MIT Professor: Power Your House With 5 Liters of Water Per Day
At the Aspen Environment Forum today, MIT professor Dan Nocera gave a revolutionary picture of the new energy economy with an assertion that our homes will be our power plants and our fuel stations, powered by sunlight and water. And it’s not science fiction.
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Nocera stated that even if we put all available acreage into fuel crops, all available acreage in wind power, and build a new nuclear power plant every 1.5 days, and we save 100% of our current energy use (yes, you read that correctly), we will still come up short by 2050. His estimate is that we will need 16 TW of energy production by then, and with our current methods, we won’t get there.
But there is a solution. And we don’t need to invent anything new to get from here to there.
Nocera said that MIT will announce its patent next week of a cheap, efficient, manufacturable electrolyzer made from cobalt and potassium phosphate. This technology, powered by a 6 meter by 5 meter photovoltaic array on the roof, is capable of powering an entire house’s power needs plus a fuel cell good for 500 km of travel, with just 5 liters of water.
The new electrolyzer works at room temperature (”It would work in this water glass right here”) to efficiently produce hydrogen and oxygen gases from water in a simple manner, which will enable a return to using sunlight for our primary energy source.
This technology will decentralize power production and provide true energy independence. The details of implementation still need to be worked out, but Nocera says that fears of hydrogen technology (safety) are unfounded, as companies that work with these gases have the capability to safely store and use them. “It’s safer than natural gas. You burn that in your house with an open flame. Now that’s dangerous.”
Image: emrank at Flickr under Creative Commons
It is simply amazing if we can generate power for each home independantly. Decentralization has definate advantage and better efficiency too.
I would be obliged to know more on this down to earth but still high tech technology. Kindly keep me updated. Ravi Soparkar Pune, India renewableenergy at in dot com
Headline should read “MIT boffin looking for more research grants but can’t add”
Why the hell would you want a fuel cell between a solar panel and your car? It actually requires 4x as much energy to generate a kw/hr worth of hydrogen that it does just to charge an EV battery. Or is he talking about using hydrogen as a fuel to replace gasoline in an ICE, even dumber idea… an ICE on gasoline will always be only 15% energy efficient at the wheels in a car. Running it on hydrogen doesn’t improve that.
This guy can’t add!
Paul … I’m fairly certain that Mr. Nocera didn’t achieve the position that he has by being stupid. I think the point he’s making is that the electrolyzer will provide a local, affordable source of hydrogen, which could then be used as input to a fuel-cell providing power to the house. That same hydrogen supply could also be used as input to a fuel-cell vehicle. An efficient, on-site production method solves several of the challenges of a hydrogen economy.
Yes, you could use the power from the solar array directly, without converting to hydrogen though the electrolyzer … so long as you only need power while the sun is shining. Storing energy in the form of hydrogen would be more cost effective than equivalent chemical storage in batteries.
I’m sure Mr. Nocera is a fine scientist, but he tends to be a bit ‘pie-in-the-sky’ with his comments. Even if this electrolyzer does all that he says it can do, there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle that still aren’t there. Affordable (and reliable) fuel-cells that can power an entire house, affordable fuel-cell vehicles, affordable hydrogen storage … note the key word “affordable”. Keep at it, Mr. Nocera, but there’s still a long way to go.
Paul,
Look into the MIT technology. What they claim is to be able to separate the H from O with a lot less effort, then just use the H to run the fuel cell. Don’t use the traditional calculation for this claim.
My concern is that the study keeps referring to the amount of Oxygen they are separating out of the water instead of the Hydrogen. The reason this concerns me is because they dissolve potassium phosphate in the water.
The abundance of Oxygen they get, which they want us to assume the Hydrogen is also coming out in correct proportion, may be coming from the PO4 reacting with the cobalt. Monopotassium phosphate (KH2PO4)
If that’s the case, their process will not yield as much Hydrogen as they wish. Since this is where the energy will come from, I want to see quantities of Hydrogen for this study before I deem it a success.
Sounds brilliant. There’s already been water eletrolyzers for diesel semis for the past 13 yrs that supplement the ICE’s primary fuel to increase efficiency & power, and they’re finally becoming avaialble at a reasonable price for cars (Ronn Motors even introduced a new exotic sports car, the Scorpion, that does 200mph & 40mpg). Taking this concept & applying it to home use, powered by PV solar, seems like a logical application. So what if the predicted efficiency is off (such an error wouldn’t earn much of a grade at MIT, by the way)…with “free” solar energy you either run it longer & store it, or build a larger system.
What seems like more of a limiting factor would be the impact this would have on scarce water supplies in certain areas, eg SoCal, AZ, etc, which is getting worse.
[...] fanciful, but this is MIT talking… MIT will announce its patent next week of a cheap, efficient, manufacturable electrolyzer made from cobalt and potassium [...]
[...] MIT Professor: Power Your House With 5 Liters of Water Per Day : CleanTechnica [...]
I tend to agree with most of the comments here. Scientists, environmentalists, and idealists, as invaluable as they all are (and I consider myself a bit of each), tend to forget certain issues associated with the invention and subsequent adoption of technology.
It’s one thing to say “this piece of technology can do something efficiently and economically” but it’s entirely another to put it into every home on the globe. Indeed, energy consumption will likely grow at an exponential rate into the next half-century, but we need to focus on WHERE this growth is coming from. Most industrialized nations’ (”western”) energy consumption has remained relatively constant, and will continue to do so. Thus, the question becomes “how do we put one of these into every home in the rest of the world… in the slums of Bangladesh, the farms of China, and the mountains of Columbia?”
We need to take this news with an understanding that the adoption rate of new technologies is EXTREMELY slow in a consumer-based economy. Tech companies typically spend a decade developing a new technology before it hits the mainstream. In this case, let’s all hope for the best but plan for the likely!
On a separate note, I had a couple of questions perhaps someone else can answer:
- Does the water used in electrolysis need to be distilled?
- How much energy (in Joules or kWh?) is it possible to generate from the Hydrogen contained in one litre of water?
here is how to seperate oxygen from hydrogen in water…pour your glass of water on a dry towel….hang across a chair back or towel rack or closeline for 2 hrs …all hydrogen will be separated from oxygen in the water….its also good for the sinuses