PV Solar - for home hydrogen production ?
If water can be split and hydrogen kept underwater for house cooking needs - using just a basic array of PV panels. Then why isn't everyone doing this when gas prices are soaring ?
The Large companies ARE doing this - so why not the individuals ?
This is a link to Wind Turbine to Hydrogen - http://www.greenbang.com/uk-hydrogen-mini-grid-installs-wind-turbine/
But there is no reason why PV can't be left to it's own devices to just produce hydrogen - then the hydrogen used when needed. Storing under water pressure is the standard method of collecting gas - just like in the lab.
If the other side - oxygen is diverted into the home - then it will be a health benefit too.
Natural gas is still dirt cheap even though it has risen dramatically over the last few years. As it stands, natural gas is still a waste product that is essentially flared off at the well head because it is too expensive to build a second set of pipelines and the pumping facilities to bring the gas to market. There are efforts to use portable gasification and Fischer Tropsch reactors to convert the natural gas to a form of synthetic crude which can be brought to market with the rest of the crude from the well.
It's also important to note that when Sandia Labs looked for more efficient means of obtaining hydrogen from H2O, they concluded that the process could also produce CO from CO2 resulting in a mixture of CO and H2 from which any linear hydrocarbon could be synthesized via Fischer Tropsch synthesis. It would make more sense to use the solar power to produce both H2 and CO and hence CH4 or even C8H18 (iso-octane i.e.: gasoline) in order to avoid the storage issues of hydrogen. It would also make more sense to use solar thermal as they did with the Sandia Labs CR5 reactor instead of photovoltaics. PV only converts energy in the light frequencies absorbed by the outer valence shells of the semiconductor whereas solar thermal collects energy from all wavelengths.
Note under just water pressure, the volume of the hydrogen to be stored would be much larger than the house itself, even compressed at 150 bar (2,200 psi), hydrogen gas only has an energy density of 405 WH/l compared with the energy density of gasoline of over 9,000 WH/l
It would make far more sense to use solar thermal collectors to provide for the bulk of the home energy usage in terms of water heating, residential heating and via absorption air conditioners, air-conditioning thereby reducing the size of a PV array needed dramatically. Solar thermal is currently one tenth the cost of PV and has a payback period of 2 to 5 years instead of 25 to 30 years with PV. Mind you, PV costs have been dropping very rapidly so the economics will be very different in 5 to 10 years. Of course, the profit margin for providing the most economic solution is not always the most profitable for the solar outfitting company hence the promotion of PV where installation and design requirements are minimal.
I have never heard of a large company using PV driven electrolysis as a method to store solar energy, very few companies have pressure vessels larger than their facilities. However there are many commercial implementations of solar thermal absorption air conditioning mostly because absorption air conditioners are available in commercial sizes of hundreds of tons of AC, there are very few absorption chillers in the residential sizes (the Robur unit being the only one marketed to the residential market).
Solar Photovoltaic Renewable Electron Encapsulator (SPREE)
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