California Energy Commission Green-Lights $8 Million Grant for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Station

The California Energy Commission has voted to approve an $8 million grant for the development of a high-capacity hydrogen fueling station.

In a statement Wednesday the Commission said the fueling station, at the Port of Long Beach, would be used to service and promote the expansion of zero-emission fuel cell electric Class 8 drayage trucks. Drayage trucks are used to take freight from ports to warehouses and other locations, the Commission said.

The Commission added that the promotion of zero-emission vehicles would help to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution at the nation's second busiest container port."

The station, according to the Commission, will source its hydrogen "from 100 percent renewable biogas."

Hydrogen is becoming an attractive fuel source for many types of transport.

A fleet of hydrogen fuel cell buses is currently in operation in the Scottish city of Aberdeen. In September, European railway manufacturer Alstom launched what it says is the world's first hydrogen fuel cell train, which can travel up to 140 kilometers per hour.

The European Commission has described hydrogen as an energy carrier with "great potential for clean, efficient power in stationary, portable and transport applications."

For its part, the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) states that hydrogen can be utilized in fuel cells to produce power using a chemical reaction instead of combustion. This, the DOE says, means that the only by-products are water and heat.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/08/california-energy-commission-grant-for-hydrogen-fuel-cell-station.html

Comments

Photovoltaics: Band Diagram

In the previous post we discussed silicon, which is the most used material in photovoltaics. In this post, we introduce the band diagram, for which we will use silicon as an example. We will start our discussion of the band diagram with the Bohr model of the silicon atom. In semiconductor materials the outer shell of the atom, which is called the valence shell, is not completely filled. The outer shell of silicon contains 4 out of the possible 8 electrons, which we call valence electrons. As we discussed in the previous post, each silicon atom in a crystalline structure is bonded to four other silicon atoms. The bonds between the silicon atoms are called covalent bonds. These bonds actually consist of two valence electrons that are shared by two silicon atoms. All valence electrons are fixed in the lattice, forming covalent bonds, and are therefore immobile. However, at a temperature above absolute zero, thermal energy is supplied to these miconductor and some of the vale

Solar Cells Losses and Design Part 1

We have discussed some important properties of light and characteristics of the radiation of light by our sun. In this post, we will focus on converting that light to electrical energy. This is done using the photovoltaic effect. Photovoltaics covers the direct conversion of sunlight into electrical energy, by a semiconductor material. The term photovoltaics is derived from the Greek word ‘phos’ which means light, and volt, which refers to electricity, specifically voltage. Volt is a reference to the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who invented the battery photovoltaic effect that was discovered in 1839, by the French physicist Emond Becquerel. At the age of 19 Becquerel created the first photovoltaic cell by illuminating platinum electrodes, coated with silver chloride in an acid solution. This device was the first to convert light into electricity. The photovoltaic effect occurs through the generation of a potential difference at the junction of two different material

Black Carbon is Found in the Amazon River after Forest Fires

In addition to the tracks of destruction in the forest, the fires in the Amazon leave traces in the Amazon River and its tributaries. Incomplete burning of tree wood results in the production of a type of carbon - known as black carbon - that reaches Amazonian waters in the forms of charcoal and soot and is transported to the Atlantic Ocean as dissolved organic carbon. An international group of researchers quantified and characterized, for the first time, the black carbon that flows through the Amazon River. The results of the study, published in Nature Communications magazine, showed that most of the material transferred to the ocean is "young," suggesting that it was produced by recent forest fires. "We found through radiometric dating analysis [a method that uses the radioisotope of natural carbon-14 occurrence to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years] and molecular composition that the largest proportion of the black carbon we found

The Environmental Engineering Hub

Search This Blog