Cooking with Hydrogen, Indian Style

[caraher]

8. Fun bit of math...

Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that the article says the product is 80% not solar powered, and accept the implausible claim that there is no need for hydrogen storage. (Beats me how one reconciles those two claims...) So how big would your solar array need to be?

Figure incoming sunlight at 1 kW/m^2, solar PV panel efficiency at 20%, hydrolysis efficiency at 50%. Let's say we want 1.5 kW of heating at the cooktop (what our kitchen electric kettle delivers; one could scale the number back easily to assume a weaker flame). Cooking with no hydrogen storage would require 15 square meters of solar panels - provided they are sun-tracking and you have clear weather. Adjust the estimate upward for any fixed array. And forget about cooking at night or in bad weather.

This is basically a few engineering students' senior design project being plugged as something far more than it ever could be.