Power Mash-Up

I read a great article in The New York Times Magazine recently about a guy who built a completely energy-independent house, using solar cells, water and cans of hydrogen.

The basic idea goes like this: Mike Strizki, of New Jersey, covered the roof of a storage shed with solar panels, enough to put out about 10 kilowatts. That’s more than he needs for his home – for most of the year, the array kicks out as much as 60 percent more than he needs.

A lot of people with solar-powered homes manage to feed their excess juice back into their local utility’s energy grid, though I don’t think anyone makes very much money off this arrangement.

Here’s the really cool part of Strizki’s setup. Instead of selling his unused power to the electric company, which has a monopoly on the local market and therefore can control the rates it pays, he runs the power through something called an electrolyzer, which combines electricity and water to create hydrogen and oxygen -- basically, the electricity powers a reaction to split water into its two elements.

Strizki stores the hydrogen in a bunch of old propane tanks in his shed, and months later, when the days are shorter and his system isn’t keeping up with his home’s power needs, he simply runs the system in reverse. That is, he runs the hydrogen and air back through the electrolyzer to create water and… more electricity. In effect, he’s using hydrogen as a battery to store power for as long as he needs. It’s simple, and brilliant.

Before crowning Strizki as the energy-visionary of the century, however, I should point out that he’s not exactly breaking new ground here. Photovoltaic solar cells, of course, have bee around since the 1950s, and the electrolyzer concept dates back to the 19th century. In other words, he simply took a few great ideas that were already around and bolted them together to create a very efficient home energy system. It’s an alternative energy mash-up!

And that’s exactly the point; alternative energy is not a new concept. The basics have been around for centuries, and even many of the latest-and-greatest ideas have been available for years.

What has been missing, until very recently, has been the will to put the ideas into practice, to actually get up and use these very amazing technologies.

One of the big barriers, of course, is cost. And even Strizki concedes that his home was not much of a deal. He spent about $500,000 to develop and install. Ouch. And considering that the average homeowner pays roughly $1,800 per year on energy, that means he dropped enough on up-front costs to power his house for almost 300 years. Looks like he may have overspent a bit, there.

Well, maybe not. Consider it an R&D investment. Strizki says he can build another system just like his for about $100,000. OK, that’s still not much of a bargain. But, if he can find enough people willing to buy these systems, the price would surely drop.

How many buyers would it take to bring the price into the range of reason? And what is the price that would make the average person willing to consider getting one? I don’t know.

But I do know that a few people have to be willing to go first, and we already have one. So, who’s willing to be next? Lets see some hands. Anybody?

(“The Zero Energy Solution,” by Mark Svenvold. The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2007)