MIT says electrolysis is a solar energy breakthrough

OK, I don’t want to be negative Nellie here, but I am truly befuddled with the amount of hype and BS surrounding anything to do with alternative energy. Here is an article from ABC about a solar breakthrough. I read and re-read it and forgive me, I just don’t get it. It is wrong on so many levels it defies comprehension. Just to make sure I was not taking crazy pills, I looked up the original MIT press release here. OK, this professor has discovered an inexpensive catalyst that assists in electrolysis. And he and MIT claim this is a major breakthrough for solar energy. They say that solar cells can use this breakthrough process to make hydrogen during the day and then we, as a happy obedient society can use the hydrogen at night, I suppose to burn dirigibles so we can read our parchment newspapers since we can’t afford electricity any more.

OK, where to start? First off, solar energy is not held back since it cannot make power at night. Oh, if you are some Ted Kazinsky Unabomber type that wants to live in a cabin off the grid, well I guess that fact that there is no solar power at night is a bit problematic. But any sane person does what is the sensible thing: You tie your solar installation to the grid and pump energy in the grid during the day while taking it out at night. Turns out that PG&E is perfectly happy with this, their big problem is that peak power occurs in the day and they love to have the solar energy in the day in order to even out the load on their generators. So you pump in all your excess into the grid. And it is much more than just a nighttime problem. See, the power from your solar array is also dependent on season; you get more in the summer. This also makes PG&E, your willing partner in solar energy, very happy since summertime peak loads are usually worse due to all the air conditioners being run. The idea is that you pump in enough energy during summer to days to build up a big bank of power so you can draw it back out at night and over the winter. It may be temping to try and zero out your electric bill, but that is usually very poor economics. You would need about $50,000 installation of panels here in California to do that, as my buddy Frank has done up in Grass Valley. What you really want to do is keep your electricity usage under the monthly rate caps—what PG&E calls you baseline rate, a chunk of kilowatt hours allowed your home based on location. This is because solar power still does not payout for the 13 cents a kilowatt-hour base rate, but when you get into the 31 cents per kWh, then the installation of a smaller installation makes sense. Frank’s installation needs two inverters to pipe the peak production back into the grid. He told me that he overbuilt the installation. What you should do is start by looking at the inverters and depending on a price and kW rating of a single inverter, then put in only enough panels to feed that one inverter. Your electric bills would go down to maybe 40 or 50 bucks a month but you would not have to tie up so much money in the installation.

Now back to electrolysis as a solar power breakthrough. What the article shows is how desperate scientist and press agents are for any kind of attention they can get. I wrote the professor and tried to get clarification if he was really claiming a new electrolysis catalyst as a breakthrough. He never responded. I thought what the catalyst must be for is photosynthesis. This is called photodisassociation. That is where the sunlight breaks apart water into hydrogen and oxygen directly with sunlight, you don’t make electricity and then use electrolysis. As the Wikipedia entry on electrolysis points out, it is an inefficient process. It is an equilibrium reaction after all. When you have all those hydrogen and oxygen ions floating around in water they do love to just recombine and release heat. The Wikipedia article cites efficiencies from 50% to 80% and I can guarantee you the real efficiency of any practical large installation will be closer to the 50% range. Another thing worrying about the article is that in one breath they talk about how cheap the new catalyst is while later mention that they still need platinum for the other electrode. I am not trying to denigrate a cool scientific discovery, but tying it to solar power as a breakthrough is just intellectually dishonest.

Here is a paper from the pre-hype era of 2000 that points out the end-to end efficiency of solar-electrolysis is about 7.8%. Don’t get all excited about the 16% efficiency cited for gallium arsenide, a direct bandgap semiconductor that is far more photo-efficient. Those are the panels used in spacecraft and the reason is that they cost way too much for anything else. A few hundred watts will set you back $30,000. Here is another article from the era of hype about how nanotechnology will make electrolysis pay off. Notice what either the MIT article or this one demonstrates is the efficiency of the reaction, and I have to assume it is because catalysts and surface area will do nothing to increase the efficiency, other than perhaps making the electrodes smaller. Sure, it is great to have a low-cost renewable electrode on the hydrogen side of the reaction. Sure increasing surface area works great for capacitors and batteries. But please, lets look at system-level implications of this. Electrolysis sucks as a way to convert electricity to hydrogen, and hydrogen sucks as an alternative to liquid fuels since it is, ta da, a gas. So this whole magilla is about using a marginal power production method to feed an inefficient process to end up with a gas that, what, you can’t even run in lamps since it is explosive.

Here is an electrolysis article from the 1982 NY Times. It is a pre-hype article done by a paper with some integrity. Note how they say at the end that the process is too inefficient to be practical at the time. I hail the work of all the three science teams in the three articles I have cited. Their work is important, but I object to casting evolutionary improvements in general science as a major breakthrough, all in order to get funding. If you looking the MIT lab that make the “breakthrough” you will see that they were just funded with a big donation and it is doubtless they want to make the private donors feel like their money is making a difference. Funny thing is, that the catalyst discovery is significant, and all MIT has done is sullied the donation by casting this as some kind of solar power breakthrough.

When I say an article from 2000 is pre-hype I really mean it was in an alternative hype period. Back in 2000 the web was the thing. Remember that hype-fest? Billions of dollars tossed around and anyone that could put up an HTML page was given VC money. I had one VC tell me that it was a shame, he had several really great proposals for conventional software that he would like to fund, but if it did not tie into the internet or the web, he could not get them money. The same thing is going on right now with energy. If you have any hare-brained idea that remotely touches on energy you can get your VC funding. I say hooray. It is about time we hardware types got our windfall. It is estimated that he web-craze fiasco transferred 1 trillion dollars from the old-money finance types to a bunch of young software jockeys who now drive Ferraris and live in the hills. Yippee, I lets us hardware types try to get 2 trillion dollars. Here in Silicon Valley there is already a shortage of analog engineers and I hope it will soon spread to the whole country. Now is the time to jack up your salary and maybe even get into that energy startup. It will most likely crash like 90% of the web startups (remember koop.com?), but you will have some fun and have stories to tell your grandkids. And the best part is that our hardware hype-fest is just beginning. Expect another 5 years of glitz and glamour until reality hits.

So before you fall for all the hype, have a look at the Gartner Group’s chart of the hype cycle. My PR buddy tells me the guys at Gartner sit about in conference room roaring with laugher when they come up with these type of things, kind of like the Starbucks guys when they make up words like “Venti”. Still, you have to love terms like the “trough of disillusionment”. I am not trying to drag us all into that trough, just reminding you all that we are still climbing towards the “peak of inflated expectations”. Keep your head on and it won’t be so depressing when a lot of this alternative energy technology turns out to be hype. As the chart show, there will be some good to come out of all this and lets keep that in mind.