Posted on 06/12/2008 6:34:42 PM PDT by doug from upland
Honda FCX Clarity and Home Hydrogen Fueling Stations
By Bill Siuru
Honda’s decision to transition its FCX Clarity into limited production and lease some 50 of these hydrogen fuel cell cars to customers in Southern California is a groundbreaking move. Why Southern California? A small number of very expensive hydrogen fueling stations already exist here and more are in the planning stages. In tandem with this, Honda has also shown a longer term solution for refueling hydrogen vehicles in the form of its fourth generation Home Energy Station. Working with its technology partner Plug Power, Honda debuted the first Home Energy Station in 2003, followed by improved and more compact HES II and III versions in the years that followed.
The Home Energy Station is a self-contained unit that not only supplies the high purity hydrogen required for a fuel cell vehicle, but through co-generation also heats a home, provides hot water, and produces electricity. Its energy feedstock is the natural gas that’s already supplied to most U.S. homes. In operation, a fuel processor uses steam reformation to convert natural gas to hydrogen gas. Then, after purification and compression to a higher pressure to allow more compact storage, the hydrogen is stored in tanks and available for refueling a hydrogen vehicle’s 5,000 psi on-board storage cylinders.
The HES also has its own fuel cell that uses hydrogen to produce electricity for the home. An inverter converts this fuel cell’s DC output to standard 120 volt AC household electrical power. Waste heat from the fuel cell is used for home and water heating. The latest HES IV version is about 70 percent smaller than the first HES design, making it more suitable for household installation. Size reduction was achieved by combining the unit’s gas purification and power generation components. This also increased overall efficiency while making it easier to switch from hydrogen production to power generation as needed.
Don’t expect to see the HES on the market soon. Honda says it’s unlikely to be ready for home use before the middle of the next decade at the earliest. However, Honda is already proving out its HES IV at the Honda R&D Americas facility in Torrance, Calif. and other demonstrations are likely.
Is this the ultimate enabler for environmental vehicles? At present the HES IV does use fossil fuel since it operates on natural gas, although this is one fuel that’s found in abundance in the U.S. and North America. Also, it produces carbon dioxide and nitrogen emissions. Still, Honda's Stephen Ellis shares that using this system to generate hydrogen and fuel an FCX Clarity can reduce total well-to-wheel CO2 emissions by 60 percent compared to an equivalent gasoline-fueled car. Overall, the HES IV can reduce CO2 emissions by an estimated 30 percent and energy costs by an estimated 50 percent compared to the average U.S. home with grid-supplied electricity and a gasoline-powered car.
Separately, Honda is developing solar-powered hydrogen refueling stations that would use no fossil fuels or produce any CO2 gases, or any other emissions for that matter. Honda is now operating an experimental solar-powered hydrogen station at its facility in Torrance. The station uses Honda's water electrolyzing module to produce hydrogen using next-generation thin film solar cells developed by Honda Engineering. The thin film, made from a compound of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, allows production of high pressure hydrogen at 52 to 66 percent efficiency.
I’d love one! My neighbor got a Prius two weeks ago, but I want one of these. :0)
What is the desired outcome and how will it improve our American lives as compared to the lives of our recent predecessors like "The Greatest Generation???
Hydrogen/Hindenburg. Great neighborhood storage. Put it in Lakehurst, NJ.
Yeah, but they are now using it in cleaner electrical power plants and the cost for consumers is flying up. There might be a big supply, but the demand is way up, too. These things will make it even more expensive to heat homes. If they would use nuclear to generate electricity, that would be a big help.
Yeah, but they are now using it in cleaner electrical power plants and the cost for consumers is flying up. There might be a big supply, but the demand is way up, too. These things will make it even more expensive to heat homes. If they would use nuclear to generate electricity, that would be a big help.
Oops, sorry. Hit the back arrow and re-posted.
While I’m here, I realize these units can heat a home, but initially they are going to cost a heck of a lot more than a furnace, so the middle class won’t be able to afford them. But their taxes will be buying these for the folks on welfare.
Things have come quite some time since then.
There have been some remarkable achievements in H2 powered vehicles going back 30+ years. However, the economics were never there. Perhaps now they are.
Consider this...the utilities utilize the spining reserve to generate H2 at night. It would not be free energy, but more a recovery of wasted energy.
I’ve been on the fringes of the alternative fueled car area ever since college in the 70s. The market economics have never been workable. That may be changing.
Wow and it will probably be so affordable, like at around only $45,000
Three items for the thread:
[1] Click on “speeches” here: http://www.crichton-official.com/
Click on “Complexity Theory & Environmental Management” Scroll down to read this and see his charts:
“...According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay (1:1) to coal to oil to gas (1:4). Here is an illustration from one of his articles: [...] Ausubel expects the trend to continue through this century as we move toward pure hydrogenwithout the assistance of lawyers and activists. Obviously if a trend has been continuously operating since the days of Lincoln and Queen Victoria, it probably does not need the assistance of organizations like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, which are showing up about a hundred years too late. Ausubel’s ideas are controversial to some, but not to sites like Sustainability Now: [...]
Click on “Environmentalism as Religion”:
“I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance. [...]
[2] The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Lincoln Simon
http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Resource-Julian-Lincoln-Simon/dp/0691003815
[3] Freakanomics
“Whether we should care about “Peak Oil” boils down to (1) will the cost of supplying oil jump, (2) If it does jump, by how much, and (3) how elastic is demand.” ~ Steven D. Levitt
Julian Simon
August 24, 2005, 3:10 pm
Betting on Peak Oil
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/julian-simon/
By Steven D. Levitt
What a waste of money...how much fuel did it take to produce this nonsense?
I just read an article about GM’s problems with the Chevy Volt.
It is clear that Honda is using an extremely limited lease in order to minimize their financial losses while maximizing PR with the enviro-folks. The tech is obviously too expensive for them to seriously offer it as a product; the complaint about distribution of Hydro stations is just another handy excuse.
Enviro tech is becoming the high ground in branding. It is amazing that this tiny, limited experiments get this much attention from drooling enviros, as well as tech heads and gaget geeks, you know, like me. ;->
I’m not going that deep. This appeared in my brother’s magazine. He is one of the very top journalists in this field. We are quite a long way from the hydrogen economy, which really is the future. Hybrids will have a place for awhile and we can do much better than 14mpg vehicles. It really is in our national interest to use less energy. And, we need to get our own energy here ASAP. We should be using our own natural gas reserves — the cleanest fuel — to run our vehicles and then tell the Saudis to shove it.
Running a Honda Civic natural gas vehicle makes sense right now. Fill up at home at a fraction of the cost of gasoline.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2007-05-08-natural-gas-usat_N.htm
Now tell me why you have a break in your tagline, please. This is really not the inquisition, really! (grin)
I don’t know how the tagline thing happened, but it’s time for a new one.
“An inverter converts this fuel cell’s DC output to standard 120 volt AC household electrical power. “
Okay so you will just burn NG to power it. There is no carbon free way to power this earth yet.
But lot’s of people will feel carbon better at the thought.
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