Consumer interest grows for residential generators

Wednesday, July 7, 1999

SETH BORENSTEIN(BR)Knight Ridder Newspapers

NEW YORK - In the heart of a city electric by nature, the Central Park police station had too little power.

Antiquated lines provided so little juice to the historic 19th-century precinct house tucked in the park that police couldn't run electronic fingerprint machines or air-condition the whole station. Getting to the 20th century with new power lines would have cost $1.2 million.

Instead, the police skipped right to the 21st century and for $1 million got their own power plant - a clean, ultra-efficient fuel cell. Now they have enough juice to run high-tech gadgetry, charge four electric police cars and light up a nearby summer stage where the Metropolitan Opera performs. On May 1, they cut themselves off from New York's vaunted power grid.

"It's great to be self-sufficient," said police Capt. James O'Neill.

The Central Park police are pioneers in what experts see as a new era of power production. Growing numbers of businesses are turning on small, economical and extraordinarily reliable power plants to wean themselves from utilities.

Private homes will be next, with hundreds of test residential generators scheduled for installation starting in August. Plug Power LLC of Latham, N.Y., hopes to begin selling dishwasher-sized fuel cells for the home for less than $4,000 in just 18 months and sees an initial market of 25 million homes.

Researchers say personal power is poised to explode into everyday life just like personal computers in 1984 and cellular phones a few years after that.

"We're at the beginning of a revolution here," said Shalom Zelingher, New York Power Authority research and technology development director, pointing to the police station's fuel cell.

These new systems provide more reliable power and drastically cut air pollution, supporters say, because they produce both power and hot water.

The hot water - which can also be used for heating and air conditioning - makes the systems two to three times more efficient than more conventional power sources.

In the next few days, a suburban Chicago McDonald's plans to switch to its own microturbine gas engine to handle much of its power needs. Last month, a bank in Omaha, Neb., turned on four fuel cells in its credit-card processing office because managers wanted a power source more reliable than the utility grid. About the same time, a park in San Francisco turned on its own fuel cell. A textile mill in Lawrence, Mass., is already chugging along on microturbines.

Allied Signal, which built the McDonald's microturbine, is talking with real estate developers about installing power plants for small residential subdivisions.

"The era of big (central power plants) is certainly over," said Chuck Linderman, director of energy supply policy for the Edison Electric Institute, a power utility trade group.

Linderman said utilities in Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Tucson, Ariz., and in New Jersey, Florida, California and Idaho are embracing the technology as a new profit center. They want to be the companies that supply and maintain the generators, he explained.

Driving the trend is a yearning for self-sufficiency as much as technology.

The new generators differ from place to place. The most promising are fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to produce both water and power, and microturbines, which use natural gas to run a small industrial generator. But wind, solar and even external combustion engines are joining the mix.

Unlike the Central Park precinct, most companies that use personal power don't cut themselves off the electric grid. They stay connected, using the grid as a backup. Some even hope to sell excess power back to the electric companies.

The utility industry is torn by all this. Some companies are putting up roadblocks because they envision lost customers.

"When the public really gets the opportunity to make choices it will be impossible for the incumbents to stop this," Plug Power Chairman George McNamee told the Senate Energy Committee late last month.

"It's a race," Assistant U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Reicher agreed. "This technology is going to be, I believe, a major part of our economy."

The Clinton administration has proposed a bill, still pending on Capitol Hill, that would remove some roadblocks to personal power and encourage more research into it.

Some people aren't waiting for support from Washington. More than 100 companies are entering the personal power business, which goes by the awkward name of "distributed generation," said Sarah McKinley, executive director of the newly formed Distributed Power Coalition of America.

"This is really the year where it starts," said Ake Almgren, president of Capstone Turbine Corp., a California company that is one of the early producers of microturbines.

The trend is intricately tied to efforts to deregulate the power utility industry in states across the nation.

"What you have is a convergence of competition and choice coming to the electricity industry along with great advances in distributed engine technology," Reicher said. "These are ideal conditions for the rapid penetration of these technologies."

What has everyone excited is the extraordinary efficiency of the new personal generators.

Getting energy from fossil fuels in a large central plant is very inefficient. By the time the power arrives at a home or business, only 29 percent of the original energy in that coal or oil remains.

Fuel cells boast 40 percent efficiency and microturbines get around 20 to 30 percent. But what makes both technologies pay off is that they are married to cogeneration. Cogeneration is the reuse of the generator's byproduct - clean hot water - to heat buildings, clear sidewalks and for other industrial uses. That brings efficiency up to the 80 percent range.

With all its benefits, personal power isn't soaring nearly as fast as it could. That's because some utilities are making it tough if not impossible for companies - and eventually homes - to switch to personal power systems, said Tony Prophet, president of Allied Power Systems Inc.

Utilities "have the motive, the means and the opportunity to block this technology," Prophet told the Senate Energy Committee. "And it's happening right before your eyes."

Distributed power would deprive utilities of customers and, because nearly all purchasers of the new systems want to remain connected to the utility grid for backup power, some big power companies are using that connection as an excuse to stall the hookup of personal power systems, Prophet said.

The utilities say it's a safety issue. They worry that a home or business generator sending power out toward the grid could electrocute a worker working on lines. That's why precise technical details have to be worked out first, said Meera Kohler, general manager of Anchorage Municipal Power and Light.

-- a (a@a.a), July 07, 1999

Answers

Sounds like it won't happen in time. Dammit.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), July 07, 1999.

Fuel cells, very interesting. Do they use liquid or gas source? Are there any explosion hazards? Hydrogen as I recall can be sort of fussy.

A link to follow up on this would be interesting.

Thanks in advance.

-- helium (heliumavid@yahoo.com), July 07, 1999.

Dog Gone,

I'm lurking, and I'm b-a-a-a-c-k for this thread.

Wanna know about fuel cells?

It's my area. 'Lived it, breathed it, seen 'em, have monitored industry news regularly for several years. I've been paid to do so.

There are pilot programs (little publicized to be sure) where homeowners can sign up. Yes, deregulation may be an issue for the power folks, and their "positioning" is to partner/invest with the heavy development players, so they will be able to control a piece of this ever-expanding and wonderful pie.

I can say--with certainty--that not a day has gone by during the last three years that there wasn't some type of announcement with regard to advances being made by so-and-so, etc.

If you want to be part of this pioneering effort, your best bet may be to contact your local utility and volunteer your house as a "guinea pig."

Bottom line: the only way we will see the commercialization of this beautiful technology is when it becomes cheap enough for us to afford. The only way it will be commercialized is if the major power players--pun intended, but so true--develop a true ancillary partnership with the fuel cell industry.

It's on the road. Will it happen in time for Y2k? Maybe not.

One thing is for certain:

If people are freezing in the dark come next year, and if gas prices skyrocket, the market will be there. Boom.

"If you build it, they will come."

Or:

"If you build a house of straw, and it is wiped out by a Y2k tornado, you might want a stronger house."

Hmmmmmm. . . .

Shall we start a "fuel cell thread" on the prep forum?

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), July 07, 1999.

One of the most promising companies in the field of fuel cells is a Toronto based company: Ballard Power Systems (www.ballard.com). A sure sign as to their prominence in this field is the number of joint ventures or agreements struck between Ballard and several of the large auto manufacturers.

-- paul dirac (pdirac@hotmail.com), July 07, 1999.

Paul,

You're on it.

Ballard is big time.

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), July 07, 1999.

The URL for the NY company is http://www.plugpower.com/

(someone else can link it -- it's late and I'd probably mess it up)

-- Dean -- from (almost) Duh Moines (dtmiller@nevia.net), July 08, 1999.