The Hydrogen Industry's Efficiency Problem May Have Just Met Its Fix
KKR Makes Largest Ever Clean Energy Investment With $4.2B EDF Purchase Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… A team of researchers in Germany has discovered a highly efficient way to convert sunlight into hydrogen fuel, potentially solving some of the most critical challenges facing the green hydrogen sector and offering an elegant solution to clean up some of the economy’s dirtiest industries.
The new prototype, which uses a kind of solar cell used in spacecraft, is a proof-of-concept for what could someday make the production of totally clean-burning fuel a commercially scalable possibility.
Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, combined photovoltaic cells with proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cells to create a totally new system capable of converting sunlight to hydrogen with 31.3 percent efficiency.
“Our new record shows that hydrogen can be produced very efficiently directly from sunlight,” Frank Dimroth, PhD,toldInteresting Engineering.
The prototype relies on III-V solar cells, the most efficient solar cells produced anywhere.
“These cells have long been used in spacecraft because of their high performance and durability,” reports Interesting Engineering.
Green hydrogen has long been hailed as a critical clean alternative for hard-to-abate industrial sectors like steelmaking and shipping.
Like the emissions-intensive thermal coal and heavy fuel oil that power those industries, respectively, hydrogen burns at a high heat.
But instead of leaving behind carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and pollutants, hydrogen leaves behind nothing but water vapor when combusted.
There’s just one major issue – hydrogen is only as green as the energy used to produce it.
The vast majority of the hydrogen used in the global economy is gray hydrogen, which is made using fossil fuels and therefore ineffective for reducing a given industry’s carbon footprint.
Green hydrogen, made using renewable energies, has been touted as a kind of silver bullet for the clean energy transition for many years now, but, as usual, the reality is far more complicated.
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