I seem to have gotten all fired up about the future of solar power and hydrogen fuel cells. It has recently come to my attention that solar power is on the verge of becoming a reality – big time. As we know, it has been around for a long time and has slowly become accepted as a possible power source for small applications, or for people who desire to be in on the good thing early. As usual, those early pioneers do so at an extra financial cost, but get the satisfaction of doing the right thing at the right time. Now that is all changing. New solar photovoltaic technologies have come out of the research labs, and are being used to make the new generation of panels. For example, Shell solar (who are the new owners of Seimens solar) has new non-silicon, thin film panels for sale. They claim that this new manufacturing technology decreases the manufacturing costs by a factor of ten. (It is interesting to note that while their costs may have gone down by a factor of ten, the cost to the consumer of the panels has gone up about 20%). Not only has the costs dropped significantly, they are about to drop much further and faster during the next year or so. There are several new companies getting into the business this year who are intentionally planning on driving the costs, and the price to the consumer, down even more than the 10 fold decrease claimed by Shell. I suspect that it will end up about 1/20 of today’s costs. That means that the $40,000 for panels that I was planning to power my house will only cost $2,000 in a year or two. At that point, it will be clearly crazy not to invest. The reason that the price will drop like that is that they supply will be huge and the manufacturing costs very low. Unless something completely unforeseen happens, the market will be flooded with panels in the very near future.
One of the sticking points in California will be the laws regarding selling power back to the power companies. Right now they have to allow “net metering,” (running the electric meter backwards when producing power and forward when using it), which is a good thing – but not good enough. A customer can reduce their power costs this way, but any extra power produced goes to the power company free of change. When the price of panels drops to the truly affordable level, it will be important to be able to get paid for extra power. Europe has just changed their laws to mandate this type of arrangement in anticipation of the coming solar revolution. We need to do they same. If I can actually turn a profit off of my solar panels, I will be much more interested in willing to maximize my investment and the amount of power I produce. I can easily make 5-10 times the power that I can use. I would like to do that, and sell it to the utilities. We need to change the laws in California to mandate this type of sale to the power companies at a reasonable rate. Small producers need to be able to get at least as much for their power as the large power plants get – maybe more because it does not deplete our natural resources. I believe that there should be a significant cost benefit for producing non-polluting, renewable power. It needs to be either subsidized, or at least paid for at the top of the price paid for power, rather than at they bottom, which is of course where the power companies will want to set the prices.
Once we switch to the use of a significant about of solar electricity, the issue of using hydrogen becomes much more viable. Right now almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, which is not smart and does nothing to decrease our use of petroleum. However, if it is made from solar power, then it represents a decrease in the use of petroleum and the associated pollution. It becomes a renewable, pollution free energy storage medium (not an energy source, but rather just a method of storing energy for mobile or night time applications). Water to hydrogen and oxygen – back to water. No pollution and no net use of resources, including water.
The interesting part of this whole scenario is that all of the pieces are not only in place to allow it to happen from a technological point of view, but it is actually happening right now. Huge manufacturing facilities are being constructed all over the world to produce low cost solar panels, hydrogen fuel cell cars are cruising our highways daily, the technology for producing fuel cells and storing it is in place, the technology for using electricity to produce hydrogen has been in place for decades. All that has to happen is that it has to happen.
Hydrogen fuel cells seem to be the “sticking point” for some reason. Part of the reason is the extremely high price of the membrane that is used to convert hydrogen and air to electricity. The membrane is very inexpensive to manufacture, but is very expensive to purchase. An almost identical membrane is used by the petroleum industry for their refining processes, and this membrane is very inexpensive. So far the manufactures have managed to keep the prices artificially high because they have what amounts to a monopoly on the produce. That needs to change. The material is similar to plastic wrap with a tiny bit of platinum in it which is the catalyst that makes the process go. Right now it is hundreds of dollars a square foot – it would be pennies a square foot. The other reason for the high cost of fuel cells is the current manufacturing techniques are done by hand, and use expensive materials and processes. There is no reason that this should be the case any longer. It was the only way to do it when doing research, but now that research has been completed – it is time to switch to much, much lower manufacturing techniques. I don’t know what the final costs will turn out to be, but I see no reason that a fuel cell power plant for an automobile should be any more expensive than a modern motor. It should actually be less expensive because the parts are simpler and there are many less pieces.
Storage of enough hydrogen to be practical in a car is a slight problem. If they use standard pressure vessels (5,000 psi bottles) they are limited to about 100 miles range while being able to “hide” the bottles from view. However, a few years ago they came out with a new design that allows the use of up to 15,000 psi – potentially tripling the range to a usable 300 miles. My guess is that there is room to improve vehicle efficiency (road friction, regenerative braking, etc) and layout of bottles within the vehicle to increase this a bit more. In any case, 300 miles seems to be enough to make it a viable energy source.
There is a question about lack of infrastructure for hydrogen. This is a red herring. We currently have an infrastructure that is perfectly capable of providing the needed hydrogen and bootstrapping the supply to meet an increase in demand. All towns of reasonable size have welding supply houses that provide various types of specialty gases, including hydrogen. If you want hydrogen today, all you have to do is go purchase it. This would clearly not work for a vast number of vehicles, but it will take a bit of time before there are vast numbers of vehicles. As the numbers of fuel cell vehicles grows, the infrastructure will grow with it, there will never be a lack of infrastructure. At some point I expect to see tube trailers being used to transport hydrogen from the manufacturing facility to the distribution point (similarly to what we do now with gasoline). As the need goes up, I expect to see service stations making their own supply of hydrogen from electricity. If by that time the photovoltaic supply has grown enough to be providing net power to the grid, then this electricity created hydrogen will be from the sun and be pollution free. I would expect that in addition to this on the spot made hydrogen, there will be others who make solar hydrogen as an additional income from their parking lots and unused farm land. The point is that the infrastructure is here right now, and will easily grow to meet the demand as the demand grows. I personally like the idea of using my rooftop solar collectors on my house to make hydrogen to power my own car. There is enough power available on my roofs to power my house, irrigate my fields, power my car, and sell a little to the power companies. All that it takes is cheap enough solar panels and the right types of laws to support this sort of thing.
I find all of the quite exciting, and interesting. We are on the verge of a possible transformation of our power system. However, when this transition happens there will be some who fear great financial loss (such as the oil industry). I wonder if they will have enough wisdom to allow and support the change, or if they and politicians attempt to scuttle the whole thing. It is there for the taking, but those that fear losing will likely fight very hard to maintain the status quo. In addition, they will likely do things like try to pump as much oil out of Alaska as possible so they can make their fortunes before the demand for oil drops to the point that it is obviously not needed. They will want to get their money while the getting is good.
We are in for an interesting few years as the world adjusts to a new paradigm in energy production and use.
No comments:
Post a Comment