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Using Sun's Energy to Split Water Means Solar Power All Night
phorm writes "Reuters is carrying an article about a recent MIT development which may pave the way for solar-energy to be collected for use in low-input periods. According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods. This would allow storage-cells to function as a form of battery for other forms of energy-collection, such as solar panels. The new method is also much safer (and likely environmentally friendly) than current methods, which require the use of a dangerously caustic environment, and specialized storage containers." sanjosanjo points out coverage of the process at EE Times, which features the MIT group's press release.
"...with our catalyst almost 100 percent of the current used for electrolysis goes into making oxygen and hydrogen."
If that is true (although I definitely have my doubts, as tales and empty promises of the past have made all of us highly skeptical when we read something like this), then it should open the road for a significantly more efficient means of producing hydrogen for hydrogen powered cars / devices. Hell a car equipped with a solar cell could just bake during the day to recharge itself and be ready to go for the commute home come 5pm. Though until I hear a confirmation of MIT's findings from another university/respected source, I hold on to my severe doubts about this.
First open sourcing solaris and now this.
Way to go Sun!
This would be a big win for any kind of "environmental" energy source (wind, waves, caged toddlers) that isn't always on.
Heck, it would make a great general-purpose home UPS and/or load leveler. If properly integrated, a home equipped with this would be less vulnerable to brownouts and blackouts. Local storage would make the job of power companies easier too.
Fingers crossed.
What are the implications for things such as water purification, desalination, etc?
Seems like a fuel cell "battery" is just the tip of the iceberg.
Now we only have to solve the problem of storing a very flammable gas and possibly an incredibly powerful oxidizer!
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
'nuff said.
Scientist and Gamer...
According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods
Great. So when do we see it? If it's anything like almost every other "alternative energy" advancement, it will either get snapped up by an oil-company owned holding company, or strangled by licensing fees/requirements/exclusivity deals.
Seriously- let's take a look back. Have there been any major advancements in solar energy technology in the last fifty or so years?
MIT = MIT Technology Licensing Office, and I used to work there. Six figure checks to professors were not uncommon...and it was the only part of the university that turned a profit.
It'd be really refreshing to see scientists develop a bit of altruism. It's the ultimate Open Source, and they'd be guaranteed decades, if not centuries, of good will and fame. That's worth a lot more than a few *possible* royalty checks.
Please help metamoderate.
Have there been any major advancements? I'm don't know, because I have no idea what major means to you, but the costs have come way, way, way, way down, and they continue to get lower.
Hell, solar panels even net energy these days.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Nocera's catalyst is made from cobalt, phosphate and an electrode that produces oxygen from water by using 90 percent less electricity than current methods, which use the costly metal platinum."
Ok wait, I looked it up and we're currently at 70% efficiency on the electrical energy it takes to split water. I believe we lose even more power to compress the gas in to liquid form for storage.
Now let's say we're only at 10% efficiency now on electrolysis. If you decreased the amount of electricity needed by 90%, you're talking about 10 times that efficiency making the electrolysis system 100% efficient which is impossible. If we're currently at 20% efficiency, then we're up to 200% efficiency which is ludicrous.
I read that lower voltage electrolysis is an active research area that increases the efficiency of electrolysis. Now perhaps what this researcher has found is a way to perform electrolysis with 90% less voltage which would improve electrolysis efficiency from 70% to maybe 85% or something in that ballpark range. That would be far more believable. I'm very much inclined to believe that the story should have reported that this new electrolysis process requires 90% less voltage; not 90% less electricity to produce the same amount of hydrogen and oxygen.
I can't believe that this hasn't been tagged "vaporware" yet
They have those systems and they're expensive. You need very strong materials keep that much rotational kinetic energy from tearing itself apart. You also need to magnetically levitate it to keep it from slowing down due to friction and also because it would probably be hard on ball bearings.
It is established FACT that Hydrogen is very difficult to contain. It leaks through the tightest seals like they were swiss cheese, and once free it races into the atmosphere and escapes into space.
This is not a major problem when all our hydrogen comes from the deep deposit hydrogen mines in Australia and Canada, but what if this new discovery hearalds an age of wholesail water mining? Do these so-called scientists not realise that we cannot have water without hydrogen? Have they forgotten that humans are 80% water? That water makes our crops grow and our fish swim?? Our life's blood could be literally floating away!
This irresponsible god-gaming may save us from peak oil today, but our grandchildren tomorrow will be facing PEAK WATER if these experiments are allowed to continue!
Write to your political representative today!
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Using Sun's Energy to Split Water Means Solar Power All Night
Well perhaps using Sun's energy is easy for you, but for those of us who don't live close to Sun's headquarters, it is impractical to buy a 100 mile long extension cord.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
>> It'd be really refreshing to see scientists develop a bit of altruism. It's the ultimate Open Source, and they'd be guaranteed decades, if not centuries, of good will and fame. That's worth a lot more than a few *possible* royalty checks.
Altruism neither pays for the scientists' mortgages nor pays for all the equipment they use to develop their theories.
I'm all for smacking down ridiculously-long copyrights, invalidating silly trademarks or getting rid of obvious patents (one-click shopping?), but this is the _exact_ thing that patents is supposed to support. These scientists (and by proxy, their granteurs (sp?)) took a gamble on developing a technology and they were successful. They should be rewarded for that success like any other person in society. Without that potential for gains, there's no reason to even try.
-Bucky
If you read the actual article (you need to be a AAAS member or otherwise have access to Science), you would see that that these MIT guys are using a cobalt oxide catalyst which is created during the electrolysis of water. Yeah, it's really efficient, which is good (I don't know that I buy the green thing), but it's also self-repairing. Although it seems to be future work, they're envisioning tailoring the chemistry so that the activity of the catalyst is maintained by an equilibrium of dissolving and redeposition of the catalyst electrode. As a bonus, it looks really easy to make.
You must be kidding ;)
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
50 years ago was 1958. Interestingly enough., that was the year the first solar panels went to space. Today, you can sit right there in your chair, do some googling, whip out your credit card and have dandy solar panels shipped right to your house at less than NASA cost plus pricing levels. That's pretty significant. A few years previous to that, some of the first ones were running $1,785 dollars per watt, and those are unadjusted dollars. Today you can look for deals and get them at around 5 bucks a watt. Not too shabby. And nanosolar started shipping this year, albeit all of it to Germany where demand is higher and they will pay a bit more now, because they know conventional will be going up fast later, so they did a whole nation push for it starting some years ago. That and it is cleaner.
here's the wiki ref for the figures, Solar timeline
I bought mine at actually a little under 5 bucks a watt some years ago. silicon demand has been going more for throw away gadgets and so on in the meantime, but several new fabs go online this year and next year so prices will be dropping again.
For one, professors have to get grants to do their research, so they are sometimes given to overstatement to that end. They are, after all, only human which means that not all of them are honest. Also, some are simply unrealistic. They think they can do something, so they announce it, even though they have no idea how to get there, and then maybe never end up doing so. Finally sometimes shit just ends up being impossible. It looks good, seems like things will work, however in the end you can't make it happen. That happens with research. You can spend millions only to realise you've been down a dead end and there's nothing to be done about it.
I agree an announcement from a major university is much more credible than some startup, but don't think things out of universities aren't overstated at times.
What do you mean "would work"? It's been working for a long time. The British did this thirty years ago. I'm sure there are other similar systems elsewhere in the world, too.
The two main problems with these schemes are that the capacity is quite limited - you run out of water in the high-altitude reservoir - and getting the response time down to small numbers of seconds requires energy input (you can't just let all the water in at once with the turbines stationary, since that would damage the bearings, so if you want fast response you have to spin the turbines up on compressed air).
Of course, such schemes won't work everywhere either. Countries like Holland don't have enough mountains for this to work well, and countries like the USA do have mountains, but the transmission losses between those and the centres of population are larger than is the case in a small country like the UK.
Average commute is 15 miles.
Average electric car uses 300 watt/hours per mile (after recoving energy from braking)
Cost effective solar cells are 15%
Surface area of a car is 1.5 square meters.
Solar insulation is 1 kw/h for 5 hous a day (on average)
SOOO...
1.5 square meters * 15% * 1000 watts * 5 hours = 1125 watt/hours
The average commute is 15 miles * 300 watts-hours = 4500 watt/hours consumed.
Solar powered cars won't work until solar cell efficiencies are 50% or better.
The solution is touted as improving storage of renewable energy from fat hours for use in lean hours. That problem is already well in hand using various battery technologies. I doubt that, even with this improvement, electrolysis-gas storage-fuel cell will beat even lead-acid batteries, let alone lithium ion (with efficiences close to 100%) or stationary vanadium redox (with properties like fuel cells but storing the energy in tanks of liquids at atmospheric pressure).
But it may be a DANDY solution for providing hydrogen and oxygen for powering vehicles: (fuel-cell prime-mover hybrids, hydrogen internal-combustion (at a carnot-cycle penalty), etc.) or as feedstock for energetic chemical processes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The paper is being published in a journal that comes out this week. It wouldn't make sense for him to post it to his website before it is even published (and would probably be a breach of contract).
Although MIT press releases are notoriously pie-in-the-sky, there probably are some real improvements here.
This seems very interesting and I hope it goes well for them. But I can't help but feel there are simpler solutions.
Yeah. How about using less stuff? It works 100% of the time, is 100% effective, anyone can do it, it uses current technology, and you can start right now. Sure, I love computers. But I only have one. I like TV, but I decided to save money and just watch shows through the web instead of getting cable and buying a TV. I love driving my car, but I try not drive unnecessarily. (As a side benefit I was able to cancel my gym membership and get exercise and commute at the same time.) I like steak, but I only eat red meat a few times a month because it's so damaging to the environment. I could do much more, but the important thing is getting started, and I've realized that my quality of life has improved with my reduction of material goods and extraneous entertainment.
Not saying the R&D should cease... but at some point we have to ask ourselves, "How much is enough?" The planet simply could not support a world full of Americans. The fact that this doesn't appear to alarm us is a grave indicator of our stewardship of spaceship Earth.
clicky
So we don't go with this mimic-of-the-biologicalstuff
approach, at least for hydrogen. Dan Nocera
and Nate Lewis organized a Gordon Research Conference
on solar fuels in 2007 that assessed all the
inorganic, nonplatinum hydrogen catalysts around.
Three winners came out. One is a dimolybdenum
system that Dan DuBois at the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory has worked on, and one is a
cobalt system that Vincent Artero and Marc Fontecave
at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble,
France, developed. The third was originally developed
at Iowa State in the 1980s by Jim Espenson
[BS '58], was recently improved by Xile Hu when
he was a postdoc here at Caltech, and is now
being worked on in my lab by grad student Jillian
Dempsey. The DuBois molecule and the Caltech
one are both very good. They operate at very close
to the optimum voltage to make H2. This is a critical
feature, because if the system's voltage is more
than the optimum, the extra energy is wasted. And
if the voltage is insufficient, the reaction doesn't go
at all. But Dan's molecule contains sulfur, which
can be nasty, and ours is easier to make, so we
think the Caltech one looks like a real winner.
Here's the link to the Patent that describes the invention. Interestingly the patent is drawn to the process rather than the device/product/composition which would be a stronger patent (it's harder to prove someone is using your process to produce hydrogen, rather than your product to produce hydrogen). This is probably the case because the chemicals used are not unique or new but are rather being applied in a new way.
Not to mention, have you seen the waste products? I wouldn't call 'em "environmentally friendly"!
Actually the way the waste is treated now it's unsustainable. However it would be sustainable if that "waste" were composted and made into humanure. If you garden, depending on what you grow in the garden, your plants will love you for watering them with your urine. Not straight mind you, nitrogen burn can kill them, but by mixing 10 parts water to one part urine. They would also love it if they were watered with greywater. That's what I did for a while, my bathtub was clogged for a while before the owner sent a plumber. So I'd use the grey water from showering to water my garden. Those who have commented about the garden said it looks real good, another gardener asked how I got my tomato and tomatillo plants so big.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Large format NiMH batteries.
Marketed as the Panasonic EV-95. Or rather, not marketed. You can't buy them. The only vehicles they are currently in now (no pun intended) are three hundred some-odd Toyota RAV4-EVs.
If they are ever sold for use to power traction motors in an electric vehicle, Cobasys will slap Panasonic with an injunction to stop. And you can't buy them at any price other than in very large quantities, and the only people who can buy such large quantities are automakers. Some would say "Not a scam" but the licensing of the technology to exclude certain forms of transportation is REAL.
Who's Cobasys? Just the joint venture between the inventor of the battery, ECD Ovonics, and -- wait for it -- Chevron.
Here are a few citations and examples. Although things seem to be getting better, as they are being licensed in some hybrids now, and they may be expanded to more applications in the future...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Apparently, it must be against the law to use any surface but the car's to generate its solar energy! ; ) A typical garage (22' x 22') with a south facing shed style roof is approximately 54 square meters. Plugging that into your formula gives 40500 watt/hrs produced, nearly 10X what your formula says is needed. The only thing holding it back is the storage capability of the car. With suitable storage we can do this now! BTW, insulation refers to the slowing down of heat transfer. The word representing the amount of solar radiation on a surface is insolation. Otherwise, thanks for attempting to quantify the subject, most people (on both sides) just go off half cocked.
I don't think you have to keep the O2 to run a fuel cell; won't it run off the O2 in the air? I suspect that the O2 would be tanked and sold to hospitals and industrial uses. Also, it might be more cost effective to pipe/truck the H2 to the city to operate a fuel cell there, thereby reducing the electrical loss from long distance transmission and step-up / step-down transformers.
Indeed, it might be best to convert all solar power to H2 and truck it to the city vs. building expensive transmission lines and pipelines.
The paper is published in a peer reviewed journal. It's patented, not secret.
They used ITO glass as an electrode with a neutral KPi electrolyte with 0.5mM Co^{2+} at 1.29V. They tried it with CoSO4, Co(NO3)2, and Co(OTf)2 as the cobalt source. It also works on FTO glass, as well as with a NaPi electrolyte.
The description of the processing method is extremely detailed. I would have little difficulty duplicating this experiment. (YIAAS)
But would you have any difficulty making it commercially viable on an industrial scale? That's the million dollar question.
However, the problem with human waste is that it can't be used for vegies because we've got a few too many nasties in it.
Just as with urine, humanure shouldn't be used straight. Manure almost never should be. When I prepared my garden beds, I built raised beds, I mixed 1 bag of cow manure to 4 bags of top soil. Actually I got some weird looks doing that, I don't have a mixer (which breaks up the particles and clumps so it won't hold as much moisture) so I spread out on the ground a tarp, added some top soil and manure in one corner then lifted it up until they mixed in another corner. I did this 3 or 4 tymes then pored the mix into the beds and turned over that and the soil that was already there digging down about a foot. The biggest problem with humanure is all of the stuff people eliminate when they're taking antibiotics, it gives bugs, microbes, an opportunity to become antibiotic resistant.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
> Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
No, extraordinary claims require ordinary proof that has been vetted extraordinarily well.
Otherwise, someone can arbitrarily declare claims 'extraordinary' and simply raise the bar every time the proof meets their old standard. You know, like they do with global warming, or evolution.
Sorry, but that soundbyte just gets to me.
Thanks! That link clarified matters considerably. To answer my own question, you have to extract the oxygen as well as the hydrogen or else the electrical circuit isn't complete. (Doh!)
Of course, I'd always assumed you had to extract both (although I'd never thought about why exactly) but the original article confused me by saying that platinum was efficient for the extraction of hydrogen but not for the extraction of oxygen - it wasn't obvious to me that what they really meant was that platinum was efficient at the cathode (where the hydrogen is produced) but not at the anode (where the oxygen is produced).
The Reuters article claims the new catalyst drops the conversion inefficiency by about 90% compared to platinum. Since platinum efficiency is about 50-70%, that means that the new efficiency is about 95-97.5%.
This is an incredible advance, if it's true. Even though it increases the efficiency of only the oxygen generation, leaving hydrogen still generated by a platinum catalyst at the old efficiency. Even if the efficiency has jumped only from 50-70% to about 70-85%, that's still a big jump. And it shows that there's a lot of reachable gains left to get, and not necessarily in the distant future.
--
make install -not war
The Cobasys example is bullshit. I admire your integrity in agreeing that it's a bullshit example, by citing the fact that they are used in hybrids (although you also lie about them only being in RAV4 EVs), but am puzzled at your inability to reconcile that fact with your lie about it being supressed. So they don't want to sell piddly quantities to shadetree mechanics. So what. They ARE selling to automakers, while you claim they aren't.
Try again.
A large fuel cell stack will cost you around $10 a watt (smaller ones are more expensive per watt). Let's say that some big fuel cell manufacturer and can afford to sell them in bulk for $5 a watt. Well, go check out your breaker box. How many watts is it rated for -- 30kW? 50kW? 100kW? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fuel cells alone. Not exactly affordable. Even if you were to use a battery or capacitor buffer so that you only need to be able to provide a fraction of that, it's still priced way out of any semblance of affordability. Of course, you don't *have* to use fuel cells. You could use a H2 ICE or turbine. But then your efficiency is *even lower*.
Batteries are really the only realistic option in the foreseeable future.
"He's a god; it'll take more than one shot." â" Lady Eboshi, Mononoke Hime
What are you trying to do, ruin my sex life?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Spin up a flywheel during the day. Compress air in a tank during the day. Charge a lead-acid battery during the day... etc
That that is is that that that that is not is not.