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They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talkin
by pkulak 17y ago
They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.
- teilo 17y agoI believe the idea here is not that a single 1KW stack would be used to power a home, but that several homes would run off of a single 25KW module, so that you only need to accomodate their collective peak requirements
- andreyf 17y agoA well-sized electric furnace will use more than 25kW in one home alone: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html
- houseabsolute 17y agoPresumably if you can get the natural gas to the box, you can get it into home furnaces as well.
- andrewcooke 17y agoif you don't all get up and shower at the same time...
- teilo 17y agoLet's consider this system in the context of the USA, where we have massive amounts of natural gas, but no efficient way to turn it into electricity. Existing turbine systems waste gas two ways: The inefficiency of combustion turbines, and transmission loss. Now, if we were to bolster our existing natural gas transmission infrastructure in order to support fuel cell technologies, we can presume that heating will continue to be provided by combustion heat exchange systems such as gas furnaces and water heaters. Additionally, there are other ways we can generate fuel which can equally be used in combustion heat exchange and fuel cells. Chief among them is our garbage, much of which can be transformed into raw materials for methane production. Yeah, I know, the AGW folks will be crying foul on this one. I'm going to ignore them for the sake of this argument. Now, even if you do not eliminate entirely the heavily centralized form of electricity production which we use now, you have dramatically reduced the load on the system as a whole by localizing power production in small modules everywhere. The result: say goodbye to rolling blackouts and cascading grid failures.
- andrewcooke 17y agoyes, and more generally making things hot is easy (efficient). so it's normally pretty stupid to use electricity for this (you would be better burning whatever you used to make electricity directly). [edit - ah, i see that they are hoping to use the "waste" heat to get the overall efficiency up]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- eru 17y agoAgreed. But --- who heats with electricity? (Heat pumps can be a good idea, though.)
- pkulak 17y agoI use a heat pump. It's 55 degrees outside right now, so I'm not using much electricity. I doubt I'd save any money heating with gas.
- eru 17y ago"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50.shtml http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50....) also seems to favour heat pumps.
- MikeCapone 17y agoDepends where you are. In Quebec, about 90% of the electricity comes from hydro, and it's pretty cheap. A lot of people (more than half, I think) heat their houses with electricity.
- erreon 17y agoIn South Texas a lot of the houses are heated with electricity. In my parents neighborhood they don't even have natural gas available to the houses at all.
- Vivtek 17y agoI do, partly. Especially nice in the bathroom.
- holygoat 17y agoMy shitty uninsulated California house is entirely heated by electricity. Only the water tank is heated by gas. Managed to break $400 for December's heating bill. I damn near lost my shit.