>>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. <<
I guess I was under the mistaken impression that Praxair, et. al., produced hydrogen as a byproduct of other industrial processes. Little did I know there are companies all over the land pumping in natural gas and pumping out pure hydrogen. Silly me.
>> In other words, you have a choice: you can buy electricity from the electric company and pay, let's say, $0.08 per kWh. <<
Forgive me, I don't know where you live, but I'm in California, and I pay $.13/kWh for electricity and over $1.50/gal for gas. And that doesn't begin to factor in the incredible political/military investment we make on a continual basis to keep our foreign oil sources afloat. When you honestly look at the taxes that people in this country pay, you just can't get away with claiming electricity only costs $.08/kWh.
>>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. <<
PVs are just like anything else in manufacturing in that, with increased volume, the costs will come down. As far as big advances in technology go, the biggest advance we could look for in PV systems is a better way to store their power. Of course the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day...that's why PV systems use expensive lead-acid batteries, which need replacement about every five years. By using the peak power produced to electrolyze water and store the energy in hydrogen for later use in fuel cells, we eliminate the need for the batteries, and bring the life cycle cost of the system down...that is, once the fuel cells are produced in large enough quantities to be available for under $1000/kW.
>>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.<<
They didn't buy them overnight, any more than we're buying fuel cells overnight. It took a generation for the changeover to fully occur. How long have the majority of this crowd even know what a fuel cell is? |
