Dollars and Jens
Thursday, July 31, 2008
energy
A couple MIT chemists have developed a simple efficient mechanism for hydrolysis. I'm curious about efficiency and how easy it is to store hydrogen at this point.
Incidentally, in the press for it here, they seem to keep harping on its use with solar power, but it appears to me that the solar power is being turned into electricity before it's being used for hydrolysis. I don't think household photovoltaic cells are as efficient (particularly from the standpoint of capital costs) as central station power generation. If it's easy to store large quantities of hydrogen and to quickly switch this system between forward and reverse, that makes things like wind power a lot more viable as well. I'm interested to see where this goes, but I certainly wouldn't expect it to lead in ten years to a large-scale use of solar power on a household scale, as is suggested here.
Labels: energy, real-time pricing
