The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

More interesting doings from Alt Power Digest over at Yahoo! Groups:

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:56:37 -0700 (PDT)
From: AP@alternatepower.com (Alternate Power)
Subject: Experimental, Solar Electric House

Tuesday, April 22, 2003:
by Duncan Mansfield:
Associated Press:
LENOIR CITY: If not for the 48 solar energy panels on the roof and the R2D2-like hot-water heat pump in the closet, Lina Kinandjar's bungalow looks like any other in her quiet neighborhood.
"I know it is an experimental house, but it doesn't bother me at all," the 33-year-old Malaysian waitress said of the home she moved into with her husband and two children in October.
The 1,057-square-foot house, designed by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and partially funded by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is billed as the most energy efficient, all-electric home ever built by a Habitat for Humanity group.
Heating over the colder-than-normal winter cost 54 cents a day. The entire electric bill, which included power for a big-screen TV and two large aquariums, was $1.42 a day. That's half as much as a comparable house across the street.
Habitat for Humanity, a volunteer organization that takes an old-fashioned barn-raising approach to affordable housing, partnered with DOE to test building techniques and products that would conserve energy and help poor families save on power bills.
Poor families spend a disproportionate share of their incomes on power bills compared to wealthy families, said David Garman, DOE assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy.
"When you talk about the affordability of a home, quite often builders are really focused on the cost of the house and not about what it costs to operate and maintain a house," Garman said. "If you want to extend the American dream of home ownership, you really have to think about energy costs."
Lina's house cost about $100,000, with the solar collectors costing an additional $24,000.
Most of the products used in Lina's house are available to homeowners willing to do some research and demand them from their builders, Garman said.
"The technology of vastly increased energy efficiency is not far-fetched," he said. " What is difficult is to get builders to adopt that and to get consumers to ask for it."
Major components, like windows and wall systems, were donated by their manufacturers. The 40 sensors throughout the house are wired to a separate phone system to feed data back to the Oak Ridge Lab.
The house is made from structural insulated panels ‹ walls, roof and floors ‹ instead of conventional wood framing. The panels are glued and screwed together.
"It took us three days to put them in versus about two weeks to frame," said Linda Morrison, coordinator for the Loudon County Habitat for Humanity.
The 8-by-28-foot panels are a sandwich of oriented strand board, a substitute for plywood sheathing, with a polystyrene core. They tested 6 to 8 times more airtight than conventional construction, said Jeff Christian, director of the Oak Ridge Lab's buildings technology center.
Lina's house also has energy efficient windows and doors, and is so draft-free that it has a mechanical system to bring in fresh air.
Heating and cooling ducts were installed inside the living space, in a lowered, hallway ceiling rather than the attic, for a heating-cooling savings of about 35 percent, Christian said.
A heat-pump water heater, which alone produces a 60 percent hot water energy savings, was integrated with an unvented crawl space, the kitchen refrigerator and the home's heating and cooling system.
With controllable ducts, the heat-pump water heater extracts warmth from the crawl space, instead from the living area, and exhausts cool air behind the warm refrigerator.
It's so efficient, Christian said, " There is the potential to get rid of the heat pump for space heating and cooling. We are not there yet, but that is what we hope to be able to do."
A novel contraption that could lead to a future product is a copper coil that captures heat from the shower drain in the bathroom. The device preheats a water line leading to the water heater. Tests show it can save 7 percent in water heating costs.
"There are Habitat houses using (panel) construction, but the extent that Jeff's people are doing it here with all the integrated systems and monitoring, nobody has done that before," Morrison said.
DOE hopes to create a zero-energy house by 2010. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Loudon County Habitat hope to refine the lessons learned on Lina's house when they start construction on two more super-energy efficient homes in June. TVA has committed to finance five more houses in the neighborhood.
Lina says she may not know how everything works in her experimental home, but she knows one thing for sure:
"I know my electricity bill has been lower than other houses," she said. ========================================



________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:56:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Buzz@bestlink.net (Buzz Armstrong)
Subject: TVA Offers to Buy Homegrown Wind/Solar Energy

Story last updated at 12:03 p.m. on Tuesday, April 22, 2003:
by Duncan Mansfield:
The Associated Press:
KNOXVILLE: The Tennessee Valley Authority wants to buy homegrown green power.
For the first time, the nation's largest public utility is offering to pay homeowners and small businesses for their wind- or solar-generated electricity.
"What we are really looking for is another way of obtaining qualifying energy for our Green Power Switch program," TVA marketing manager Ed Colston said.
The renewable energy program, the South's largest, currently sells wind, solar or landfill-gas generated power at a premium to about 6,300 residential customers and more than 300 businesses.
This new feature will pay homeowners and businesses for the power they generate and credit them for consuming less.
A participating customer's home will have two meters ‹ one to measure wind- or solar-energy generation and the other to measure the net energy consumption.
TVA will pay $500 to offset the cost of the extra meter and 15 cents for every kilowatt hour generated by wind or solar. That's more than double the 6 cents a kilowatt hour residential customers pay for TVA power.
Colston said TVA still comes out ahead, given how much TVA spends on windmills and solar collectors for extra power generation. The utility recently signed a $60 million to add 18 turbines to its Buffalo Mountain wind farm.
A super-energy efficient Habitat of Humanity house built for Lina Kinandjar and her family in Lenoir City may become the first house on the TVA grid. The 1,057 square-foot house was engineered by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and equipped with solar panels paid for by TVA.
TVA doesn't sell electricity directly to consumers, so Kinandjar will need the support of her local power distributor to participate.
Lenoir City Utilities Board general manager Kenneth Dutton said he likes the concept but is still studying the details. He wants to be sure "we don't have something that could backfeed into our system and get someone hurt."
Jeff Christian, director of the buildings technology center at the Oak Ridge lab, said the solar-powered system in Kinandjar's house was installed according to established industry standards.
If the Lenoir City Utility Board's power goes out, so will the power inverter that connects the home's solar collector system to its fuse box and sends overflow to the utility's power line. For the same reason, the home system has no storage batteries.
Christian said the home's 48 photovoltaic panels will generate 1,500 to 2,000 kilowatt hours a year, with peak production coming in hot summer afternoons when TVA's electric demand is highest.
TVA's incentives won't make self-generating homeowners rich. Christian estimates Kinandjar will earn about $300 a year from TVA on a system that cost about $24,000.
"It is not for everybody," Christian said.
But most people buying these systems look for a different kind of payback, he said.
"Right now there are people who feel outraged that we have 25 out of 30 days in August with ozone alerts and our health is impacted when we go to the Smoky Mountains," he said of the pollution in the national park.
"It is like, what can I do? I can go complain about the car I drive or the big bad electric utility, but what does that get me? That is the core of people this will appeal too," he said.
"We don't think it will be hundreds, at least not in the beginning," Colston said. "We are estimating we may see 10 systems in the first year and then maybe add slowly from there."
The TVA's service territory covers most of Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. ========================================



________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:55:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: AP@alternatepower.com (Alternate Power)
Subject: DOE Adds Two New Fuel Cell Projects

April 24th, 2003:
Washington, DC - With fuel cells playing a prominent role in President Bush's "hydrogen initiative," Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced plans to add two new projects valued at more than $213 million to the Energy Department's program to make these hydrogen-fueled power systems so inexpensive they could become commonplace in America's power market during the next decade.
Secretary Abraham said that the department has selected teams headed by FuelCell Energy of Danbury, Conn., and Acumentrics Corp. of Westwood, Mass., to its "Solid State Energy Conversion Alliance" (SECA) program.
"Fuel cells play a central role in President Bush's vision of a new hydrogen energy future," Secretary Abraham said. "Hydrogen fuel cells will help free us of our dependence on foreign oil and eliminate harmful emissions."
SECA's goal is to develop a solid-state fuel cell so economical and versatile that it might one day provide auxiliary power for large trucks, supply the military with a battlefield power source, or generate clean electricity in high-efficiency power plants. To make this possible, the department wants to develop breakthroughs in fuel cell design and manufacturing that can cut costs to one-tenth of today's commercial fuel cells.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy Mike Smith said the SECA program is intended to move fuel cells into the mainstream of tomorrow's energy market. "Fuel cells today are being sold largely into niche markets where companies are willing to pay a premium for reliable onsite power," Smith said. "The President's hydrogen and climate change initiatives, however, envision fuel cells playing a much more prominent role. For this to happen, we have to reduce costs."
The Department's goal is to develop a ceramic fuel cell with factory costs as low as $400 per kilowatt. Today's fuel cells sell for well over $4,000 per kilowatt. If the cost targets can be met, future fuel cells could compete economically with virtually all types of power systems, including gas turbine and diesel generators.
FuelCell Energy and Acumentrics will join four other industry development teams selected by the Energy Department in August 2001 [see Techline]. If the new projects run their full course, more than $67 million in federal funding will go to the FuelCell Energy team and nearly $38 million to the Acumentrics team over the next nine years. FuelCell Energy and its partners would add nearly $72 million while the Acumentrics team would contribute $36.5 million in cost sharing.
Fuel cells generate power by combining hydrogen and oxygen in an electrochemical reaction, much like a battery produces electric current. Oxygen comes from the air while hydrogen can be extracted from a variety of fuels such as natural gas or coal, or perhaps one day from the electrolysis of water.
One key to reducing costs will be to mass manufacture standardized ceramic fuel cell modules using techniques adapted from remarkable advances in solid-state electronics. In a ceramic fuel cell, the major components - the electrodes and electrolyte - are solid materials typically configured as rolled tubes or flat plates.
The modules - each sized to generate 3 kilowatts to 10 kilowatts of electricity - would be fitted together for different market applications. By avoiding the need to custom-build each power unit, large volumes of fuel cells could be produced at lower costs. The computer industry used the same approach to dramatically cut the costs of computer chips.
The FuelCell Energy team will base much of its concept on being able to lower the fuel cell's operating temperature. Current ceramic fuel cells operate in excess of 1000 degrees C (or more than 1800 degrees F).
By bringing temperatures down to 700 degrees C (or nearly 1300 degrees F), FuelCell Energy can use lower cost metal alloys, reduce insulation, strengthen seals, and make other improvements to reduce costs. The lower temperatures also will permit the company to transfer many of the innovations it developed for its commercial line of molten carbonate fuel cells to its solid oxide design.
The Acumentrics team's design involves a series of ceramic mini-cylinders, each roughly the size of a soda straw. Combined into a 10-kilowatt module, the design potentially offers exceptional ruggedness and quicker start-ups than other systems, making the fuel cell especially applicable for residential markets, military applications, broadband communication networks, and as auxiliary power units for heavy-duty trucks.
The Energy Department will fund the projects in three phases with checkpoints to determine whether concepts warrant continued development. The first phase will extend to 2006 when developers are to produce an early prototype for testing at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia. Subsequent phases would focus on improvements to meet the department's cost and performance targets.

===================