Scale Solar-Hydrogen Production

LARGE-SCALE SOLAR-HYDROGEN PRODUCTION 15.4.1. Solar-Hydrogen Farms... 

The next steps involve the development and build of an optimized pilot plant (100 kWth) for solar Hydrogen production based on this novel reactor concept, involving further scale-up of the HYDROSOL technology and its effective coupling with solar platform concentration systems, in order to exploit and demonstrate all potential advantages. Specific challenging problems currently addressed include ... 

Higher efficiency, higher cost multijunction solar cells, such as the Ill-V materials systems capable of 20-40% PV conversitm efficiency are also commercially available. Using these materials, 14-28% STH would be achievable using PV-electrolysis. In today s market, however, such systems would be prohibitively expensive for any large-scale deployment. The 5-7% mark for lower cost amorphous silicon technology is a more appropriate near-term benchmark for practical solar hydrogen production. Alternative PEC-based schemes need to meet or exceed this benchmark to be viable. 

Abanades, S. and Flamant, G., Production of hydrogen by thermal methane splitting in a nozzle-type laboratory-scale solar reactor, Int. J. Hydrogen Energ., 30,843, 2005. 

The distribution of the population density is highly concentrated on the coastal regions, 60% (out of 33 millions) in a land area that represents less than 6% of the whole territory. Such situation imposes the recourse to the Atlas and desert regions in order to host future population. The last requires the building of thousands of houses and even new cities. On-site electricity production is suitable since grid extension is not economically viable in most cases. In this regard, small-scale PV solar hydrogen units would be... 

Fig. 15.12. Daily variation in electrolytic hydrogen production rate (1), the solar array temperature (2), and radiation power density (3). Single crystalline silicon solar cells, SPE electrolyzer location, Cape Canaveral, Florida. The time scale denotes minutes elapsed from 5 a.m. (Reprinted from Yu. I. Khar-kats, Electrochemical Storage of Solar Energy, in Environmental Oriented Electrochemistry, C. A. C. Sequeira, ed., Fig. 5, p. 477, copyright 1994. Reproduced with kind permission of Elsevier Science-NL, Sara Burgerhartstraat 25,1055 KV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.)...

Figure 1.1.17 The solar refinery as the conceptual contribution of chemistry by chemical energy conversion to the sustainable use of renewable energy. The upstream part (hydrogen generation) and the downstream parts need not to be colocalized in a practical realization. CSP stands for concentrated solar power. Green boxes indicate solar fuel products blue boxes stand for intermediate platform chemicals. The red arrows indicate flows of solar hydrogen to a storage and transport system for large-scale applications. The blue arrows show the major application lines for chemical production of solar fuels. The scheme also indicates the role of fertilizers from ammonia required in sustained use of biomass for energetic applications.

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