sale
of a fuel cell for remote power (to the New Jersey Department of
Transportation, for a traffic warning sign) and the first street-ready
car powered by a fuel cell (built by students at Humboldt State
University in California). A former nuclear weapons scientist at Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is experimenting with a tiny
cell that converts methanol into enough current to run a laptop computer
or a cellular telephone. And in April, Ford put $420 million into
Ballard Power Systems, a fuel cell company in Vancouver, British
Columbia, in which Daimler-Benz already has a major investment.
Officials at the Energy Department, which is helping to pay for the
test in Latham, near Albany, say they have high hopes that within a few
years thousands of homes will be drawing electric power from fuel cells,
cutting pollution and fuel consumption.
''In the last year, we've seen significant breakthroughs,'' said
Federico F. Pena, the Energy Secretary, in a telephone interview.
''We're going to see fuel cells in homes, cars and other uses much
sooner than we had predicted.''
Concerning the Latham project, Dan W. Reicher, the assistant
secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said, ''The launch
of a fuel-cell powered house is up there with the introduction of the
electric refrigerator, the room air-conditioner and the fluorescent
light.''
''The big difference is that the fuel cell could turn the house into
a full-time energy producer instead of a consumer of electricity,'' Mr.
Reicher said.
What has made experts more optimistic is the progress scientists have
made in tinkering with the fuel cell's gossamer-thin membranes, which
look like plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. The membranes are crucial
in facilitating a basic chemical reaction -- the combination of oxygen
and hydrogen to make water -- into the basis of an energy revolution.
W.L. Gore & Company has taken its signature product, Gore-Tex, and put
it into the membranes of fuel cells, including the one in Latham, in a
way that many researchers say has great promise.
Jonathan H. Leonard, the program supervisor for fuel cells at
California's South Coast Air Quality Management District, one of many
government agencies eagerly watching the research, said, ''Splitting
water into hydrogen and oxygen is a simple process that takes
electricity. Combining them to make water and electricity, well, you
don't get much simpler than that. I don't think there are many
doubters.''
Certainly not Michael M. Walsh, a mechanical engineer who is a
consultant to Plug Power, the company running the Latham test. Mr. Walsh
lives in the Plug Power-owned house five days a week with, among other
devices, a stereo, a personal computer and a clock radio that wakes him
in the morning. They will operate the same, whatever the electricity
source, he said, and people inside the house ''won't know whether we are
running on the grid or not.''
But for all the breakthroughs, fuel cells are too expensive for
everyday use. Car companies, which would probably be the biggest users
of a cost-effective fuel cell, say the cost is roughly 100 times more
per horsepower than an internal combustion engine. Chrysler, for
example, figures that each car-sized fuel-cell stack it buys costs
$170,000. And running houses on fuel cells is substantially more
expensive than relying on power from conventional utility plants.
Plug Power will not say what its prototype cost, arguing that the
figure is about as relevant as the cost of producing the first
automobile of a model year; it is astronomical but allows the production
of thousands more units at lower cost. Plug Power predicts that it can
commercialize fuel cells for houses by 2000, at a cost of $3,000 to
$5,000 each. Detroit Edison, a part-owner of Plug Power, plans to
purchase 30,000 to 50,000 units.
A New Jersey company, H-Power, also hopes for mass sales. In March
the company made what it described as the first unsubsidized, fully
commercial sale of a fuel cell, for a trailer-mounted highway sign, the
kind that commonly warns of construction ahead. The company will supply
65 of them for $759,000.
''It's an arms-length sale, with no subsidies, with a warranty, and
all the aspects of a commercial sale,'' said Arthur Kaufman, an
executive at H-Power.
* In another application of fuel cells, Robert G. Hockaday, a
researcher on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory, bombarded a
thin plastic film with neutron radiation to form pores where the
hydrogen-oxygen reaction can take place. He predicted he could keep a
cellular phone on standby for more than a month on two ounces of
methanol. But he does not yet have a prototype that generates enough
power in a small enough volume.
A big part of the expense is that fuel cells are hand-assembled,
mostly by Ph.D.'s, because there is still no mass market. That, in turn,
is because the components still cost too much, but elements of the
equation are changing, thanks to work being done in various
laboratories. One step has been to reduce the amount of platinum, a
catalyst in the chemical process, to one-fifth of former levels.
Another, accomplished by the Gore company, has been to strengthen the
gel-like heart of the system. The heart, in the fuel cell used in Latham
and in those being explored for cars, is a proton exchange membrane.
Anything positively charged, like the proton that is the nucleus of a
hydrogen atom, jumps from one side of the membrane to the other.
When a hydrogen atom, consisting of one proton and one electron, is
pressed against the membrane, the proton goes through and the electron
does not. That creates a positive charge on one side of the membrane and
a negative charge on the other; wire them together, and electricity
flows.
DuPont's membrane, sold under the trade name Nafion, does not readily
transport the hydrogen ions from one side to the other until it is wet.
It takes time for the water that is produced to suffuse the membrane
and, once it is wet, the membrane loses two-thirds of its strength.
Because fuel cells are typically arranged in ''stacks,'' with layers of
membranes, fixing a flaw is difficult.
But fuel cell experts say Gore has taken a step to solve the problems
of cost, fragility and start-up time. Embedding Gore-Tex, the material
it sells to textile mills for use in windbreakers and caps, produces a
membrane that is 20 microns, about half as thick as predecessors. It is
cheaper to buy, gets wet faster, and lets protons slide through more
quickly, but it is also stronger.
There are other areas for improvement. Currently, a square centimeter
of membrane produces about half a watt of power. Raising the power would
reduce the number of layers, the number of plates and the number of
wiring connections.
The consensus among fuel cell experts is that with growing activity
and the promise of mass production, the problems can be solved. People
who worked on the membrane and on the problem of platinum, which is used
to provide sites where the hydrogen-oxygen reaction can occur, are
moving on to other troublesome components, said John B. O'Sullivan, the
manager of research on distributed generation at the Electric Power
Research Institute, a utility consortium in Palo Alto, Calif.
''My concern is no longer, can we make this stuff work,'' Mr.
O'Sullivan said. ''It's, can we make it work cheaply enough.''
Photo: A consultant, Dan O. Jones, left, checked a fuel-cell system at a
house in Latham, N.Y., yesterday with the project manager, Richard
Maddaloni. (David Jennings for The New York Times)
Diagram: ''HOW IT WORKS: The Fabric Heart Of an Energy Cell''
Scientists are now using Gore-Tex, the waterproof fabric used in
foul-weather gear, to make ultra-thin membranes for fuel cells. Here is
how a membrane functions.
Hydrogen, which is made of a proton and an electron, is channeled to the
fuel cell through these panels.
Electricity is produced when the plate strips away the electrons and
directs them through a circuit.
The protons pass through the mem 2/3brane. The thinner the membrane, the
more easily protons pass.
Protons and electrons join with oxygen and form water.
(Source: W.L. Gore & Associates)
I0607 * End of document.
|
