Technology

Neat.

Remind me to check back in 5 years to see if this ever actually materializes.

@ooli tl/Dr "Photoncycle
Brandtzaeg holds up a chalk-looking substance: “With this, you can store electricity 20 times as densely as in a lithium battery.”

“We're locking up the hydrogen molecules in a solid to basically fix them. We're using a reversible, high-temperature fuel cell, so we're assisting a fuel cell which both can produce hydrogen and electricity in the same cell,” he says.

That means no need to cool the hydrogen down, making it non-flammable and giving it a higher density than an ion-lithium battery"

I've said it before and I'll say it again: most new hydrogen technology is snake oil.

Its main source right now is as a byproduct to petrochemical processing, so a lot of the motivation behind it is really about maintaining these production lines, rather than "going green".

Some things do require hydrogen, eg science applications. Hydrogen can be made using green electricity, but the energy cost is incredibly high. In order to fulfill just the things that require hydrogen, where there is no other alternative, we would need 3x the global renewable capacity solely dedicated to hydrogen production. If we start adding mass transport into that mix, or things like this hydrogen heating system, then we're only exacerbating the problem.

We need our renewable electricity to power things that already use electricity. We don't have enough capacity to be pouring it away into all the potential uses for hydrogen - which are often far less efficient. You lose so much energy creating hydrogen (as well as losses due to leaks) that you may as well just power it with electricity directly.

I don't want my house to be self-sufficient. I want my street and neighborhood to be self-sufficient. I already use my neighbors excess solar for reasonable prices.

My city wants to be off natural gas in 2030 and my neighborhood is in the pilot to transition first. I don't necessarily want a huge heat pump attached to my house, and I don't want a huge energy storage solution in my small garden.

There is city land around our housing block with plenty of room for a solution that can serve the whole street. I hope the city is going to propose something like that for us.

They don't actually say what the efficiency of it is, only that the inneficiency is mainly heat and "70% of home energy needs are for heat" which makes sense in Scandinavia but makes less and less sense the further South you are, plus it massivelly depends on being able to capture and use that heat (can you use it for cooking or only for environmental heating?).

Ultimatelly efficiency and price are what makes almost all the difference.

That said, I hope this turns out to be a proper solution: we definitelly need home energy storage solutions which have much higher energy density and lower cost per mWh that the ones we have now.

We already have efficient enough solar panels to make our homes self sufficient, we just can't afford to buy them.

Even if we could, the power supply industry would see it happening, bribe and persuade the government to make it illegal to go off grid (I'm sure their solicitors would come up with "good" reasons that we should be stopped), to save their poor little shareholders.

No way will they go down without a fight. Would I love to go off grid? Sure. If I had a few grand of spending money I could easily do it. But that's just one person, no way they'd let the entire country do it.

You know what else is a solid form of hydrogen?

Ice.

I wish they went into more deatil about what kind of solid fuel cell system they're working with - they say they're trapping hydrogen molecules in some kind of molecular lattice, i.e. a crystal of some sort perhaps?

Anyway, I hate patents but understand why you need them... They just seems to slow down progress.

We Reddit now.

I dont see any electrical units in this article

This is great and a step in the right direction, roll on self-sufficient streets, villages, and towns.