By Frank Mustac, Special Writer
HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP — A handsome residence on Woosamonsa Road in the township doesn’t use electricity from the power company anymore.
The home owned by Alice De Tiberge has been turned into a solar-hydrogen house that generates its own power by converting sunlight into electricity using solar panels and stores the extra power it makes by collecting hydrogen.
It’s a first-of-its-kind house, said Mike Strizki, who designed and installed the 40 kW (kilowatt) power system. An inventor and president of Renewable Energy Holdings in Flemington, Mr. Strizki organized an invitation-only house unveiling event Friday for VIPs and the media.
“This is the first commercially affordable solar-hydrogen home in the world. It’s a pretty big day for me,” said Mr. Strizki, who is also president of a nonprofit entity called Hydrogen House Project that provides public education and conducts research on hydrogen and other clean energy technologies.
For the last nine years, Mr. Strizki has been living in what he describes as the first solar-hydrogen house in the Western Hemisphere. That home, also located in Hopewell Township, contains a power system of his own design using older technology.
The state-of-the-art system installed at Ms. De Tiberge’s home on Woosamonsa Road provides power for all of the amenities required in a home, including a full kitchen, laundry, bathrooms, hot tub and multimedia entertainment systems.
One part of the system stores electricity produced by photovoltaic solar panel arrays on the property to a bank of large batteries that, in turn, provides power to the house.
Another part of the system directs solar-panel-produced electricity to what’s called a Joule Box. Designed by Mr. Strizki’s company, a Joule Box is a rugged over-sized industrial cabinet installed outdoors that contains several pieces of equipment, including an electrolyzer at one end and a fuel cell at the other.
Through the process of electrolysis, the electrolyzer uses electricity to convert water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is collected and stored in tanks for later use.
To reverse the process, a fuel cell in the Joule Box combines stored hydrogen and ordinary air. With the aid of a catalyst, the hydrogen reacts with oxygen in the air producing water and free electrons in the form of electricity, which charges the batteries that provide power for the house.
“So it’s water to hydrogen, hydrogen to water. The power of the sun does the conversion,” Mr. Strizki said. “Every manned space mission since Apollo has used fuel cells to provide the astronauts with drinking water, heat and electricity. We’re using the same process as the space technology and brought it home.”
Energy, he said, is stored in form of hydrogen gas that is durable forever “rather than in batteries that go bad in three years.”
“Hydrogen has no shelf life,” Mr. Strizki said.
Making electricity from hydrogen with a fuel cell, he said, also means the homeowner doesn’t need a gasoline or diesel generator during inevitable power company outages, plus there’s no need to stand in long lines at gas stations like there were after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey in late 2012.
The 40 kW solar-hydrogen system installed at the house on Woosamonsa Road costs a total of $175,000, which is much less than the $236,000 for a smaller 33 kW system he installed in the Princeton area a few years ago.
“The cost of the solar panels have gone down dramatically. The cost of the fuel cells and everything else has gone down dramatically,” Mr. Strizki said. “As more of these systems get sold, the (total system) cost is going to go down dramatically.”
Adding up the savings from not having to pay electric bills anymore with possibly earnings from selling any excess electricity generated to the power company, plus recouping money from available federal and state incentive programs, he said, the return on investment is about seven years.
Ms. De Tiberge, the homeowner, was more conservative, saying the payback could be 10 years.
“To me, it’s an investment with the belief that I will leave something good behind (in the world) for my kids — land, forests and being self-sustainable,” she said.
For more information about the Hydrogen House Project, visit hydrogenhouseproject.org.
