MIT: We can make solar energy cheaper

Wouldn't it be funny if "extremely high gas prices" were actually the best thing that ever happened to the planet? (Forcing us to explore solar power, instead.)

I'm skeptical, but hopefully you've got answers:
So, you make hydrogen gas efficiently. Then what?
1) How are you going to store enough hydrogen gas to keep a power plant going for 48 hours (if it's cloudy for a couple days?) How much will the storage cost? (I didn't do the math -- maybe it's not so bad but please do tell)
2) How are you going to convert the hydrogen back to electricity? Burn it? Then you lose a good percent of your energy to waste heat and still have to, in effect, build the equivalent of a natural gas turbine power station in addition to building the solar in frastructure. Fuel cells? how much will that cost to build and maintain compared to conventional power?

Maybe this hydrogen approach is better than storing heat in hot salt or in compressed air in places lacking convenient caves to pressurize. How much better is the hydrogen approach than those others? The hot salt approach has the advantage of not needing so solar cells.

Let Howard Mills of UMT work on the system

So lets hear details on the process! I have 5kw of solar panels and don't look forward to spending 10 grand on a good set of batteries in the next couple
of years.
I plan to increase the size of my system to 10kw over the next few years. To be able to run a small generator at night to charge up a smaller (and therefore less
expensive) battery bank using hydrogen to power the engine would be great.
But of course the process will probably be patented.
John S.

This headline is misleading;

So they came up with a BETTER ENERGY STORAGE (Battery) that can be used with Solar/Wind/Hydro....

What about using the GRID that is currently in place? This can be done right NOW.

Other MIT profs have come up with a BETTER way to manufacture PV Solar panels (see Evergreen Solar in Devens Mass for example)

And let's not discount the Nano Batteries developed at A123 systems in Watertown.

This is a very high falutin' way of saying the have developed a better battery??
The real story should be how does this compare with other batteries.

I hate to say this but solar energy advocates have been talking about it being cost competitive in a few years for the last 3 decades. I hope they are right this time but I am not holding my breathe.

"When the sun is out, electricity from solar panels can be fed to the compound in water, causing the water to split into hydrogen and oxygen". OK YOU FOOLS when the sun is out you can not ferry electricity from a solar panel that isn't making any to another process. When the sun goes out the solar panels are dead. I guess solar panels that work without the sun at night can do anything including making the author of this report a superdum jerk.

Under the intrepid direction of their new president Prof Susan Hockfield, an outsider, MIT is embarassing itself in the renewable energy field on a daily basis. She's taken distinguished researchers from various fields and thrown them into a trendy venture-capital concept called the MIT Energy Initiative. The problem is that they don't know what they're talking about because they're not operating in their fields of expertise. The astute reader behind comment no. 5 understood that this new energy storage system has nothing to do with solar energy. Instead, it's simply a new catalyst for electrolysis (splitting H2O into H2 and O2) which hopefully will require less energy than it does today. You could do it with electricity from oil, coal, gas, wind or your cellphone battery. And why solar and not wind? Wind power costs less than a third of solar photovoltaic power, and also can't be stored when there's no wind. Because wind is so nineties. Solar is in. Al Gore said so. The venture capital bucks are going there. When's the last time a wind power company raised venture capital. Give me a break, Prof Hockfield and go back to Yale before MIT becomes a laughingstock not just in the renewable energy community.

The article is actually in the 1 Aug edition of Science, and though the article is up online, you have to have a subscription to read it. Your local library should have a subscription, though, both online and print, which means you can still read it for free if you don't have your own subscription. It's the first article under "news of the week".

All these skeptical questions are exactly the point - this is just one piece of the puzzle, and there is a lot more to be done. The Science article emphasizes that the breakthrough is the material - for large scale generation, you need a lot of the material, and cobalt is cheaper and more plentiful than other materials used before. So it's not really a "better battery" but cheaper one.

This is (possibly) a better way to do electrolysis. But we are left in the darkness about how much better it is. Terrible article...

Number 8 seems to be stuck in the paradigm of generating power for the cheapest overall costs of the 10 or 20 years ago. Venture capital is financing wind power. I am working on a venture capital wind project that will ultimately supply some 1,000 MW. And more are on the way. While wind is pretty cost effective, you need to be in an area that is consistently windy enough to make it pay. NREL has maps of the entire US that shows where winds make this possible. As a percentage of the US, the area is pretty small.

On the other hand, solar has a much wider area which is economically feasible. The greening of our electrical power industry will require both wind and solar, maybe even some wave or tidal power.

As for number 7, the fact is that the vast majority of power is consumed during the daylight hours. This makes sense because that is when people are up and doing things. So your nightime system only needs to be a fraction the size of your daytime system.

'es in about 8 years." Harris based h'

SHOULD BE

'es in about 8 years." Hanis based h'

I read the article posted on the MIT new office web site. It seems like what they found was an efficient, inexpensive way to get oxygen out of water (with electricity) using a catalyst that's relatively cheap and common. But they don't say they've got any new way to get hydrogen out of water. As I understand it, that still requires a catalyst like platinum that is $2,000 an ounce. Unless they've got ways to get both gases out of water efficiently and inexpensively, they don't have an overall system that is efficient and inexpensive. Did I miss something?

Wow...so many assumption, so much BS and buzzwords, both in the article, and in the responses.

The idea that we need better batteries to store the electricity from solar/wind and other sources is so obvious to anyone who has given energy half a minute of thought. But step back for a minute, and realize that it's not just about electricity. It's any storage of power. We store energy in water pressure behind dams, in chemical energy with batteries, in electrostatic fields in capacitors, and so forth. The problems are that each system of storage has its problems. For instance, self-discharge in chemical and electrostatic. Oh, I suppose there's some self-discharge in hydro power storage behind dams, but it's not significant. Hydrogen storage is nice because there's little self-discharge. But it has the disadvantages of being explosive, and it's lower power density when it is stored as a gas. To store it as a liquid requires very low temperatures. The best research being done in hydrogen is storing it in a chemical matrix, and not as a pure gas or liquid. The idea is that this hydrogen can be quickly converted to electricity by a fuel cell or combustion when needed. But it's not really that easy, because fuel cells don't provide a lot of instantaneous power and combustion isn't very efficient and is potentially dangerous. But let's put that aside for a moment and get back to storage. Storing hydrogen as part of a compound is good, and there's no more benign and plentiful compound than water. In order to get the hydrogen out of water, you need to have something that has greater affinity for the oxygen than hydrogen does. I assume that's what the actual science behind this vapid globe article is. Many other people have been working on this for some time, and have come up with some simple and functional designs. For instance, Aluminum has a greater affinity for oxygen than hydrogen does, so it works well in generating hydrogen - but the problem is that the surface layer of oxidized aluminum forms a barrier so that interior aluminum is not oxidized, meaning only a very small amount of aluminum is oxidized and a very small amount of hydrogen generated. One answer would be to provide a massive amount of surface area per volume of aluminum. This could be done with such things as an aerogel. But there are better methods. One involves an alloy of aluminum and gallium, which prevents this aluminum oxide 'skin' from being created and allows the entire volume of the aluminum/gallium solid to be used. This is really a great breakthrough! But it happened in the sixties. Some advances have been made since its invention but I am not sure of how important these are in comparison with the original invention/discovery. I am not sure how the MIT invention mentioned here stacks up. But, that's what I get for depending on the Boston Globe for science articles. Time and time again mainstream journalists fail to see what is important about a particular technology or scientific discovery, and try to link it to something important, with the help of the PR departments of various organizations (MIT as an example).

Solar is hardly trendy now, maybe in the 1970's when we could have a better, cleaner economy if Regan had not run on the "doom and gloom democrats" are in favor of solar platform. If we had elected Carter we would be so much further along our path to a post oil future but America looked at the future and ran in terror

Many Differ w /the statement that there is a need to create means to store Solar made energy after dark. There is.
Photo voltaic panels generate energy which is being stored today in at least 2 basic ways:
1. In Batteries ( Achilles heel is that batteries need to be replaced every 3 yrs.. Cost depends on size of PV system )
2. In Net Metering ( Solar made DC energy is converted into AC, then fed back into the power company's grid and credited to the customers electrical account.. Power made during day, like money in the bank, crediting an account, powers evening needs.

Im making my very own electricity from wind and solar... Its Free... and its really easy... I think anyone could build there very own windmill or solar power system from the instructions at WWW.ENERMY.COM