NATION’S FIRST SOLAR-HYDROGEN HOUSE
by Jill Fehrenbacher
A New Jersey civil engineer powers his home with solar panels and hydrogen tanks. Could this sort of thing work for mainstream homeowners?
Mike Strizki is a civil engineer who lives in the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. He pays nothing for monthly utilities bills at all, because the technology he’s managed to put together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides year round power to his home, even on the cloudiest of days. Strizki lives “off the grid” and his system creates no greenhouse gas emissions. He also has a fuel cell car which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.
from The Christian Science Monitor…
It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But does Strizki’s method – converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen – make sense for widespread adoption? According to some renewable-energy experts, the answer is “no,” at least not anytime soon. The system is too expensive, they say, and the process of creating hydrogen from clean sources is itself laced with inefficiency – the numbers just don’t add up.
Strizki’s response: “Nothing is as wildly expensive as destroying the whole planet.”
Read the whole article at The Christian Science Monitor >
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Of course Strzki’s system has its limitations, but “they” say a lot of things, don’t “they”? If we all had Strizki’s system instead of our current system, then one person with an oil powered combustion engine would seem “inefficient” and unrealistic. As far as efficiency goes, Solar energy built right is COP (coefficient of performance) greater than 1, meaning it can produce more energy than it took to make the solar cell. This is free energy being “irrigated” from the sun. This is not inefficient. Also of note, is that Strzki’s system is a not-so-new model of decentralizing the power grid. This makes blackouts unlikely, if not impossible. If an area was struck by earthquake or disaster, then the surrounding areas are unaffected and could probably provide the support that the affected region would need. Solar power can also be used in a plethora of ways, together with PVC cells. There is “softer” low tech architectural designs that can use material smarter and more practically. These solutions exist in many different forms - use your internet and start researching. Decentralizing the energy grid is also another way of strengthening our country against “terrorism” (as contrived as that term might be) or attacks - there is no single point of vulnerability, no grid to take out in a single Rambo-like blow of death. But decentralize is a naughty word. So ignore it. Then again…”they” killed the electric car too. Be careful of what “experts” and “they” might have you hear.