Toyota is making replaceable hydrogen cartridges to power your home | Hacker News Reader

Toyota is making replaceable hydrogen cartridges to power your home

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20 pointssomid314 comments

To power a microwave oven for a couple of hours? Geez. Not the scale that is needed, at all.

I recently did some calculations:

How many kWh of energy does a 1 person house need for one year electricity and heating?

And I think it came out to about 40,000 kWh.

The fascinating thing is that this amount of energy could be harvested with solar panels, even in places like the UK or Germany, with an area needed not much bigger than the roof area of the house.

The problem is only storing these amounts of energy - and specifically, seasonal storage, from summer to winter.

Batteries are not an option for this. You‘d need the batteries of 400 Tesla Model X. The installation would cost several millions of dollars. And each home using that many batteries would mean hundreds of electric vehicles that cannot be built.

But with hydrogen, it would actually work. In fact, hydrogen could be a plug-and-play solution for heating systems that currently run on oil or gas. You just replace the fuel tanks, and perhaps the burner unit. This way, you don‘t lose energy by first converting H2 to electricity and then to heat.

As a home owner, you‘d gain full energy independence. Price changes in electricity or oil would no longer affect you. And, on a global scale, if citizens harvest their own energy, and can store it seasonally, conflicts about oil or gas just will no longer be of any importance. It will be easier to just harvest the energy that drops on your land for free from the sky.

> You just replace the fuel tanks, and perhaps the burner unit. This way, you don‘t lose energy by first converting H2 to electricity and then to heat.

This hydrogen tech is undoubtedly for powering fuel cells and not for burning.

That’s why I find it so disappointing. Also the idea of small containers. It‘s as if they want to make us buy gas for our homes. Which is the very opposite of what the combination of solar and electrification can do (i.e. a move towards decrentralization of energy generation).

Indeed. To heat your house with hydrogen, you would use a fuel cell to convert it to electricity and use the electricity to power a heat pump.

Heck, to heat your house with natural gas, it would be dramatically more efficient to burn the gas in a small combined heat and power generator and use the power output to operate a heat pump or otherwise do something useful.

I hadn‘t thought about that. If it‘s more efficient to go the H2 > electricity > heat pump path, then, of course, burning the H2 for heat directly would be a dumb idea.

I also never heard of oil or gas being burned to drive a generator which in turn heats the home using a heat pump. I would have guessed that the losses during conversion are so high, especially when done at the single-home scale, that it isn‘t worth it. Do you know of any such systems as you describe that are in operation?

You use the waste heat from the combustion to also heat the home

> ... never heard of oil or gas being burned to drive a generator which in turn heats the home using a heat pump.

I don't think the losses during conversion are the problem. Costs are.

I'd guess until now energy prices simply haven't been high enough to apply this concept to small scale (single home), because compared to just a oil/gas furnace (using relatively cheap fossil energy) the system consists of more and higher-tech components so it costs more to buy and because overall it's a more complicated system it'll likely be more expensive in maintenance as well.

On the large scale you can now read about ideas like replacing gas furnaces at home with heat pumps and instead burning the gas in industrial scale power plants (to generate the required electricity) and also use the "waste" heat.

You don’t need the batteries of 400 Tesla Model Xs. What are you talking about? You don’t need enough batteries to store the entire energy requirement for a year, you just need enough to store enough energy for a day so you can discharge at night.

Talking about consuming in winter the solar energy collected in summer. Which is an important factor the further you are away from the equator. Most energy in homes in Germany, for instance, is being spent on heating - mostly in the form of burning oil, gas, coal and wood.

If the replacable cartridges can be transported then you can just buy some in the winter, perhaps 40% of what you need with the rest coming from your solar panels.

"Hydrogen power is most suited for trains and air transportation, where electrification is difficult."

Yeah, its hard to power a plane by electricity, but trains..?

At least in the US with 1900s rail infrastructure most trains run on diesel(?). In Japan or China I’m sure they run off electricity already

Diesel.... Electric Trains. The Engine burns Diesel to run the generator that runs the engine.

The Engadget article they copied from: https://www.engadget.com/toyotas-prototype-cartridge-is-a-wa...

Seems like a good idea worth exploring. But would need to scale the amount of power it could generate. 3-4hrs is maybe useful for off-grid weekend activities

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