Posted: Oct 06, 2017 10:39 am
GrahamH wrote:The point is presumably efficiency. Avoid losses in the PVs and use the solar energy more directly.It's possible to produce hydrogen to power fuel cells by extracting the gas from seawater, but the electricity required to do it makes the process costly. UCF researcher Yang Yang has come up with a new hybrid nanomaterial that harnesses solar energy and uses it to generate hydrogen from seawater more cheaply and efficiently than current materials.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nanomater ... r.html#jCp
One presumes that the seawater would have to be pumped into the catalyst compartments, probably on land. That means it is not directly using solar energy anyway. Then there is the practicality of harvesting the H2 from over a large area. Problem.
PVs do not have this issue.