New Solar Cell Harvests Hydrogen From Water

Engadgets is reporting that researchers at Penn State have built a new kind of solar cell that can harvest hydrogen directly from water. "The folks at Penn State have now developed a process that more closely mimics the photosynthesis process in plants, and while we won't pretend to understand all the nitty gritty of dye usage and other such nonsense, we do know that such a system could eventually attain 15% or so efficiency, providing a nice and clean way to gather power for that fuel cell car of the future."

Comments

Re:mod up

[misleb]

Parent is first one to point out storage benefit... someone with points should mod up.

There is no storage benefit for hydrogen.

This is the biggest problem with solar/wind power, the power generated often needs to be supplemented with conventional generation technologies to ensure constant energy supply. Production of stored energy source like hydrogen solves this issue.

No, hydrogen sucks as a chemical fuel. You'd be a fool to waste electricity making potential on making hydrogen. Supplement your solar/wind energy with some other method of power generation if you have to, but for God's sake don't throw it away in the form of hydrogen. Unless, of course, your using the hydrogen in a battery to store electricity at high efficiency. But hydrogen as a general purpose fuel? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

-matthew