Turning Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel

 

• Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology broke through the 1-kilowatt ceiling of green hydrogen generation using solar energy.
• The system turns solar power into hydrogen, oxygen, and heat.
• The lab wants to find new ways to use solar to create useful energy sources.

Researchers in Switzerland took a promising lab experiment and scaled it into a real-world example of how we could use solar energy to produce green hydrogen. Their system broke the coveted 1-kilowatt ceiling for green hydrogen production, and offers a new commercialization opportunity.

This efficient convertor of solar energy to fuel functions as an efficient artificial photosynthesis system, according to a new study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) published in Nature Energy. It also produces useful byproducts of oxygen and heat.

“This is the first system-level demonstration of solar hydrogen generation,” Sophia Haussener, head of the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at EPFL, says in a news release. 

“Unlike typical lab-scale demonstrations, it includes all auxiliary devices and components, so it gives us a better idea of the energy efficiency you can expect once you consider the complete system, and not just the device itself.”

To make it all happen, a system that looks like a satellite dish has been engineered to act like a tree. The 23-foot-diameter dish concentrates the sun’s radiation power nearly 1,000 times. 

When water is piped into the system, a connected reactor uses photoelectrochemical cells powered by that concentrated solar radiation to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. 

The process—dubbed artificial photosynthesis—also generates heat, which can move through a heat exchanger to reach a useful finished state.  READ MORE...