Would it be practical to use solar power to run the electrolysis? Or would that be like using gasoline to power a generator for an electric car?
From an environmental standpoint, solar electrolysis would be the way to go it seems. Not sure if you would be better off skipping the electrolysis though and run off solar alone.
The whole thing comes down to precisely that, you have to get energy from somewhere. Theoretically if nuclear fusion becomes a thing then hydrogen fuel cels can become practical until you can run enough copper to deliver electricity directly for all the things that want electrical juice as a power source.
The answer to the solar power thing to run electorlysis is something like this: Solar panels are only 20% efficient and electrolysis is 70% efficient. So just thinking about raw numbers, with solar power you would extract 20% of that 70% by the time you are done.
The math isn't on our side here.
Solar photons and h2o are very abundant though. If you won 1 billion from a lottery but you ended up with 10% after taxes.. you still have 100 million.
Low efficiency isn't necessarily bad if the raw material is plentiful and the byproduct isn't significant?
Efficiency tends to improve over time as technology is developed..
Maybe the space required for the solar panels and electrolysis unit would be significant, but this video shows a couple of bottles of water running a engine. Maybe I'm the dog chasing a car right now.. I can't help but wonder.
Yes. An Australian company did this back in the 2000s. They had "refrigerator" sized machines that could fit into your home that could be fully powered by solar panels (with a battery bank to store excess energy). You could power your entire home as well as recharge your car with this electrolysis machine.
It would make every single house independent from any energy gride. All you needed was water and to periodically replace the filters.
Everything about this seems like a capitalist's wet dream (pun intended), right? So why didn't they take off? They had working prototypes that cost less than $10K to make. They were hoping to get bought out by a larger company to reduce manufacturing costs because of economies of scale. So what happened to them?
It's simple: none of the major governments would want millions of homes to be independent of an energy gride. No energy companies would want that, either. So both government and the commercial sector squashed this. No one is stopping another company from trying to make this happen, again. No one. The tech is well understood, by now. And I think the market - especially with the Tesla Wall battery packs - make this a much easier pill to digest. I think the time is ripe.
Do you have any links for this, I am genuinely curious.
Nope! I did a massive writeup on this on a forum back in the early 2010s when they were up for purchase. I don't remember their name but that forum is gone and all searching I do on google or duckduckgo returns nothing. They were erased.
This is not some bullshit conspiracy theory. I researched that company for hours for a college paper back then. They were legit. And it's not smoke and mirrors: energy you put in is energy you get out and you burn the hydrogen for energy. It can continually run all day long. And it did lose major efficiency if you didn't keep up with the filters.
See if you can find it. It was back around the time Iceland was testing hydrogen fueling stations across its major highways and they were looking to put these refrigerator sized machines in the ground (to make them seamless and not interfere with the view). Bro...I am getting FRUSTRATED trying to find anything related to this company. But I am positive they were bought out and erased because this is a tech that invalidates the need to rely on an energy grid as well as invalidates ALL green future money for about 70% of all energy needs (residential, small business, and most medium businesses). So, obviously, a tech like this cannot be allowed to survive. We wouldn't need a green new deal. None of that bullshit.
It's not breakthrough tech. Their innovation was making it compact into a fridge sized devices. But it is all the same tech we already use.
Let me know if you have any better luck. Keywords I tried were: Australian hydrolysis fridge sized machine
Can't do either. The numbers aren't there.
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