Posted on 01/22/2021 11:47:18 AM PST by Red Badger
The Lavo home hydrogen battery is not a battery, it's an electrolysis system, hydrogen storage array and fuel cell power system rolled into one attractive cabinetLavo VIEW 3 IMAGES
To get off the grid with home solar, you need to be able to generate energy when the Sun's out, and store it for when it's not. Normally, people do this with lithium battery systems – Tesla's Powerwall 2 is an example. But Australian company Lavo has built a rather spunky (if chunky) cabinet that can sit on the side of your house and store your excess energy as hydrogen.
The Lavo Green Energy Storage System measures 1,680 x 1,240 x 400 mm (66 x 49 x 15.7 inches) and weighs a meaty 324 kg (714 lb), making it very unlikely to be pocketed by a thief. You connect it to your solar inverter (it has to be a hybrid one) and the mains water (through a purification unit), and sit back as it uses excess energy to electrolyze the water, releasing oxygen and storing the hydrogen in a patented metal hydride "sponge" at a pressure of 30 bar, or 435 psi.
It stores some 40 kilowatt-hours worth of energy, three times as much as Tesla's current Powerwall 2 and enough to run an average home for two days. And when that energy is needed, it uses a fuel cell to deliver energy into the home, adding a small 5-kWh lithium buffer battery for instantaneous response. There's Wi-Fi connectivity, and a phone app for monitoring and control, and businesses with higher power needs can run several in parallel to form an "intelligent virtual power plant."
At AU$34,750 (US$26,900), it costs more than what you'd pay for three Powerwalls in Australia, but not by a huge amount, and that price is set to drop to AU$29,450 (US$22,800) in the last quarter of 2022, by which point Lavo says it'll be available internationally.
Pulling the cover off reveals a surprise: the 40 kWh worth of hydrogen is kept in those four small red containers on the left, and the rest of this big ol' cabinet is taken up with the battery, electrolyzer and fuel cell stack Pulling the cover off reveals a surprise: the 40 kWh worth of hydrogen is kept in those four small red containers on the left, and the rest of this big ol' cabinet is taken up with the battery, electrolyzer and fuel cell stackLavo How is it better than a battery? Well, Lavo says the key bits should last much longer than a battery system, up to 30 years instead of maybe 15 from a lithium battery setup. There are also no toxic chemicals to dispose of afterwards, and the company says that even though it's a bit of a beast, a single Lavo system is more compact than an equivalent amount of battery storage.
How is it worse? Well, the safety aspect is certainly open to debate. Lavo says a leak will rise and disperse so quickly that there's little chance of a fire or explosion, and that hydrogen is "inherently no more dangerous than other conventional fuels such as gasoline or natural gas," but it's fair to say it could really get a party started in the rare event that a house fire managed to reach it.
Then there's the efficiency. Batteries store and release energy with minimal losses; for every kilowatt-hour your rooftop array generates and sticks into a battery, you'll get back more than 90 percent of it. But the process of generating hydrogen by electrolysis using a proton exchange membrane is only about 80 percent efficient, so you lose 20 percent straight away. And at the other end, you'll lose somewhere around half of what you've got stored in the process of converting the hydrogen back into energy through a fuel cell.
So not only does it take more energy to fill up, a 40-kWh hydrogen energy storage system might start looking a lot like a 20-kWh system when you actually try to get the energy back out of it. The Lavo folks say this system's "round-trip efficiency is above 50 percent," so taking them at their word, you're still tossing out roughly as much energy as you're keeping.
The Lavo energy storage system design looks terrific All the hydrogen is stored in four small red hydride containers; the rest of this beefy cabinet is taken up with the electrolyzer, battery, and fuel cell stackLavo And the final joy killer is the system's maximum continuous power output of 5 kW, limited presumably by the throughput of the fuel cell. There are single split-system air-con systems out there that draw more than 7 kW, and they're not particularly extravagant ones. 5 kW of continuous power output is going to be an issue; you'll need to keep your grid connection active.
Still, it's early days, and hydrogen is the hottest topic in the energy sector right now. It's not infeasible to think home storage units might start making sense at some point down the track, but Lavo will likely find this (admittedly gorgeous) unit tough to sell next to a battery system.
I’ll admit I didn’t think about LPG, because I haven’t had one near my house in over 50 years.
Hence the very first sentence: “The Lavo home hydrogen battery is not a battery, it’s an electrolysis system, hydrogen storage array and fuel cell power system rolled into one attractive cabinet”
It’s Australian so maybe they didn’t think of this, but how will this work in freezing weather. It needs liquid water. I guess one could build an insulated structure for it. It most likely generates heat along with hydrogen.
“Finally. Hydrogen is not a fuel, it is an energy storage medium.”
What’s the difference?
What’s the difference?
Hydrogen has been touted as a fuel for use in cars and especially fleet trucks for decades. GM had a huge Hydrogen car research program. But the infrastructure to transport and store Hydrogen in meaningful quantities is prohibitedly inefficient and expensive, and the source of hydrogen usually ended up being from natural gas.
But using Hydrogen to store excess energy generation from wind or solar, and reconverted back to electricity when needed is a perfect use of Hydrogen, and the more you scale it up, the more sense it makes. This single home storage solution is probably economically marginal at best, but on the power generation utility scale, it begins to make more sense. It is much more feasible to store excess energy from a wind farm as Hydrogen than in a lithium battery array. And at that scale, it's cheaper, too.
“reconverted back to electricity when needed is a perfect use of Hydrogen”
And it’s acting as a fuel in this reconversion, but I understand you’re talking about as a consumer fuel à la gasoline or propane, not the physico-chemical nature of hydrogen gas.
Based on my current average monthly power cost, it would pay for itself in 17 years.
I'm thinking the same thing from an economic standpoint. Would be interested to see a bigger system for neighborhood generation. I'd be interested in seeing if efficiency got better when you actually scaled up, rather than just adding units.
Kinda doubt that. You still have to install something (solar/wind/whatever) to generate the electricity to put into it. That ain't free except in the minds of the uneducated.
You'd have to factor in ROI of the system, ROI of the generating hardware, and disposal/maintenance costs of the entire system. Very few 'solar' installations ever actually even break even in actual economic terms.
Now that’s technology well done about time.
Still waiting for the breadbox size nuclear power plant...
“Or a 500 gallon propane tank sitting right in your backyard on your home out in the country?”
A 500 gallon propane tank will not blow up. It will likely rupture or the blow off valve will open spewing LPG into the air which will create one hell of a fire.
For it to blow up it needs to be mixed with O2.
A few years ago there was a garage fire that held two 20 lb propane tanks. They did not blow up.
I regularly use these small disposable propane tanks (like those for small grilles) for target practice. I also shoot at MAP gas bottles and diesel engine starting fluid cans. They do not blow up or catch fire. They rapidly vent.
I suspect likewise for hydrogen. The Hindenburg did not blow up, as the gas mixed with oxygen it rapidly burned.
They mentioned an estimated 30 year life for this system versus 15 years for a lithium-ion battery. I would estimate more like 10 years for lithium-ion. If they use a high-end catalyst for the oxygen electrodes in the fuel cell and electrolyzer, 30 years is reasonable for a hydrogen fuel cell system. A 3x lifetime is a good advantage.
Almost all of the hydrogen is stored in the form of hydride, so the instantaneously available volume of hydrogen is very limited, insufficient for a large explosion. The hydride needs to pull some heat from the environment to release the hydrogen so it is rate-limited. Also, any released hydrogen rises fast in air due to its low density, as opposed to propane which is heavier than air and tends to pool near the ground, looking for an ignition source.
Hydrogen gas rises into the stratosphere where some of it reacts with ozone. Widespread use of leaky hydrogen is probably not a good idea. There must be safer alternatives to H2O that could be electrolyzed in a closed loop system.
Ah yes, they blow up.
Hydrogen vented into the atmosphere in our current mostly fossil energy world is adsorbed on airborne particulates which aids its reaction with oxygen into water. Sporadic leakage from home fuel cell systems is negligible compared to the natural ongoing dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen by UV radiation, right there in the stratosphere.
Are you trying to talk me out of installing this ? (LOL)
Would you settle for a Central Air Conditioner size?..................
Sure, that’ll work.
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