World's First Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered Island

Albanach writes "According to this article in The Herald Newspaper, the island of Islay, on the West coast of Scotland is set to become the world's first Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered island. Scientests at Napier University wish to use the existing Wave Power Station to treat sea water and store the resulting hydrogen in fuel cells. The first plan is to power a building, moving on to powering the entire island in a decade."

Comments

seems a very expensive way

[56ker]

of getting some hydrogen! Surely it would be more efficient to use the electricity from the wave power and send it to people's homes rather than using it to electrolyse the water into hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen?

Wave power, fuel cells

[geoswan]

Solar panels at the sea locations provide the energy, albeit slowly, to electrolyze the water to the gaseous components. H 2 and O2.

I think if you re-read the original article you will see that hydrolysis is powered by wave energy, you know, ocean waves, not light waves.

Also, may I point you at a simple explanation of how fuel cells work? It has this cool animated gif, displaying the process. Note: no turbines.

There is this really cool tool on the web, called google, it is a search engine. You can use it to look things up, before you post stuff, preventing you from looking like a complete dope. You should try it out!