this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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I'd be interested in home scale hydrogen electrolysis with excess solar energy even if only to sidestep the "use it or lose it" reality of off-grid solar.
Rather than just filling up batteries?
Hydrogen can be stored in underground caverns and that can be relatively easily scaled to TWh. Electrolysis and fuel cell can get you 70% or so of your electricity back. So it is less efficient then batteries. However there might be a place for hydrogen as seasonal storage. Also the storage makes sense as quite a few processes use hydrogen anyway.
So there is a use case, but right now we mostly should just add renewables and batteries. We are nowhere close to a solar/wind grid, which does actually need seasonal storage. Also grid size helps a lot and there are options such as burning waste.
Electrolysis of the most expensive process (PEM) is around 80% efficient by itself. The more common methods are 70%. Anything that uses it after that only drops it further. Fuel cells max out at 60%, which means that electrolysis to electrical output efficiently is about 50% altogether in the very best case.
Some of the better internal combustion engines are reaching about the same.