To power a microwave oven for a couple of hours? Geez. Not the scale that is needed, at all.<p>I recently did some calculations:<p>How many kWh of energy does a 1 person house need for one year electricity and heating?<p>And I think it came out to about 40,000 kWh.<p>The fascinating thing is that this amount of energy could be harvested with solar panels, even in places like the UK or Germany, with an area needed not much bigger than the roof area of the house.<p>The problem is only storing these amounts of energy - and specifically, seasonal storage, from summer to winter.<p>Batteries are not an option for this. You‘d need the batteries of 400 Tesla Model X. The installation would cost several millions of dollars. And each home using that many batteries would mean hundreds of electric vehicles that cannot be built.<p>But with hydrogen, it would actually work. In fact, hydrogen could be a plug-and-play solution for heating systems that currently run on oil or gas. You just replace the fuel tanks, and perhaps the burner unit. This way, you don‘t lose energy by first converting H2 to electricity and then to heat.<p>As a home owner, you‘d gain full energy independence. Price changes in electricity or oil would no longer affect you. And, on a global scale, if citizens harvest their own energy, and can store it seasonally, conflicts about oil or gas just will no longer be of any importance. It will be easier to just harvest the energy that drops on your land for free from the sky.