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Originally Posted by ken0042
But Lanny, why not use that powerful photocell to generate electricity?
The main reason Hydrogen is "good" is it can be stored and used when it's convenient; like in a car. The big problem with hydrogen is how explosive it is.
And, if every car in the world ran on hydrogen the streets would always be wet from the exhaust. Wet streets cause accidents, and when hydrogen powered cars crash the go boooom!
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Just chiming in about the utility of a hydrogen economy. Like you said hydrogen is good because it can be stored. The bad part of hydrogen is that to make it useful it must be pressurized, which takes a lot of energy. Also, people always talk about how explosive hydrogen is. . .well the gasoline you use in your car is more dangerous right now in terms of explosions and fire.
An alternative to using straight hydrogen is to use something that you can easily get hydrogen from. We've all been talking about using water but nobody ever mentions using methanol. The research is much further along for the conversion and application of methanol instead of water.
Like Lanny said, the future likely involves harnessing the sun's energy. The problem is that the best solar panels are only something like 15% efficient. Once this problem is figured out there is still the problem of making it useful for all facets of daily life.
The growing energy demand is likely the biggest concern of the planet today. Essentially to be able to match the energy demand in one hundred years we will need to have a new nuclear power plant go up every day up until that point. The future is looking pretty grim for modern human society unless a solution is found. I'll try to find some literature on this stuff that you can view on the internet.