A Large-Scale Power Plant Has Turned Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel
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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.
And it all works without creating carbon dioxide, making it a scalable example of green hydrogen production. Typically, hydrogen used for fuel is created by breaking down natural gas, which unfortunately produces polluting CO2.
“With an output power of over 2 kilowatts, we’ve cracked the 1-kilowatt ceiling for our pilot reactor while maintaining record-high efficiency for this large scale,” Haussener says. “The hydrogen production rate achieved in this work represents a really encouraging step toward the commercial realization of this technology.”
While the primary outputs of artificial photosynthesis are hydrogen and heat, the oxygen produced as a “waste product” can also serve a purpose. In an initial example of commercialization, the university’s SoHHytec spinoff has partnered with a Swiss-based metal production facility to use the hydrogen for a metal annealing processes, oxygen for medical applications at nearby hospitals, and heat for the factory’s hot-water needs.
“With the pilot demonstration at EPFL, we have achieved a major milestone by demonstrating unprecedented efficiency at high output power densities,” Saurabh Tembhurne, SoHHytech co-founder and CEO, says in a news release. “We are now scaling up a system in an artificial garden-like setup, where each of these ‘artificial trees’ is deployed in a modular fashion.”
The researchers believe the system will work equally well in residential or commercial settings to provide heating and hot water while powering hydrogen fuel cells, which could charge electric vehicles. Currently, hydrogen is mainly used in creating fertilizer and supporting oil refining, but experts want to use hydrogen to power trucks and airplanes or heat and power homes and businesses.
“The production of synthetic fuels and chemicals from solar energy and abundant reagents offers a promising pathway to a sustainable fuel economy and chemical industry,” the authors write in the study.
The team isn’t content on simply splitting water molecules. In the future, they want to split carbon dioxide, meaning that these artificial trees may soon serve a litany of purposes. Next stop—green energy.
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