There are also some very promising ideas on the drawing board for safe ways to store Hydrogen. One example would be a Lithium Hydride (LiH). Either in battery or slurry, the LiH will absorb 5x its weight safely until a catalyst like heat or chem. reaction turns it back into a gas. There are technologies coming which will solve the problem. Stories like this only inspire others to try harder and work on solutions.

I?ve looked into small production ethanol in your ?back yard?. Once upon a time that worked, almost everyone had an alcohol still in their back yard. But today, can you trust that the people running the meth-lab down the street won?t blow up the neighborhood?

Yes technology exists for ad-hoc phone network. But, at a 1 watt maximum antenna power, you?d have to trust the population to be dense enough to accommodate your long distance call. If you break down between Dickinson and Bismarck, can you trust that someone else on I-94 will be close enough to hand off your call to the next mobile phone? That?s why we have a network of cell towers everywhere, and yes as a community we all pay for that infrastructure.

If this is a “battery” in the traditional sense, can it be used to produce electricity directly in an electric car sans the fuel cell?

Don’t want to shoot down someone else’s progress report, but what America really needs is a free published batch method fuel alcohol that we can dump our lawn cuttings and waste food into. Something solar powered, something with a hopper at one end and fuel coming out the other that requires a small manual and just a bit of understanding as to the chemical processes going on inside. There are plenty of people and even universities working on projects close to this scale, which all have little or no funding. We are spending hundreds of billions on the Offense Budget (sorry, let’s be politically correct Defense Budget), but we cannot find 1/2 million to put something like this together?

There is only one reason for this: We, systemically, have our priorities wrong. If an idea won’t make money for someone right now or in the very short term, it does not get funded?

Or in a greater perspective, anything that promotes individual independence, living off the grid, or outside the box, it does not get funded. For example, an ad-hock mobile phone network that would not require service providers, just the phones we are all carrying with us.

Art

Sure its not quite ready for commercial use, but its the first step forward and who knows, maybe 3 years from now they’ll redevelop it into the Hydrogen Power Stations(these things do generate enough power to run half a city block, and it fits in GMs new hybrid car the Hy-Wire) check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrp9N1soo0o
its 4mins in to the video(the blip runs for 30secs)but you should watch the whole clip, its about 6mins…very cool

cheers

“The researchers’ breakthrough was the creation of a new catalyst for the electrolysis reaction”

While a Cobalt/Phosphate catalyst may be safer than a corrosive catalyst, no matter what catalyst is used, at this time, solar electrolysis is not efficient enough to power a functional consumer automobile. You’d have to have some serious solar cells to generate enough H and O2 to power a car. Then, you’d have to transfer this stored energy to the fuel cell in your car or use a fuel cell in your home to charge your car’s battery overnight.

I think the author’s leap from a safer catalyst to “opens up the door for… addressing global climate change” is a BIG stretch.

Show me how I can power my car for 30 miles with a sub-$10,000 solar / fuel cell combination, and I’ll be impressed.

- Rickshaw

Thanks for the great article.