Solar Hydrogen: The Ultimate Solution to Prevent More Climate Change

By Sandy Thomas

This book shows how private industry can make a profit building and installing solar hydrogen systems that eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity and most greenhouse emissions from the transportation sector while eliminating all petroleum imports.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543974287

Book preview

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Chapter 1 – Introduction

Abstract. The catastrophic threat of climate change (up to and including the possible demise of modern civilization as we know it!) demands a daring and comprehensive new project to reduce greenhouse gases particularly from the generation of electricity and from the transportation sector, the two biggest sources of greenhouse gases in the U.S. This book describes such a bold new project that will drastically cut greenhouse gases from electricity and from transportation. This project is not only technically feasible, but investors in this project will make a reasonable return on their investment, meaning that private capital can fund much of this effort to curb further climate change. In addition, this project will dramatically reduce or even eliminate all U.S. oil imports, thereby reducing defense costs and improving the US balance of trade.

The foundation of this proposal is to transition from a fossil-fuel dominated energy system for electricity and transportation to an energy system based on solar energy with hydrogen serving as the main energy carrier in place of gasoline and diesel fuel. This Solar-Hydrogen Energy System (SHES) would eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity and would eliminate most greenhouse gases from the transportation sector.

The main components of the Solar-Hydrogen Energy System are shown in Figure 1.1. All energy is supplied by solar photovoltaic (PV) systems¹. When the sun is shining, most of the solar electricity is fed directly to the load. Some PV electricity is also used to generate hydrogen from water with an electrolyzer. This hydrogen is stored underground or in above-ground tanks to be used later to generate electricity at night and during cloudy days using a stationary fuel cell system that directly and efficiently converts hydrogen to electricity. Some of the stored hydrogen is also used to power zero-carbon fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and fuel cell buses, trains, ships and fuel cell material handling equipment (MHE) such as forklift trucks.

Figure 1.1 Block Diagram of a Solar Hydrogen Energy System (SHES) including a hydrogen fueling station

To avert the worst consequences of climate change, the climate change community has set a goal of reducing US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

To the best of our knowledge, no person or organization has proposed any plausible GHG reduction scenario that could possibly achieve or even come close to reaching this climate change reduction goal². Shell has proposed a Sky Scenario that would curtail GHG emissions by the 2070 time period [1-2] and keep the maximum temperature rise below 2 °C but would not achieve the 2050 goal. Current incremental efforts such as pursuing increased energy efficiency buildings, vehicles or manufacturing activities or adding some renewable energy projects to a fraction of the power grid will not be adequate to achieve the GHG reduction goal. Any such scenario would have to include major reductions in GHG emissions in all segments of society, but particularly in transportation and the generation of electricity, the two biggest sources of US GHGs that accounted for 35.9% (transportation) & 34.5% (electricity) of 2017 US GHG