Technology that holds the key to world's demand for power
(Filed: 17/06/2006)
 

Steep oil prices have fuelled rising interest in alternative sources of energy. Investors willing to accept high risks may consider following the founder of one of Britain's biggest firms of independent financial advisers into a tiny energy company. Peter Hargreaves explains why he has put some of his own fortune at stake

The world found a very convenient source of energy in fossil fuels and has been too lazy to look seriously elsewhere. Anyone today who envisages a world without transport, heat and electricity needs to know just one fact.

	Force of nature: wind farms may be the way forward

According to BP Solar: "If all the sunlight hitting the earth's surface in one hour was harnessed and converted into electrical power, it would be enough to fulfil mankind's energy needs for a complete year."

The problem with vegetation is that it takes millions of years to convert agricultural material into the fossil fuels on which we have become reliant. It is amazing that intelligent people believe we can fulfil our energy requirement by growing agricultural products today and using them as a source of power - biofuels are a complete non-starter.

Indeed, if you planted every piece of agricultural land in the entire world it wouldn't start to provide for our energy requirements. Biofuels are also certainly not the answer to reducing carbon emissions - they produce the same amount of hydrocarbon as fossil fuels.

However, if we could take that energy from the sun either directly or from the rainfall it produces or the winds it creates and convert it directly into a usable source, the world's energy future would be secure.

Solar panels and wind turbines unfortunately do not create power in a timely manner. You need electricity to light your house at nights when the sun doesn't shine. The wind doesn't blow every day and during windy days 90 per cent of the available power is wasted.

We need to be able to take the power that is currently being unused and convert it into an easily storable source of power. If it was one that when used created no pollution whatsoever the world would have its answer.

Excess electricity generated from renewable resources could be quite simply passed through electrolysers, a technology that has been around since scientists observed the effect of passing electricity through water well over a century ago. You get hydrogen at one terminal and oxygen at the other.

The only difficulty is creating a commercial electrolyser which will generate these two gases from electricity, keep them separate and store the usable one - hydrogen - conveniently.

The whole world right now should be exploring how we can use all this wasted power from the sun and store it in the form of hydrogen. Hydrogen would power your central heating boiler but, more important than that, it will work perfectly well in an internal combustion engine. The difference being that the only thing that would come out of a car's exhaust run on hydrogen would be water vapour. Yes - harmless, odourless, clean steam.

Many people in the world think that the fuel cell will be the world's saviour. There is no doubt that fuel cells will be part of the future and an important one but currently most hydrogen - one of the two important gases required to power a fuel cell - is made predominantly from reformed fossil fuels. In other words, instead of the greenhouse gases pouring out of car exhausts, the greenhouse gases would pour out of the chimneys of a huge factory.

Only a small amount of hydrogen is generated from electrolysers, predominantly ones connected to hydroelectric power plants in places like Norway and Finland. These electrolysers are exceedingly expensive, complicated and require constant maintenance and supervision. The only way hydrogen will be harnessed is if hydrogen was easy to generate.

No one knows exactly how the "hydrogen cycle" will work. It could be that people have small wind turbines on the top of their garage generating hydrogen to use in their cars - and using the excess to heat their house. In hot countries, solar cells could deliver the same service. However it may be that hydrogen is generated centrally perhaps in what are now petrol stations or perhaps as a by-product of wind farms.

There is. however, one company which claims to have already demonstrated that it has the technology to generate hydrogen much more cheaply and conveniently.

More importantly, if this hydrogen is generated from electricity wasted when the wind blows too strongly or the sun shines too brightly or when electricity is not needed, in effect the power is completely free.

A small company in Cambridgeshire called ITM Power is probably a world leader in electrolyser technology; it may also be the world leader in fuel cell technology, too. It has developed a method which in commercial production will make both electrolysers and fuel cells economic. It has already demonstrated that this technology has good longevity.

Interestingly, hydrogen is also complementary to the other likely way forward - that is, nuclear power. The problem with nuclear power stations is you can't shut them down and electrolysers could collect the energy when there are troughs in demand for electricity.

Is hydrogen the future? Well, no one has come up with a better suggestion yet and if electrolysers can be made conveniently and cheaply they are a major part of the solution to the problem of finding alternative sources of energy.