+ Fuel Cells: What are They and How do They Work?

With an ever growing need for an alternative energy source, one of the newest, most promising technologies is the modern fuel cell. While licenses for fuel cell patents were purchased for use in NASA space programs back in the 1960’s, recent advances are making fuel cell technology a serious near future contender for general commercial purposes. However, with all of this recent talk of these breakthrough devices, one may wonder, what exactly is a fuel cell and how does it work?

How Does It Work

I checked out How Stuff Works to get a basic understanding. In the most basic sense, a fuel cell utilizes a chemical reaction to produce electricity, much like the standard batteries we are all familiar with. While there are many different types of fuel cells, let’s take a look at a polymer exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) for the sake of simplicity.

In the basic construction, we basically have two plates with grooves or channels, one negative (called the anode) and one positive (called the cathode), much like the terminals on a battery. Between these two plates is a thin layer of material called a proton exchange membrane. Then, two “fuels” such as hydrogen and oxygen are sent down the channels on either side of the membrane. On the negative anode, molecules of a fuel like hydrogen are split into electrons (electricity) and protons (positively charged particles). The membrane allows the protons to cross the barrier in-between the two fuels while the electrons are forced to travel around an electrical circuit, generating a current, before rejoining the protons on the other side of the membrane and completing the chemical reaction, forming a byproduct such as water (in the case of hydrogen and oxygen) or carbon dioxide.

What About the Hydrogen?

In a world that relies upon naturally occurring and refined fuels such as gasoline, ethanol, propane, etc., how do we effectively produce the hydrogen necessary for fuel cells? While research continues in the pursuit of a long term, fully hydrogen sufficient solution, the answer for the transitional period from fossil fuels to hydrogen seems to lie in a process called “Steam Reforming.” Fuels like readily available methane (natural gas), ethanol, propane and even gasoline are reacted with steam at high temperatures (700 -1000ºC) and in the presence of a catalyst (a material that speeds up a chemical reaction) produces hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Then, in another process called the "water-gas shift reaction," the carbon monoxide from the previous reaction is reacted with water and another catalyst and water, producing more hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

After saying this, I’m sure some red flags have gone up. Aren’t we trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Isn’t that the point of using a fuel cell over conventional combustion? Won’t this just switch our dependence on imported oil to a dependence on natural gas? However, according to the U.S. Department of Energy,

“Producing hydrogen from natural gas does result in some greenhouse gas emissions. When compared to ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles using gasoline, however, fuel cell vehicles using hydrogen produced from natural gas reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60%... Current estimates indicate that using natural gas to produce hydrogen during the transition period to a hydrogen economy would increase overall U.S. natural gas consumption by less than five percent… [The Department of Energy] is not funding research activities for large-scale central production of hydrogen from natural gas. DOE efforts are focused on distributed natural gas reforming for the transition period only. Large-scale hydrogen production from natural gas reforming is a mature technology, and natural gas resources in the United States are limited—15% of the natural gas we use is imported. Producing large amounts of hydrogen from natural gas in the long term would only trade U.S. dependence on imported oil for U.S. dependence on imported natural gas.”

In addition, natural gas pipeline infrastructure already exists, reducing costs associated with needing new equipment, facilities and additional maintenance. Again, according to the department of energy, “Today, 95% of the hydrogen produced in the U.S. is made via natural gas reforming in large central plants. (The hydrogen produced is used predominantly for petroleum refining and ammonia production for fertilizer).”

High Efficiency

Another question that might arise is why do we even care about fuel cells? For one, they have incredible efficiency over standard batteries and combustible fuels alike. For two, they create less waste and/or pollution. Typical batteries are completely closed systems, meaning that when their internal chemicals are finished reacting (and cannot be reversed in the case of rechargeables) the battery is completely “dead” and must be replaced, generating landfill waste and possibly environmental hazards while fuel cells will generate electricity as long as the proper fuels are continuously supplied. Additionally, in terms of engines taking advantage of fuel cells, typical byproducts are water, carbon dioxide or other eco-friendly compounds.

Although fuel cells have advanced incredibly far since their first applications in NASA space programs, manufacturers still face many challenges in production. Equipment costs and sheer cost of materials (one material often found is platinum) used in the fuel cell must be overcome in order to make hydrogen cheap enough to be able to compete with current alternatives. Key research areas include reducing these costs with more effective catalysts/manufacturing methods and combining the many manufacturing processes required into several larger steps.

Despite these challenges, many companies are taking fuel cell technology to the next level, integrating them into various prototype consumer devices, vehicles and power generation devices. Among those companies are Honda with their FCX Clarity, their latest fuel cell vehicle, planned for availability to a limited number of customers in summer 2008. Other companies include Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies, whose remote control car runs completely on hydrogen, and Medis Technologies with their 24/7 Power Pack, producing portable power for a wide range of handheld devices.

+ John Robbins, Energy Consultant and Solar Home Designer

John Robbins is as an energy consultant and solar home designer in the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana (OKI) area, and is a frequent presenter to groups and organizations, as well as individuals and students. Having been to one of his presentations a couple of years ago, I knew John more or less lives the Energy topic we’ve been looking into, so I was pleased that he agreed to let me interview him for The Greener Grass. First a little background to what John does:

“I help homeowners and small companies lower their energy use or cost, pollution demands too, using custom-fit combinations of conventional and alternative energies plus very efficient "passive high-performance" building envelopes and efficient energy use within. I audit and analyze heating, cooling and electrical loads in homes and offices, whether they use conventional or alternative energies, whether they are my designs or designed by others. I examine and fine-tune electrical loads in prep for converting to solar power, as I also did with my own office which has run on solar electricity and batteries since November 2001."

John has the been residential chairperson for the S.W. Ohio Chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE), is an AEE "Certified Energy Manager", has been awarded the 1998 Ohio Governors Award for Excellence and Energy Efficiency in the Education Category, to name a few of his credentials. You can learn more (a lot more!) about John and energy efficient power and building at his website, http://home.insightbb.com/~johnfrobbins.

Priorities and Values
I started out by asking John to elaborate on a topic we discussed briefly when I first contacted him: Your comments about what people look for when buying a home, and energy efficiency not being high on the list compared to square footage, location, number of bedrooms, etc., seemed very significant. Do you have any thoughts about how people's priorities might be changed?

“Right now there's no recognized "personal energy using ethic" which might assist people in understanding how much energy they SHOULD use. This is a cultural problem, not unlike weight. I can recall when it was seen as appropriate for wives and mothers to feed their husbands and kids until they were overweight, since that showed they were well-fed (back when wives and mothers were more typically given that responsibility). Maybe this was fallout from the Depression or other less fortunate days when people didn't have enough to eat, so were overly thin. But it seldom makes sense in today's well-to-do economics in this nation that most overweight or obese people should need to eat more to recover from underfeeding.

Indeed, there's a general recognition nowadays about what's overweight and obese, how much of this/that nutrition one should eat, what one should weigh. So much of all this is part of the "American Way", to want and strive for "more", whether that's more money, more stuff, bigger and/or more luxurious housing, hot tubs or cars, or just more energy use. In many upscale neighborhoods, there are actually regulations on minimum house size, instead of maximum size or energy efficiency.

It's my perspective that this fundamental was central to Donella Meadows' THE LIMITS TO GROWTH and BEYOND THE LIMITS, which introduced sustainability in terms mostly related to physical flows, not just spiritual or political intents.

People especially in our cities and suburbs are surrounded by a mostly mechanized environment, their house, their vehicles, the buildings the work in, so they don’t have an understanding of resource flows like people in rural areas. There was a girl on my street when I lived in White Oak that told me that there were horses at the end of the street, but they were cows! She didn’t know the difference between a horse and a cow!

I heard once that the people in northwest Hamilton County did the most recycling. Why? Because they can see or smell the Rumpke Landfill [where the county garbage goes to]. So they have a higher interest and motivation regarding that issue. If they had a power plant in their backyard, they might be more cognizant of their energy usage and committed to lowering it.

I am not saying that a wealthier person, for one, cannot strive for more stuff or more power use. I just think many of us will never be wealthy enough to avoid trimming our usage and demands when nonrenewable supplies begin to get too tight to sustain normal rising demands at reasonably low prices. A wealthier person or anyone else who uses more energy than average might begin to understand and learn to want to trim their usage too. I think the more conventional energy one uses, the more responsibility one has to lower it, regardless of how. There are many ways.”

Energy Literacy
I've heard and read that most people are energy illiterate, and maybe there aren't enough energy education programs. What do you think about making this topic part of the core curriculum in high school?

"Energy and environment math and science problems could and should be introduced far earlier, like in 3rd grade. I'd love to write energy "story problems" for elementary school math books. We need problems that get kids thinking very early about energy issues, like so many light bulbs being on x-number of hours using y-amount of kilowatts and z-amount of kilowatt-hours, resulting in so many pounds of C02. I’ve often made this suggestion to teachers. The longer we wait to introduce especially numbers-related understandings like this, the more abstract these matters can be later, especially when people are adults when first learning about it.”

Power Plant-Sized Energy Reductions
You mentioned that just saving energy wasn't enough until it could take entire power plants off-line, or prevent powerplants from being built. With that in mind, is it possible that the alternative energy community should focus on very large projects? (office buildings, factories, etc.)?

“Many small reductions add up into larger volumes. We often hear about trying to cut power plant pollution via energy efficiency (EE), renewable energy (RE) and Demand Side Management (DSM). But since EPA pollution regs typically prevent ramping down power plant output (since pollution per output goes up dramatically as units are ramped down or idled), it's important to think about these implementations in volumes more similar to that of the power plants which we'd most like to shut-down or prevent from getting built. If we don’t implement enough EE, RE and DSM to shut down, turn off or avoid building new conventional powerplants, we’re not usually implementing enough to reduce any large amount of pollution.”

More Incentives Needed For Energy Efficiency
I read that one of the most affordable ways to implement solar would be to roll it into a new home mortgage. Do you think there's enough education or incentives for this? How about a new home carbon tax?

"Most EE and RE are not assigned appraised value in mortgage appraisals, at least around this area of our nation. EnergyStar allows a slightly lower interest rate, like 1/4% lower, but this is quite different from increasing value itself. If somebody has triple pane lowE windows with sunscreens, for instance, they should be appraised as worth more than double pane windows. After all, they do cost more. But a typical appraisal assigns no extra value. Similarly, there is no valuation for solar panels, whether they work or not. No extra valuation for a wall which has double or triple the R-value either. This is all clearly wrong and must be changed.

Ohio has fairly generous subsidies for grid-tied solar-electric power; I think it’s 35%. But the paybacks are still usually 30-40 years for most homeowners, even with the subsidies. Should anyone start their home or small business energy reductions program by installing solar-electric? No! Usually it’s better to start with lots of insulation, air-tightening and efficiency, then looking at solar heating and daylighting, orienting houses and structures better for “passive solar”, instead of just to the street, and so forth. In any logical approach, solar electric is the last energy-reducing strategy to implement.

In Ohio, there are no subsidies for RE expenditures less than $10,000. Yet there’s a heck of a lot of stuff anyone can and should do to reduce conventional energy consumption before spending $10,000 on the most expensive energy supply solutions. Programs maybe incentivize the highest-cost solutions because sellers of low-cost insulation and caulk didn’t have as much money to lobby the statehouse as sellers of expensive solar hardware. And there’s been a rather huge buyout of the solar industry by the oil industry, which has plenty of money!

Going back to my opinion that ‘the more conventional energy one uses, the more responsibility one has to lower it,’ imagine if our culture began to understand and accept limits on energy demand and use. A wealthier person might just prefer to get or have more, but do it with heavier applications of more expensive renewable, recycled and high-tech solutions that can’t be easily afforded by the rest of us. This is somewhat reverse of normal trends today, where the wealthiest consumers often pay the lowest average prices for their nonrenewable resources.

In Ohio, people who use the most power get extremely beneficial electricity rates. People who get charged the highest amount per kilowatt-hour are most often the people who use the least. I don’t think the average person knows this. But it certainly isn’t like that in some other geographic regions like California and Seattle, where electric rates go up the more you use. These changes will likely eventually come to Cincinnati.

I also support carbon taxes. When those come to be, electricity users in the Midwest will get hit with the highest taxes because of our burning so much coal to produce electricity and because of our being so inefficient. This is why I support incentives to reduce power usage, not just incentives to install certain kinds of RE hardware."

The Most Fascinating Development ?
As a final question, I asked John about what's a new development or RE method that has you excited right now?

“New developments are happening everyday. Just read yesterday about a new lower-cost solar panel, (which you can't buy right now of course, just like many other developments we read about). However, since solar panels and other similarly high-cost high-tech stuff (i.e. hybrid vehicles) are less affordable to most consumers, I am most fascinated by stuff EVERYBODY can do. I'm a "small-d" democrat and egalitarian.

Most of the ways we can reduce our energy consumption and demand for pollution are far less expensive than solar. Lots of ways are free, like turning off stuff when we’re done with it, like carpooling, like moving one’s desk closer to a day-lit window. Some are lower-cost, like choosing a smaller higher-mpg car for commuting instead of a more expensive larger vehicle. Like choosing a smaller house or office instead of a larger one. There are many energy-reducing solutions which are even lower-cost than what we’re doing or buying now! Getting our usage down in less costly ways lowers our eventual costs to convert to RE power too. Less power needs result in less expense for power supply, whether it’s conventional or renewable!”

+ Maglev Wind Turbines: Big & Small

Magnetic Levitation (maglev) has been used and studied for years in hopes to reduce friction and improve efficiencies. While this technology has been limited to train and rail applications, renewable energy may be the true application maglev was waiting for. Vertical axis wind turbines can take advantage of maglev technology and greatly improve efficiency, noise and power output. Plans released by Maglev were recently unveiled at the Wind Power Asia exhibition in Beijing.

The proposed plan calls for a one gigawatt maglev wind turbine which can power approximately 750,000 homes. The advantage of the proposed maglev wind turbine is that the space required would be less than 100 acres, while the equivalent space required for traditional wind turbines would be about 64,000 acres. The total estimated cost for the proposed maglev turbine is $53 million dollars.

For a smaller scale, maglev wind turbines are also available for residential, commercial, and farm use by Mag-Wind. Mag-Wind offers a unit with a footprint of 13 square feet, and is recommended to be installed on the roof. The roof allows the unit to take advantage of what Mag-Wind has coined, “the roof effect.” This essentially increases the effective area of the propellers, which will improve efficiency by allowing more air to be forced to spin its turbine. The advantage of small scale maglev is that the start up spin speed for such a turbine is much lower than traditional horizontal and vertical axis wind turbines of similair scale and power output. Whatever the scale, maglev may play a key role in vertical axis wind turbines in the future.