hydrogen has been called the fuel of the future for as long as I can remember and for good reason
it's incredibly abundant and energy dense but it's also a huge challenge to store and produce
that's why I was so excited by a company producing a solar hydrogen panel producing hydrogen in your
home charge your future hydrogen car to power your house later well there's some challenges and some
pretty Innovative breakthroughs here so let's talk about this today I'm Ricky and this Two Bit da Vinci
this video is sponsored by Hoy miles
hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and it's also the second most energy dense fuel behind nuclear power every kilogram of hydrogen contains
33.3 kilode hours of energy that's a hundred times better than Tesla's best batteries and
70 times greater than the current record holding battery from amperous technology we could pack
the same amount of energy in Tesla's model y a 1700 pound battery pack into just 15 pounds of
hydrogen saving 1685 pounds minus the weight of the storage system but there's a catch we can't
find the hydrogen in nature because it's clingy and likes to stick to other elements Like Oxygen
so producing those 15 pounds of hydrogen requires putting in a lot of energy to pry it apart also
being the smallest element and a gas it has a very low energy density at room temperatures
and pressures those 15 pounds I was talking about would occupy a volume of 3 000 cubic feet that's a
cube 14 feet by 14 feet by 14 feet roughly a very large room with high ceilings this means that we
need to compress it down to very high pressures or cool it down to below negative 253 degrees
Celsius to liquefy the hydrogen gas or combine it with other elements again to make it fit in
a smaller space finally storing and moving this high pressure gas or cryogenic looking around is
very hard and expensive too and acquires costly equipment this is in essence hydrogen's biggest
problem cost the cost to produce it the cost to compress it store it move it and use it
this is why we don't see hydrogen lines coming from utilities feeding our homes it's also why
hydrogen cars haven't really made any Headway against battery powered EVs and that's exactly
what a company from Belgium called solheid is trying to solve but before we get into that
let's talk about our sponsor this week Hoy miles my solar system is finally approved and running
and I'm officially producing clean energy for our house and office it feels so good knowing our
crazy high energy bills are behind us koi miles makes some world-class micro inverters the part
that takes DC from your solar panels and inverts it to AC for your house the hardware is Top Notch
offers super high efficiency and comes with an amazing warranty but the magic that makes Hawaii
miles so great is that you get all the benefits of panel by panel production at an amazing price
with their two to one or four to one inverter you can plug in two or four panels into one inverter
and get all those micro inverter benefits while paying a fraction of the cost I'm always looking
for ways to make solar more affordable for more people and Hoy miles is my go-to recommendation
for inverters and why I have them installed in my house so if you're an installer or a
homeowner you gotta check out high miles you'll be glad you did links in the description huge
thanks to high miles and you for supporting the show so the First Technology we're going to talk
about today is solar hydrogen panels AKA still hide this is an all-in-one solar panel and water
vapor electrolyzer that can produce hydrogen gas directly from water vapor in the air using
only solar energy this panel was developed by a group of researchers at KU Leven in in Belgium led
by Dr Jean Runge the team founded a spin-off company called soulhide to commercialize the
panels they've been working on since 2010. they made the headlines recently when they partnered
with komate a Belgium Hardware startup incubator announced that they could hit commercial scale as
early as 2026 that's just a couple of years away but I bet you're wondering what makes this panel
special and how does it work it's actually pretty simple the hydrogen panel is made up of two parts
one a standard PV panel on top that converts solar energy into electricity just like we've always
done and two a very special type of electrolyzer that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen
and oxygen the oxygen is released into the air and the hydrogen is collected in a series of tubes and
it's piped into your house so instead of having a series of wires coming out of the panels feeding
electrical panel you'd have pipes running hydrogen gas I could go wrong once we get to the hydrogen
we can put it through a fuel cell to generate electricity and we could in principle use it to
fill up our hydrogen in cars I know what you're thinking hydrogen cars seriously yeah seriously
there are many who consider hydrogen will be the energy source of the future the Japanese
included if you don't believe me you should check out our video that was wildly popular on Japan's
red hydrogen plans linked below there's even talk about Tesla switching to Hydra in 2024. now I'm
just I'm just kidding that is a Elon Musk special April Fool's Day joke but either way hydrogen
may be the only economical way to decarbonize many critical Industries like steel and cement
Toyota is the world's biggest car manufacturer by volume and they're also betting big on hydrogen
with their development into the hydrogen combustion engine so this isn't a fuel cell
that takes hydrogen produce electricity to power electric motors like the Mirai this is a hydrogen
combustion engine that would be like a direct replacement for gasoline interesting we gotta do
a whole video on that later the only reason why we don't see hydrogen cars here in the states is that
there simply aren't any hydrogen fueling stations anywhere outside of California and Hawaii even
there they're few and far between but what if you didn't need a hydrogen pumping station what if you
could produce all the hydrogen you needed at home just as you could generate electricity and charge
your Ev today I gotta ask if you could refuel your car at home in under four minutes and get 300 to
400 miles of range would you switch to a hydrogen car even if there were no other pumping stations
around sound off in the comments below that's a tricky one because that would mean you need
a second car for road trips and ah complicated so a chord is so high the hydrogen panel is the
size of an average PV panel and can produce around 250 liters of hydrogen on average per day for an
overall efficiency of 15 percent we'll get back to that in a minute the key to their technology
is their special electrolyzer which doesn't use liquid water but takes water vapor from the air
this is something called direct air electrolysis or Dae and it works efficiently even in bone dry
air with just four percent humidity only the driest deserts in the world would be too dry
for Dae let's look at some of the other benefits of the silhouide panel solheid made a point of
ensuring that their panels would be compatible with normal PV panels and they fit on the same
standard PV mounting and racking this means you could just swap an old panel and replace with
the still hide or you could even retrofit your current panel with the electrolyzer this got me
thinking what exactly is the difference between getting a soul hide panel and just keeping a
traditional solar panel and adding a third-party hydrogen electrolyzer I'll get back to that in a
second because it's actually pretty important and you'll want to stick around for my take on that
the second benefit is that this is an all-in-one green hydrogen generation system that'll start
producing hydrogen the moment the Sun hits the panel this is a lot easier to install and more
convenient than setting up separate panels and electrolyzers so if you like all in one stuff
like an iMac you'll probably like this panel too the average water electrolyzer has an efficiency
of around 80 percent while daes are much better around 95 percent and more this means that 95
electricity generated by the solar panel on top gets converted into hydrogen on the bottom that
is a huge breakthrough and really interesting but for other benefits sohide panels are also pretty
flawed the most important problem I see with this panel is that it doesn't come with the hardware
to a convert hydrogen back into electricity or B Store hydrogen when you're not using it these
are two major obstacles you need a full cell sorry a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back
into water electricity this process only converts about 40 percent of the energy in hydrogen into
electricity and the rest is released as heat this is a horrible efficiency and it would make much
more sense to use that electrical energy directly from the panel instead however if you use a heat
pump in a well-insulated house you can get that up to around 90 thanks to the coefficient of
performance of heat pumps but again you probably would be just better off storing it in a battery
there are several ways you can store hydrogen but none of them are perfect the hydrogen produced is
low pressure so we have to either a compress it and put into a canister at 100 to 200 bars
at ambient temperatures this requires using a compressor which in turn requires energy and in
typical cases you can lose up to 20 percent of the energy just from compressing it or B cool
it down to hydrogen's Boiling Point to store it as a liquid this is even worse since it eats up
30 to 40 percent of the energy you're storing additionally liquid hydrogen tends to boil off
in a small system like the one you would have at your home you could easily lose up to 15 of your
stored hydrogen per day or C stored chemically as ammonia hydrocarbons or as a metal hydride
this process requires complex catalysts and energy both for storing and later using as hydrogen even
though these cons come mostly from hydrogen itself and not from the panels there is one technology
I'll share with you in a minute that bypasses one of the worst parts of the system that could really
change the game but before that let's talk money so hide panels haven't hit the market yet and the
company hasn't set a price point it's pretty clear however that they must be more expensive
than traditional panels since it's a normal panel and a Dae unit but they did hint that the home
panels will be available by 2030 and that they expect their cost to have every five years just
like normal solar panels have over the past few decades and that by 2030 the soul height panels
would cost roughly what it costs for a panel today that means that a soul hide panel would
cost approximately 300 in 2030 after decreasing in price fifty percent every five years so do
the numbers solid panels today would cost roughly 800 each or almost three times as much as a normal
panel putting the price for the electoralizer alone at around 500 assuming a 30-year lifespan
and a production of 250 liters of hydrogen per day per panel this brings the cost of generating
green hydrogen at home to just three dollars and fifty cents per kilogram in today's price this is
dirt cheap and a solheim's main selling point that is almost a fourth of the current cost of
green hydrogen production at a large scale and almost half the cost of gray hydrogen produced
from natural gas in Europe but by 2030 the cost will be just one dollar 30 cents per kilogram
if the projections are right and this is even cheaper than gray hydrogen produced in the US
from cheap fracked natural gas there are several big ifs here and cost we didn't consider but the
fact that we can get even close to the same ballpark as the cheapest dirtiest large-scale
hydrogen production methods are pretty amazing especially considering this could happen on your
rooftop in a residential setting this means the decentralization of green hydrogen generation no
more depending on large production plants and no more distribution issues you could be producing
hydrogen at a residential scale at home for use locally no distribution required but this still
doesn't answer a key question though why go for a soul hide instead of a normal high quality solar
panel connected to an electrolyzer and I'll be honest besides the convenience of having the
entire generation unit in a single neat package I have trouble answering this question there are
companies like the Australian Lavo that offer commercial hydrogen batteries designed to work
with solar power the key difference is that the unit generates and also stores hydrogen as metal
hydride at room temperatures and pressure there are commercial units store up to 40 kilowatt
hours worth of hydrogen and this has a round trip efficiency of 50 percent this translates
into a real world energy storage capacity of around 20 kilowatt hours after converting the
hydrogen back into electricity that said 20 is still about 50 percent more capacity than
a Tesla powerwall although the power wall is way more efficient much higher closer to maybe 85 90
round trip as opposed to their 50 percent there's another problem with hydrogen if the level costs
around twenty three thousand dollars or over twice as much as a Powerball however but it does last 20
000 Cycles so if it does last the entire lifetime of it it could potentially make sense because it
does last longer than a powerwall I think for soul Hyde to truly make sense they have
to partner with a company that does the storage and electricity production component like Lavo
does and if they can find the right partner and bring this together and truly make it a
hands-off approach this could work especially as they reach economies of scale solheid's key
Advantage is their direct air electrolyzer which works very efficiently with water vapor in the
air but its key disadvantage is that the produced hydrogen is really low pressure and low density
and it's really hard to store but there is another technology breakthrough that I wanted to leave for
I'm talking about the high differential pressure electrolyzer now that's a mouthful but it's
actually pretty simple it's a piece of equipment that can break down water into hydrogen and oxygen
but that produces the hydrogen at high pressure without any need for a compressor this means we
could store compressed hydrogen at home while the panel is generating electricity and pump it
directly to our hydrogen car at home without any additional Hardware which is awesome companies
like Honda have been using this technology for a while now and they built their first working solar
hydrogen station all the way back in 2010 but with little creativity companies like sawhide could
bring this technology to our homes at affordable prices in the near future solving another one of
hydrogen's greatest challenges which was storage in a nutshell whenever we make these kinds of
videos It's for a simple reason the future of energy storage will come down to two competing
Technologies do we go hydrogen or do we go batteries and there's pros and cons to both like
all things in engineering for example hydrogen is just an abundant element in water vapor paper all
around us right now just a matter of collecting it there's not as much mining required although
with batteries you need lithium you need iron you need nickel you need Cobalt potentially although
increasingly less so but there is a mining component involved but the battery's benefit
is way more efficient over 85 percent round-trip efficiency compared to just 50 percent for the
hydrogen also there's other competing things like how you get the electricity back out in
the case of hydrogen in your fuel cell those are just less defined there's been less research and
development so how long will they last how finicky can they be that's a big question whereas in the
world of batteries it's just an inverter and we've been building inverters for a very long time and
these can easily last 10 or 20 years so ultimately that is the battle and if you think that's crazy
you gotta watch this video next on Japan's plans for red hydrogen production using nuclear power