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The Potential of Hydrogen Power for Energy Storage

With oil prices increasing and signs of climate change becoming ever more noticeable, there is much interest these days in alternative fuel sources. On example of such an alternative fuel is hydrogen.

What Experts Know About Hydrogen Power

You may think of hydrogen as a fuel source, like gasoline, but it is actually more of an energy storage solution, like a battery. This is because there are not reserves of existing hydrogen that can be mined from the earth. Hydrogen must therefore be produced using another energy source before it can be used. This may make hydrogen sound less useful as a fuel, but energy storage is actually a very important problem.

An Energy Storage Solution

Many clean alternatives for generating power at power stations such as solar and wind are being developed, but without storage solutions this energy cannot be used in places like your car where it must be portable. While batteries can be used for storage, they can be expensive and harmful to the environment. It may be possible to develop a cleaner and less expensive solution using hydrogen.

Energy storage is also expected to be an issue at power stations themselves. Even though power stations don't need to be mobile, in order to fully take advantage of energy sources like solar and wind they must also be able to store large amounts of energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

Using batteries on this scale is definitely impractical, and hydrogen may provide a solution to this storage problem.

What are the Downsides to Hydrogen Power?

* One downside to hydrogen power are that it is harder to store than alternative such as gasoline because it is much less dense, meaning it takes work to pack it into a small enough space to make it convenient to use.

* Another downside is that, for applications like cars, hydrogen filling stations do not currently exist. This means a switch to hydrogen would require a huge amount of infrastructure development.

* Currently engines that use hydrogen are also costly to produce, although this could change if it becomes more popular as a fuel choice.

What are the Upsides to Hydrogen Power?

* An advantage of hydrogen is that it can be burned without generating CO2. This makes it cleaner than gasoline, however this benefit only applies a clean methods such as solar power are used to produce the hydrogen.

* An additional advantage is that, since hydrogen can be created from oxygen and water, and hydrogen is burned to produce oxygen and water, it is possible to create a closed system for generating and using hydrogen. This system would act much like a battery. Because of this property it may someday be possible to have a hydrogen-powered car that you don't need to fill with hydrogen since the hydrogen would be generated within the car when you attach it to an external energy source.

* A huge advantage of hydrogen is that it is far less toxic than materials used inside batteries, and the material needed to make hydrogen (water) is readily available. This may make it a better solution for large-scale energy storage than batteries. Currently hydrogen generation still requires the use of expensive catalysts, but recent research has suggested that inexpensive methods for generation exist.

The Future of Hydrogen Power

The technology for using hydrogen in this way in machines such as cars already exists. Whether or not hydrogen is adopted in the future will depend both on how fast the technology for making, distributing, and using hydrogen advances, and on how fast competing technologies advance.

In the future it is certainly possible that hydrogen will play a significant role in powering our society because of it's valuable potential for use as an energy storage solution, and as an alternative to fossil fuels where a portable fuel source is needed.

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