Linkpost: 06/29/09
- Why the Microgrid Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Crisis (Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company) Microgrid development/promotion makes way too much sense.
- Climate Bill Faces Long Odds in Senate (Jay Cost, RCP) One hopes.
- The climate change climate change (Kimberley Strassel, WSJ)
- Jacko, Sanford and weirdness (Mark Steyn, OC Register)
- A Debt The Founders Wouldn't Believe (Judd Gregg, IBD)
- Honduras Defends Its Democracy (Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ) Sensible, reasoned stuff.
- The Pitfalls of the Public Option in Health Care (N. Gregory Mankiw, NY Times)
- Why Did the Washington Post Sack Dan Froomkin? (Erik Wemple, Washington City Paper)
- Big 12 appears ready to surpass SEC in football (Chuck Carlton, DMN) Umm, no.
- Lamest #followfriday tweet ever?
- Brooklyn gumbo (Robb Walsh, Houston Press) Must visit soon. This is my kind of place.
- Benjy’s on Washington (Alison Cook, Houston Chronicle) This is not my kind of place. Pass.
- The Three-Tier System and Consumer Access To Wine (Fermentation) In Texas, and many places, we pay too much for wine. Thanks, government!
- Behind the bar: Mike Sammons at 13 Celsius (Brett Koshkin, 29-95) Some good content on a silly website. I really want to like my neighborhood wine bar, because they have some nice natural wines, but over half my trips in ’09 have resulted in me leaving because of truly horrendous service. The last trip will be my last for a while.
- Lobster and lighthouses for less in Portland, Maine (Clarke Canfield, USA Today) I’d love to make it back to Portland for some seafood later this year, but airfares aren’t cooperating at the moment.
- Oh yeah, some Greece photos are posted (but I haven’t added any descriptions yet).
2 comments On Linkpost: 06/29/09
microgrid: <http://www.extremetech.com/…>
"I also sank around $38,000 into the system. At $3,000 per year in savings (which assumes a constant rate for power cost and the same power usage pattern), that
Did I ever tell you about the distributed power generation system I worked on for Reliant Energy before the Entex/Centerpoint/Reliant Resources/Reliant Energy split? The plan was to take Natrual Gas, feed it to a steam cracker (reformer) to disassociate the hydrogen from the methane, then feed it, along with atmospheric air to a PEM type fuel cell, and then convert the low voltage DC power to AC and feed it back to the power line when not being consumed. This was all supposed to be fit into a package about the size and shape of an outside 4 ton AC unit. Our part of the project was the PEM cell stack and associated hardware. we could generate 8KW for short periods, but it took 21 KW to maintain the proper cooling and the proper humidity and to run the blowers and all the associated hardware (now mind you much of that would be taken care of by the cracking system (reformer) which we never took possession of, we had to simulate it’s output). The inverter, which was the most efficient available was only about 72% efficient. between the stack and the inverter we were within space and power output targets, but the steam reformer was the project killer. by itself it was the size of a small (20′) seagoing container and took more power to operate than we generated. Some of the operations could have been accomplished by direct firing it with Nat. Gas instead of running it on AC power, but they didn’t want to have any open flames because of the possibility of hydrogen leaks. it also generated H2S because of the presence of Mercaptan (odorant) in the gas.
All told, the project was a failure and i don’t think reliant really wanted it to be a success, they just wanted to be able to point to it and claim they were working on "green power".
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