Stanford team hits 30% record for storing solar energy in hydrogen fuel
In California, Stanford University reports that an interdisciplinary team at Stanford has made significant strides toward solving the solar energy storage issue, demonstrating the most efficient means yet of storing electricity captured from sunlight in the form of chemical bonds. As Stanford observed in a release, “that stored energy can be recovered later in different ways: by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen into water to release electricity again, or by burning the hydrogen gas in an internal combustion engine, similar to those running on petroleum products today.”
In work published in Nature Communications, researchers were able to capture and store 30 percent of the energy captured from sunlight into stored hydrogen, beating the prior record of 24.4 percent.
“This milestone brings us much closer to a sustainable and practical process to use water-splitting as a storage technology,” Jaramillo said. “Improving efficiency has a remarkable impact on lowering costs. We have to continue work on finding more ways to lower the costs to compete with conventional fuels.”
Category: Research
