A Large-Scale Power Plant Has Turned Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel

I am not sure this is viable and sustainable at the scale needed for the world population and businesses!

I have recently blogged here my critical opinion about hydrogen and water! And they like us to forget about the Hindenburg disaster!

"... 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. ... 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. ..."

"... But this dish is special, because it works like an artificial tree [???]. After concentrating solar radiation nearly 1,000 times, a reactor above the dish uses that sunlight to convert water into valuable and renewable hydrogen, oxygen, and heat. ... “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. ...” ..."

From the abstract:

"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. For the production of hydrogen, photoelectrochemical or integrated photovoltaic and electrolysis devices have demonstrated outstanding performance at the lab scale, but there remains a lack of larger-scale on-sun demonstrations (>100 W). Here we present the successful scaling of a thermally integrated photoelectrochemical device—utilizing concentrated solar irradiation—to a kW-scale pilot plant capable of co-generation of hydrogen and heat. A solar-to-hydrogen device-level efficiency of greater than 20% at an H2 production rate of >2.0 kW (>0.8 g min−1) is achieved. A validated model-based optimization highlights the dominant energetic losses and predicts straightforward strategies to improve the system-level efficiency of >5.5% towards the device-level efficiency. We identify solutions to the key technological challenges, control and operation strategies and discuss the future outlook of this emerging technology."

A Large-Scale Power Plant Has Turned Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel (secondary source)

A solar hydrogen system that co-generates heat and oxygen (primary source) EPFL researchers have built a pilot-scale solar reactor that produces usable heat and oxygen, in addition to generating hydrogen with unprecedented efficiency for its size.

Kilowatt-scale solar hydrogen production system using a concentrated integrated photoelectrochemical device (open access)

How many thousands of those need to be built to provide hydrogen for millions of people and businesses?

Fig. 1: Overview of the system