Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power

I am waiting for the day when there is an affordable (&lt;$5k? &lt;$10k as an absolute maximum) residential system that can run on home solar and produce ethanol&#x2F;hydrogen&#x2F;ammonia&#x2F;whatever combustible fuel from excess electricity. Round trip efficiency can be horrible, so long as the system is low maintenance and can be configured to run exclusively off of spare generation.<p>Is anything like that on the horizon? Or do all of these liquid fuel synthesis options require industrial pressures&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;input electricity so as to forever be out of reach from residential synthesis?

If I understand correctly, this is producing hydrogen and oxygen mixed together. This is useless. It&#x27;s also overall less efficient that commercial PV cells driving commercial electrolysers.<p>One common issue with all these concepts doing electrolysis at the collector is how do you gather the hydrogen. Rigging PV modules together with wires is much more practical than hooking hydrogen emitters together with tubing or pipes.

Having seen too many such announcements about promising green technologies, I tend to ask a few questions when seeing something like this. One of them is what state a technology is in (early research, announcement, small prototype, industrial scale prototype).<p>It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It&#x27;s of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being &quot;cheap&quot; sounds dishonest if you&#x27;re far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.

Impressive idea. Hope they get a better efficiency factor.<p>On a side node, you can already add Hydrogen to your home. There is a startup in Berlin, DE which sells complete systems for home: solar roof, heat pump, electrolysis device, bottles and ventilation system.<p>During summer you fill the bottles with H2 and during winter you consume it.<p>I&#x27;m not affiliated with them. The price before Corona for the whole system was around 65k Euro and now around 100k Euro.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homepowersolutions.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;product&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homepowersolutions.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;product&#x2F;</a> Picea is the name

&quot;The catalyst is made of indium gallium nitride nanostructures, grown onto a silicon surface.&quot;<p>World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year.<p>How did &quot;cheap&quot; get into this?

Burning hydrogen will still create a lot of NOx. Not recommended for places where people live.

Cheap and sustainable in your lab, neither once it hits the market.

Unless you need hydrogen for a capability that only hydrogen has it is much more efficient to use solar electricity either directly or to charge batteries.

Is hydrogen cheap to transport, cheap to store, and cheap to use though? I thought making it was only a small part of the problems with hydrogen.

Is it just me or has it been like 18 months of one supposedly &quot;game changing&quot; hydrogen catalyst after another? I&#x27;m not trying to be cynical. It just seems the science press is awash in results from one research project after another in this area and I find it very difficult to rank which ones have any credible chance of utility.

I am doubtful that this scales. Main concern is the cost in materials, fuel, and electricity in manufacturing large lenses. Sure, it seems that there are large increases in efficiency when generating hydrogen.. But not really once you take into account the cost of generating the infrared.

Would we use these like regular existing solar panels on our rooftops? And does 10x efficiency mean that we could harvest 10x the power of what existing solar panels provide?

&gt; As humanity tries to reduce its carbon emissions<p>It&#x27;s time to change this stereotype. Humanity tries to reduce its greenhouse gases emissions, and CO2 is not the biggest problem.