This has been areound for probably 50+ years! Squelched

many times by big energy/oil and the government! Google

Joe Brown Cell, and ignore the hype, I have built

dozens of these and they truly work. This is a semi-reverse

application of the priciple, but nearly the same

exact thing.

The energy that plants store may not be “electrical current” like we use, so then there are enzymes and/or other biomechanisms at work for storing energy. Biochemistry may not be your field, but you could look into bio-research for what you want to accomplish.

A true breakthrough would be MIT discovering the exact biomechanisms involved in photosynthesis with the biochems listed, such as proteins and enzymes, and then this breakthrough will not require the use of expensive catalysts.

I agree with you 100%. i hate it when people say you can burn water

Bottom line: I say we start building those nuke plants and spend more research into getting all the energy out of that nuclear waste (i.e. reduce the half-life) At the very least that will cut off a huge amount of our pollution, and at the very least we could pull off something with electric cars before you figure out the hydrogen fuel cell nonsense (or find something even better! maybe something that doesn’t just so conveniently have to be a gas at STP!) in the meantime

Anyway, seriously, I wouldn’t believe any of the crap coming out of the peswiki.com site. There isn’t a single physicist in his right mind who would believe any of that crap. Seriously, lots of those guys are trying to read up on quantum physics without even getting their college level physics straight, and come up with these weird meaningless ideas out of their heads. I wish I had the time to refute all the nonsense they say. . .of course, I agree with their goals (to reduce our dependence on petroleum, reduce CO2, etc) but they always love making it sound SO EASY when energy is a hard problem and needs more *cough* educated people to help solve it. And then there’s the issue of how the education in this country is totally going downhill, but I digress. . .

Alright, onto the main comment I was going to make: “a year’s worth of energy consumed by us hits the earth every hour” Sounds good at first, but if you think about it, it’s pretty saddening. That means we would need to cover .01% of the earth with 100% efficient solar panels just to meet our CURRENT power needs, not including the however many percent is ALREADY covered by photosynthetic plants. That’s about the size of a small state. Then imagine our power consumption increase 10x, which is pretty reasonable. . . there simply isn’t enough energy on earth to sustain us. We are one very very sad race. . .so perhaps the L factor in Drake’s Equation is really why we haven’t found intelligent life yet–they’re all dead by their own overconsumption.

these pellet type storage processes negate the storage problem.

I’ll bet the cost/benefit still doesn’t beat charging batteries instead of converting to hydrogen/compressing/re-converting to electricity. In autos, it’s crap. For homes, probably a great idea.

Overpotential is a measure of the extra energy over the theoretical minimum needed to do an electrochemical reaction. In this case, lowering the overpotential means you don’t waste energy you can use to split water. This is where the efficiency gain comes from.

Most catalysts for oxygen reduction are expensive, or work at high pH, or both. High pH=highly alkaline, which makes the solution dangerous and corrosive. Platinum is expensive. Cobalt phosphate is dirt cheap by comparison.

As Nocera says, it opens a door. It might be economical, and it might not. It has a much better chance, because it is at neutral pH and low overpotential, than existing electrolysis.

There are a lot of flammable and dangerous chemicals and devices already in your home, but for some reason H2 and O2 are extra scary to people. I just don’t get it.

I supposed when people talk about fuel-cell cars there is some viable reasoning for concern because if you collide two vehicles which are transporting a substantial quantity of any volatile substance you could have trouble. That said, how often do you see people crashing their houses into each other?

out of my way!!!!