The Promise and Challenge of Fuel Cells for Individuals
How do Fuel Cells Work? Fuel Cells create electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen to make water. Batteries work by chemical combinations as well to create electricity. The difference is a battery has all the chemicals stored inside and eventually lose their charge. With a fuel cell, as long as hydrogen and oxygen are flowing into the cell, electricity is produced. The electricity is produced with the only bi-product of water.
How Fuel Cells Work
Why the big fuss about fuel cells? Most electricity produced today is done by burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel supplies are not renewable, and because they will eventually run out, the price of fossil fuels is very unstable which creates power structures that cause adverse political and economic consequences for people who don’t own fossil fuel reserves. Additionally, the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity and power our transportation, is implicated in the majority of global pollution woes and increasing global temperatures. Perpetually created solar and wind power can create most of our needs for electricity, but you need transportable power to run vehicles. Transportation is where fuel cells offer the most promise to solve many political, economic, and global pollution problems caused from over reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels.
The website - www.fuelcellworks.com provides an excellent summary of how fuel cells work.
What can we as individuals do? Electricity generated from solar and wind power can be used to separate hydrogen from water. This hydrogen can be used to power fuel cells in cars. When creating your own power generation systems, if you create a system that produces more electricity than you need to power your home, you can set up a system to create your own hydrogen to power fuel cells. On my property that is on a south facing hill in Northern Nevada, I can create about ten times more electricity than I need between solar and wind power. Stay tuned as I figure out just how to make this a reality.