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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I 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

A well-sized electric furnace will use more than 25kW in one home alone: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html

Presumably if you can get the natural gas to the box, you can get it into home furnaces as well.

if you don't all get up and shower at the same time...

Let'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.

yes, 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]

Agreed. But --- who heats with electricity? (Heat pumps can be a good idea, though.)

Depends 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.

My 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.

I 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.

"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50....) also seems to favour heat pumps.

In 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.

I do, partly. Especially nice in the bathroom.

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