Technology is not the Problem

[FRED]

Hydrogen from solar economical at $0.35 per gallon in 1978.

[oddlots]

Back to the future with your host Jack

Priceless. The best part is the car runs on "white powder." No kidding.

[metalman]

Re: Back to the future with your host Jack

Priceless. The best part is the car runs on "white powder." No kidding.

top notch. wonder if 30 yrs later he still thinks the auto giants are out to kill little car companies.

[Rajiv]

Re: Technology is not the Problem

Add this little piece to the solution to the puzzle

MIT claims 24/7 solar power

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have combined a liquid catalyst with photovoltaic cells to achieve what they claim is a solar energy system that could generate electricity around the clock.

A liquid catalyst was added to water before electrolysis to achieve what the researchers claim is almost 100-percent efficiency. When combined with photovoltaic cells to store energy chemically, the resulting solar energy systems could generate electricity around the clock, the MIT team said.

"The hard part of getting water to split is not the hydrogen -- platinum as a catalyst works fine for the hydrogen. But platinum works very poorly for oxygen, making you use much more energy," said MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera. "What we have done is made a catalyst work for the oxygen part without any extra energy. In fact, with our catalyst almost 100 percent of the current used for electrolysis goes into making oxygen and hydrogen."

Also
'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Also the video

[MEDIA]http://techtv.mit.edu/file/get/Newsoffice-DanielNoceraDescribesNewProcessForStoringSolarEner gy923.mov[/MEDIA]

[jmdpet]

Re: Technology is not the Problem

More recent video here of Prof. Nocera talking about this:

http://vimeo.com/8194089

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Technology is not the Problem

Rajiv's video linkage didn't work so well (for me, at least.)

Let's see if this embedding works better:

[Rajiv]

Re: Technology is not the Problem

Old outdated link (2008 vintage)

Two other videos of Nocera

Tiny Bubbles

Sampling MIT at the MIT Museum: Water Splitting