Solar Hydrogen: Fuel of the Future

[caraher]

23. Again, this is at best a small niche application

That 42% efficiency is just for hydrogen to electricity. Ultimately this pant is fueled by petrochemicals ("Hydrogen is supplied using specially built pipelines from the nearby Polimeri Europa petrochemical plant, where ethylene-cracking is carried out.&quot . The technology as demonstrated mainly supports further consumption of petroleum and natural gas.

Now of course one could use electricity from solar or wind to generate the hydrogen, but now we're back to how efficient hydrogen is in an energy storage role compared to alternatives. If we're generous we say 70% of the energy in the original electricity gets stored in hydrogen, and then we get back 42% of that with this combined cycle plant, for an unimpressive overall 30% efficiency.

An industry web site acknowledges the low efficiency problem, and suggests that hydrogen energy storage is mainly useful in applications where more efficient alternatives like pumped storage create bottlenecks in the rate of re-extraction of energy.