The mounting climate change crisis requires elevating the use of renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar, and due to their intermittent availability, scalable storage solution for energy generated from these sources is a challenge.
Hydrogen has emerged as a promising carrier of green energy, and storage option for renewable energy such as wind and solar. While it does not amount to carbon emissions in the atmosphere, it is expensive and complex to develop.
Electrochemical splitting of water is one method to generate clean hydrogen. The process involves passing electricity through water in the presence of catalysts to produce oxygen and hydrogen.
In a new development, researchers at Georgia Tech Research Institute and Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new process to split water and material that maximizes the efficiency of generating green hydrogen. The method serves to be an affordable and sustainable option for industrial partners that want to shift to clean hydrogen for renewable energy storage in place of conventional carbon-discharging hydrogen generation from natural gas.
The findings of the study come as climate experts opine that hydrogen can be significant for the top industrial sectors in the world to attain net zero emission goals.
Earlier, in last summer, the U.S. federal government set a goal to reduce the cost of green hydrogen generation by 80% in one decade. In a bid for this, the initiative termed Hydrogen Shot led by the Department of Energy seeks to reduce the cost of green or clean hydrogen to $ 1 by the end of 2030.
Importantly, scientists seek to replace coal and natural gas currently used to store extra energy at the grid level with green hydrogen. This is related to its benefits of zero carbon emissions, and thus making it environment friendly for storing renewable electricity.