Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage Adding caffeine can enhance the efficiency of fuel cells, reducing the need for platinum in electrodes and significantly reducing the cost of making them, according to researchers in Japan. Fuel cells are attracting interest as an alternative energy storage technology in a variety of applications, from electric vehicles to …
Actually, it's a bit of both. The researcher, after pulling a caffeinated all-nighter trying to meet a deadline to publish successful results, had the shakes and while reaching for the cup knocked it over and spilled the caffeinated beverage onto the battery - to his amazement the voltage meters all maxxed out and sparks started flying - the rest is history. It's going to be up there with the discovery of Penicillin.
I'm a heathen - I hate, and don't drink, coffee.
It's fun to watch the morning coffee addicts go about their addiction :p :twitch twitch: Cooooooofffffeeeeee :zombie apocalypse commences: heehee
I will admit to first using energy drinks during my (heavy) workouts last year. I try not to use them often but after a 14 hour-long day I sometimes need the pick-me-up for the gym afterwards.
I find the taste of coffee to be quite disgusting (but I like the smell, never really understood that).
But all the rest? The zombie bit? That's me in the morning before I've thrown at least three teas in me. And not wimpy stuff like a lemon green or a delicate Earl Grey, but a proper builder's tea...thrice.
Then, and only then, am I able to mostly pass as a functional human being.
> They can use Starbucks for it :)
“ A medium cappuccino at Costa Coffee contains a “massive” 325mg of caffeine, almost five times the strength of the Starbucks version with a modest 66mg.”
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coffee-shops-caffeine-levels-costa-starbucks-b2274145.html
However, caffeine is abundant due to the amount of decaffeinated tea and coffee now being sold…
I wouldn't curse too loudly as they might give you a Dvorak keyboard. :)
I guess you have hardware or software that must be connected to a French keyboard.
Otherwise a qwerty keyboard could be just as good for text entry - just the accents/diacritics which I recall even with MS-DOS you could enter with an ALT+octal code (now altGr?)
For natural language French text automatically replacing a character with the required accented character wouldn't require AI.
With the exception of the Académie most humans can grok French text without the accents. :)
Even with two decent but different mechanical keyboards moving between them is a pita. Switching between two national language keyboards be must like have the PFY/BOFH frequently messing with your workstations.
Oh, it's worse.
You also have to hunt down all keyboard settings in Windows because it otherwise sometimes decides to change your keyboard layout without any discernable reason. It's 2024 and Microsoft STILL hasn't figured out international use - it's downright pathetic.
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"the huge losses"
You mean the <10% losses on the grid as a whole...
Yes, sub 10%.
Of course if you're electrolysis water to get your hydrogen you don't do it off the grid - you do it on the site of generation that is either dedicated, or would otherwise be curtailed, so even that 10% is a *massive* over estimate.
75% electrolysis efficiency, 60% FC efficiency (and this should rise with caffeine).
But the input can be renewables - the challenge remains that storing and transporting hydrogen is a pita.
For static long duration storage that's not as big of an issue, but for mobile applications it is.
Fuel cells and electrolysers are stuck requiring a hell of a lot of Platinum. There's no way we could go from a few Megawatts installed capacity to Gigawatts (never mind 150-300TWh/y as required by the UK's Future Energy Scenario plans) without exhausting supply of what is already a stonkingly rare and expensive metal.
Yes, pumped hydro is great in theory, but in practice you need a Very Large Hill (a mountain), with a Very Large Lake at the top. These are rare in nature, and infeasible to build. Not impossible if you already have a nice mountain which isn't designated an Area of Natural Beauty and therefore you can get permission to chop the top off and dig a massive hole in it.. But even then, that gets you Hours, not the Days of storage that you'd need to plug Wind lulls. The efficiency isn't great (though maybe better than fuel cells) but the cost to is going to be in the tens of billions for a GW-scale facility, and it doesn't actually generate electricity.. Better to build a nuke that does?
And still, you have to get the electricity in and out of the facility. The biggest problem with the UK grid IMO is the transmission bottleneck - we can't easily build more pylons because of nimby landowners, and so we are unable to get the electricity out of Scotland when the wind is blowing (so we have to turn on gas plants and French imports, while paying the scots to NOT use their wind) and i'm not sure how storage fixes that problem, since all the feasible storage solutions are very short-term, and even then, storage is not the same as transmission capacity.
The reason that NG were so excited about Hydrogen, is because it could solve some of the Transmission problem. Put electrolysers in Scotland and Fuel Cells in England, and use the existing Gas network to pump it around to where it's needed. You obviously can't do that with stand-alone storage like a stationary battery or pumped hydro plant.. But unfortunately, for reasons of electrochemistry and physics, the Hydrogen plan didn't turn out to be very feasible either.
So, instead we are building HVDC links like they are going out of fashion. Not just between countries/continents, but inside the UK. Priti Patel famously opposed pylons and wanted to build a UK HVDC superhighway instead.. Apparently one can lay a 2GW subsea cable much faster and with less hassle from nimby's, than a traditional AC transmission line. (although it would use far more copper, and be more expensive overall)
What worries me about that plan though is that HVDC is asynchronous - by virtue of being DC - so it exacerbates the already perilous grid-islanding and frequency-instability that could cause a UK-wide blackout - and although we can sort-of fix that with some funky software, they are extremely vulnerable to sudden failure or sabotage.
Subsea AC cables then? Maybe. Although apparently they annoy the fish even more than the DC ones do. And just-as-prone to anchor-dragging etc.
"What worries me about that plan though is that HVDC is asynchronous - by virtue of being DC - so it exacerbates the already perilous grid-islanding and frequency-instability that could cause a UK-wide blackout - and although we can sort-of fix that with some funky software, they are extremely vulnerable to sudden failure or sabotage."
I don't think we're in significant danger of islanding, whilst that AC backbone exists we'll stay in sync.
Indeed at least one Australian grid (which tend to be much longer and thinner than ours since everyone lives on the coast) is already down to only having two synchronous generators required...
"Subsea AC cables then? Maybe. Although apparently they annoy the fish even more than the DC ones do. And just-as-prone to anchor-dragging etc."
They also have efficiency losses due to induction, meaning DC is usually a better solution over longer distances.
It's also notoriously difficult to harness.
I mean if you are happy to completely wreck ecosystems then you can build a barrage across the severn, and that would generate a significant amount of electricity.
The La Rance barrage generates an average of 96MW (40% capacity factor, 600GWh/year), estimates for the severn are in the region of 2 GW (17TWh/year)
Can you explain how completely wreck ecosystems by building a barrage across the Seven is different to completely wreck ecosystems with climate change?
I'm not being rude I honestly want to know, yes building a Seven barrage will damage existing ecosystems, but they are already begin damaged by climate change and the damage will continue to get worse. If the ecosystems are already damaged why not build the barrage and maybe it will help prevent damage to other ecosystems.
"Can you explain how completely wreck ecosystems by building a barrage across the Seven is different to completely wreck ecosystems with climate change?"
Certainly - the destruction would be localised and clearly attributable to a single project. It would also be substantially faster.
That makes it politically a complete non starter
Ideally we'd look at ways to avert the climate change destruction that doesn't also involve destroying relatively rare habitats in the process (and one slightly non obvious issue is that if we went all in on tidal then it would be the same sort habitat in all the locations we used - potentially impacting a large proportion of that habitat globally.
you don't, in fact, need a Very Large Hill, with a Very Large Lake at the top, a Very Large Hole in the Ground* works as well.
*AKA a disused mine.
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/02/28/Researchers-found-37-mine-sites-in-Australia-that-could-be-converted-into-renewable-energy-storage/
Geek's Guide - Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery
https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electric_mountain/
Just come across this on Electric Mountain - podcast/text
> Fuel cells and electrolysers are stuck requiring a hell of a lot of Platinum.
Bollocks. And you know it. 400g/MW is a commonly admitted figure. Besides, there are a lot of alternatives: only around 30% of electrolysers use platinum as a catalyst.
So, get used to it. Green H2 production is increasing exponentially. Find yourself another rant.
Lol. Posting AC as usual...
I bet you a pint that Hydrogen will never contribute 2GW in total in the UK in the next 10 years, never mind their target of 10GW by 2030. I also bet a second pint that storing hundreds of GWh in Hydrogen proves infeasible.
But you'd need to take that mask off to drink it...
<ignoring childish scorn from insecure character/>
You're still thinking in terms of legacy hierarchical grid, it seems. You're apparently unable to realize that Green H2 is well positioned for community markets, and once prices drop, even consumer market.
Not everyone can have their personal nuclear power plant but everyone can have their solar panel power generating equipment. The next step is to add battery storage (for short term) and then the following step is to add one's green H2 storage (for long term storage, for redundancy or for trade). So, smart grids are coming, two way grids, complementing national grids.
So you're 2GW is nothing more than some ignoramus finger-in-the-air guess. In any case, you seem to be thinking of 2GW as a baseload figure. Green H2 is not for baseload. I thought that was obvious for everyone.
Turn down the petulance and you might have a point to make.
Green hydrogen is still a *tiny* proportion of the hydrogen we use today... but note that we *do* use hydrogen.
We use about 700,000 tonnes, at ~33MWh per tonne, annually. That's 23 million MWh, or 23 TWh annual usage in the UK currently. That's already an average of 2.6GW
> Turn down the petulance and you might have a point to make.
Thanks for you advice on "petulance". TBH, I don't care about how facts are perceived in this forum. Most people here are just trolling about topics way above their level of understanding and, more importantly, way beyond their sphere of influence. But it's always fun to put bullshitters in front of their bias: when facts hit them eventually, they'll get more annoyed.
> Green hydrogen is still a *tiny* proportion of the hydrogen we use today...
Nobody is arguing about *today*. When you state today's reality you're off topic. The topic is the transition. Which means *tomorrow*, by definition.
Green Hydrogen to Undercut Gray Sibling by End of Decade (Bloomberg).
"Yet in their most recent levelized cost of hydrogen analysis, Bhashyam and his team found that a tipping point is just around the corner. From 2030 on, they find, producing green hydrogen in a new plant could be as much as 18% cheaper than continuing to run an existing gray hydrogen plant in five major economies around the world. “In Brazil, China, India, Spain and Sweden, green hydrogen from new plants is going to start undercutting gray hydrogen from existing plants by the end of the decade,” says Bhashyam. “Remarkably, this holds true even for green hydrogen plants built without subsidies.”
"Nobody is arguing about *today*."
Neither was I - except to point out that you were correct: Hydrogen is already used in fairly decent volume - the assertion that you were countering was the we'd ever get to 2GW of hydrogen usage.
You accused cyberdemon of being childish and insecure, and then failed to address the (valid) concerns raised.
That's not fact based - it's why I suggested turning down the petulance - because you have good things to say.
Hydrogen storage is a significant barrier to long term energy storage as hydrogen, distribution is also a barrier although many use cases don't actually need long distance transport.
Yes, a tiny minority of it is green at the moment.
I'm sure we can produce a very substantial amount of it using electrolysis, but storage and transport is the biggest issue - I'm absolutely with you there.
We can use hydrogen in gas turbines - somewhat less efficient than fuel cells, and will produce various NOx compounds as well, but it's a pretty well established technology... that just leaves storage.
Can we get to a 2 or 10 GW, or GWh, not quite sure what the target actually is?
No idea - but not without actually trying to do it, which probably doesn't involve bunging money at oil companies.
I fail to see the use-case of a hydrogen fuel cell, other than in space-based applications.
Whether you're using it like a battery (generating fuel on-site) or a generator (hauled-in via truck of pipeline) it will be cheaper and more efficient to do the the same with electrolyte (instead of hydrogen) for a redox flow battery (instead of a fuel cell).
> Fuel cells work somewhat like batteries. They generate power by converting the chemical energy of a fuel (or electrolyte) and an oxidizing agent into electricity. This is typically hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidizer.
This sounds a LOT like an "engine". Fuel and oxidizer. HYDROcarbon and Air.
Yes, in the same way that your body sounds alot like an engie - fuel and oxygen -> energy.
But the process is completely different to both of those comparisons, and fairly close to the electrochemistry of a battery.
My hearing aid batteries work in a similar way, though they use zinc as a fuel.
This is clearly why no-one could replicate the infamous Fleischmann and Pons experiment: somehow a very strong espresso got into the reactor and whoooosh! The researchers who tried to replicate it, and Fleischmann and Pons themselves, never knew the secret so the world lost a perfect power source.
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