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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (403512)	8/1/2008 1:30:51 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1572687

"Right, and it takes energy to do it. So, is the energy consumption in the process sufficiently small that it is feasible to utilize the technique? We don't know, because they didn't say." That isn't the relevant question. The relevant question is how much does it cost per unit energy stored? Size is a factor, also. Might as well throw in life cycle costs. Currently, batteries are too expensive in many ways. Not particularly efficient, unless you slow charge the batteries give off a lot of heat and life cycle costs are problematic. Compressed air and turbines can work, but are expensive to put in place and doesn't scale up well. If you have the space, pumping water up to a reservoir and using it to run a turbine can work, but it doesn't scale down. If you use solar thermal, melting salts works pretty well. Which is why it is usually incorporated in modern designs. Producing H2 with conventional devices can work, but the process is expensive and the required KOH adds some danger to the equation. Plus the process is finicky, the concentration needs to be monitored or it stops working and the solution needs to be heated. This method promises to solve the conventional hydrogen generation problems. It works at room temperature, uses plain water. It is unclear exactly how it would scale, although there doesn't seem to be any inherent reason it can't. The material used aren't all that expensive, although how much electrode is needed per unit volume of hydrogen isn't clear. That is the most likely showstopper. If you need something the size of a refrigerator to produce 1 mole of H2 per 24 hours, that would be a problem. So, short of boiling the water, energy consumption isn't the biggest hurdle. It isn't like the energy is going to be used for anything but generating heat anyway.