MSNBC Story

Solar power is used to break up water into hydrogen. He used as much local and environmentaly-friendly materials as possible. Was wondering if he has any excess hydrogen so it could be used for his car.

 

It's kind of an odd setup, really. Hydrogen isn't a power source, it's a storage device. From what I've seen, hydrogen is less efficient than batteries, in terms of the process to convert electricity into hydrogen, and then convert hydrogen back into electricity. Batteries typically do this task far more efficiently.

The Republic had a story about the house a month or two ago that made him sound like a real weirdo, IMO. The part about no glue, drywall, paint, etc.. they have some quote where he sounds like Howard Hughes with the aversion to germs and contact with chemicals and stuff. It's a cool setup, but I can't see how this is more beneficial than doing a solar/battery setup using NiMH instead of lead acid, which is typically used for solar arrays. NiMH would be much more environmentally friendly and again, should be a more efficient storage means than thw loss in converting to and from hydrogen.

 

The good thing about a hydrogen setup is that you can store a lot more energy so that there's more useable power as compared to batteries. It's the same idea as using hydrogen to power cars, it allows for extended range because the storage medium has a pretty high energy density. At home it would be easy to have larger storage tanks, so pressure would not have to be as high as in a car, but in theory if you had a compressor it would be possible to use the hydrogen in a FCV.

 

There's a fixed limit as to how much he needs to store though. That limit would be somewhere around 1/20th or less of the space he already dedicated to his massive solar panel farm. It's one of those things where you really can't explain it in any way other than "He did it because he can."

 

Sure, it's an experiment to see if it's a suitable option, but theoretically if you designed one of these systems properly and you had enough capacity you could generate enough hydrogen to supply the house with power for the winter when solar power is at it's minimum.

Also, even though the current technology for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is rather innefficient there are substantial improvements in the works that will change the way we think about hydrogen, much like what's happening with bio-fuels -- rapid development is improving efficiency making them into a source of energy rather than an energy sink. Things like this lead the way to innovations that can be put to use in all sorts of applications, home and automotive.