Admittedly, I don’t understand all of this, but I understand enough to see the potential. I heard the article on NPR on the way home last night, and thought I’d pass it along.
Your links are requesting I log on to Nissan webmail. Probably not what you intended.
I saw something about this elsewhere, it looks like a more efficient solution for producing hydrogen from water, using a better catalyst than just adding some salt to make the water conduct electricity, as they did in middle school chemistry class. You still need to produce the electricity somehow, but combining this with low pressure hydrogen storage tanks and fuel cells, you could possibly produce enough electricity from wind or solar to get continuous power at night or when the wind isn’t blowing. Cost of standard solar panels is still a deal breaker, but that may be coming down as well.
Ok, that’s better. So, to progress from middle school chemistry producing hydrogen and oxygen by connecting up a battery to that glass apparatus with the two tubes:
The middle school apparatus usually has a nine volt battery, maybe two batteries in series, a copper anode and cathode, and it isn’t very efficient. If you leave it running for fifteen or twenty minutes, you’ll get a few milliliters of gas at the top of each tube. The water is salt water, so it conducts electricity. The water also warms up a bit during that time, but really not enough to be noticable unless you let it run for a long time.
Prior attempts to improve on this focussed on the salt solution, and on the anodes. The best anode turned out to be platinum, which is very expensive, and the gas generator still needed (relatively) high voltages – it could run off batteries, but not solar cells.
The breakthrough here is to replace the platinum catalyst with cobalt (cheaper and more efficient) and get a generator that can produce hydrogen when operated by a power supply of millivolts, which means hooking it up to solar cells will actually produce some hydrogen gas. Apparently there is very little heat loss, as well, so it’s much more efficient - more of the solar cell output gets stored as hydrogen than wasted as heat.
Very cool indeed. Energy storage has always been a problem for small scale wind and solar installations. This could result in a storage container the size of a gas grill propane tank providing the hydrogen for a fuel cell to keep things running when the sun isn’t shining.
well,i haven’t seen what the links go to, but i think i have some relevent information
you can also use solar power for hot water. and i don’t mean running a black hose across your roof. there is a company producing these glass tube with some kind of copper device inside that is designed to get hot. a liquid (much like antifreeze) runs through the copper thins and gets very hot, even on a cloudy day. then the antifreeze stuff is used to heat up a tank of water. it won’t make all your hot water, but it heats it up enough so that your regular watre heater only has to keep it warm. it will cut your oil bill by making your boiler not have to work as hard.