Smw3: If creating hydrogen from photovoltaic modules made sense, the big industrial gas companies would be doing that, rather than making it from natural gas, as they do now.
You say that "sunshine is free, and once the PVs are paid for, the power they produce is too." But with today's PV technology, they are NEVER paid for. They cost so much for the amount of electricity they generate, let alone the hydrogen that gets produced from water by using that electricity, that the interest on the capital tied up in the PVs is a lot greater than the value of the energy generated.
In other words, you have a choice: you can buy electricity from the electric company and pay, let's say, $0.08 per kWh., and leave your money in the bank. Or, you can lay out several hundred thousand dollars for enough PVs and hydrogen production and storage equipment to produce, in the end, an equivalent amount of energy. Keep in mind that, at least at present, hydrogen must be stored either in 5000 psi steel tanks or in liquid form not that far from absolute zero, so you'd better be prepared to cover the costs of one or the other.
The interest you would have earned on the capital investment (or the interest you have to pay if you finance your setup), if you divide by the amount of energy you have created, comes out to a cost per kWh is many, many times what the electric company charges. You would have to assume a cost of capital of zero for your approach to make any sense; but hey, if capital cost nothing, what project wouldn't make sense?
Maybe you, personally, are in a position to wildly overpay for your energy in that way, but most people are not, and would probably resent it if you tried to force them to do so. Money spent on overpriced power is money not available for other things. In other words, your approach, if widely adopted, would make most people poorer.
Of course, if there were some big advance in PV technology that allowed a huge amount of electricity to be generated with a small capital investment, then the arithmetic would be decidedly different. But until that day comes, hydrogen is still an extremely expensive fossil fuel.
As to your comment on the early days of the internal combustion engine, I doubt whether many thought they were uneconomic. The proof was they bought them; they made economic sense. |
