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When David Cameron said he wanted to put a wind turbine on the roof of his £1.5 million Notting Hill house, it was soon revealed to be just so much greenwash. Not because turbines on houses are not part of the future of the 21st century home — they may well become so — but because the kit he wanted to instal would have been so hopelessly inefficient as to be next to useless.
The Tory leader's plan was not only crass eco-publicity, it was patently not the cleverest way to harvest the power of the wind.
The wind — especially in north Kensington — rarely blows when you want it to. Statistically, a wind turbine produces power for only a third of the time. The chances are the blades will turn when you don't need them, when the household is out during the day or asleep at night.
A turbine on your house or indeed a multi-turbine wind farm is only really useful if you have the ability to store in large amounts the power they produce.
And that has been the holy grail of electricity ever since Michael Faraday made a spark playing with ha'pennies and saltwater two centuries ago.
In a light industrial park next to the River Don in Sheffield where 40 years ago the air would have been thick with the noise and heat of the steel mills, there is a company that says it has found that holy grail.
In its warehouse, ITM Power has created what it believes is a home of the future. That “home” is powered by a solar panel the size of a couple of table-tennis tables which could alternatively quite easily be a wind turbine.
But it is raining, as it does in Sheffield apparently, and there is little useful power being produced. Yet the lights are on, Philip Schofield is chattering on the telly and the kettle's boiling.
What has happened is the electricity produced by the panel in the previous day's 23 deg C of sunshine has been put through an electrolysis machine. The electricity met water and the H was split from the O in the H2O. That hydrogen was passed into a not abnormally large gas canister, and from that canister the hydrogen is being used as the fuel to fire up a generator, a good old-fashioned combustion engine that is producing the electric current to the home.
The carbon-free produced electricity is being stored as carbon-free hydrogen and then reproduced as carbon-free electricity — and once you have gone to the expense of installing all the gear, every bit of energy you use is absolutely free.
Fuel cells or batteries to store electricity are not new and are making electric cars a useful thing of the present. The production and storage of hydrogen in the home however remains something of a Cinderella alternative power: not so much the forgotten energy source but, to some who have viewed the newsreels of the Hindenburg, it is the fuel that dare not speak its name.
And because electrolysis using traditional ruthenium and platinum components is very expensive.
ITM's unique proposition is its secret recipe: a patented membrane made from a petrochemical polymer, produced in a process not dissimilar to the making of a contact lens, and manufactured at a small fraction of the historical cost of electrolysis.
“Yes this is the holy grail of the industry and at a time when legislation is creating a market for zero carbon energy and storage,” says the AIM-quoted company's new chief executive Graham Cooley, a veteran of the electricity industry who has been charged with commercialising ITM's technology.
ITM's vision is to embed its technology in small communities in which turbines or solar panels create the power and the hydrogen is produced and stored locally and distributed by traditional wires or pipes into homes.
Its challenge is to produce all this at a commercially affordable price.
Reader views (9)
Forget hydrogen as it takes huge amounts of electricity to produce it. Wind power is expensive and inefficient. The way forward is nuclear but unfortunately Labour have destroyed an industry in which we led the world.
- Roger, Winchester, England
Let's hope Cameron is not going to make similar fashionable but impulsive and ill thought out decisions when spending billions in public money.
The wind turbine episode is not encouraging. Ten minutes research could have avoided it.
The Tories obviously have have a substantial PR department. Is there a Department of the Facts too?
- Mike Newland, London, England
Surely solar panels directly heating water would be more efficient and its so easy to store hot water. It does seem that the one virtue of the UK's antiquated plumbing systems is that cold water is put in a tank that reaches ambient temperature free of charge. If we all had direct feed systems using mains water for everything we would consume a lot more energy.
- Jack Spratt, Richmond, Surrey
Remind us what the best thermodynamic efficiency is, when you separate hydrogen. IE, how much energy does it 'cost' to 'make'? The remind us about the efficiency of the fuel cells that use it best. I promise not to ask about mobile storage or natural leakage - for that, best to combine it with carbon as a stable compound and call it something like, well, 'petrol'.
- Steve, London, England
You could use the spare electricity to compress a big tank of compressed air, then use that to run a generator. You can get more electricity back that way, unless these guys have also broken the laws of thermodynamics!
- Jtd, denmark
THE ONLY DEFENSE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING ARE CONDOMS
- Alan Green, Woodford Green
The principle of using hydrogen as a buffer against the intermittency of renewable energy supply is just not confined to devices sized for individual residences. The same principle applies to whole wind farms or large scale solar arrays and would make the idea of relying on the output of tens of thousands of wind turbines as a sizable percentage of the UK's electricity generation a lot more of a practical proposition.
Hydrogen is really the only practical way to 'store electricity' on a large scale, batteries are not a sensible option.
Once power generators are making hydrogen, they then also have the opportunity of (rather than using in a fuel cell, or burning it) supplying it as a transport fuel (The world's leading motor companies, Toyota, Honda and Daimler have all stated they will begin volume commercialisation of fuel cell vehicles in the next 3-6 years). This would introduce a whole new set of fuel suppliers, breaking the monopoly of the oil and gas companies and reducing the presently near complete reliance of the transportation sector on oil supplies.
- Jmm, Loughborough, UK
At last a sensible piece on the subject that sees beyond the rubbish peddled by the wind power lobby. Before being written off as some kind of climate change denier , I'd like to say that I absolutely agree with a need to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
However, I object to people pushing "solutions" that require huge subsidy and do not achieve anything except to blight the landscape.
- Ben, London, UK
Pity wind turbine blades aren't made of solar panels.
- Fred, London
