The problem with hydrogen is it costs more power to make it than you get out of it. The electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficiently stored straight into a battery, any battery. Its green use is clean from the tail pipe and it makes good clean top shelf rocket propellant, makes water. SO its practicality as a fuel is not surpassed.
Bio hydrogen produced by bacteria could be a way around the expense of energy that needs to be spent to make it.
Similarly how we rely upon the gasses present around fossil fuels over large areas we could produce hydrogen. Messy business compared to solar and wind production.
Sure! The hydrogen cell is a way of storing energy and like anything can be improved upon and made practical, burning it might provide better delivery of kinetic output. The gas electric cell is just different when compared to more conventional forms we accept.
And how to store energy and its compatibility to our current methods of producing energy is on topic too. The OP is general and well titled IMO.
The ESU is the answer to many problems green tech is facing to be competitive. Upon the introduction of high voltage ESU to wind farming, ESU's will make wind farming almost unbeatable. To be able to store the high power production on windy days during low peak grid usage will see us getting a heavy nights usage on the winds power alone more often.
So much is wasted in some green electricity production. It's almost like they say "it came free anyway". Green tech needs to get conservative with its power but evolve into full power schemes. Solar power needs two leaps and bounds, (reliable solar tracking and or reflective technology integration and solar panel efficiency improvements ) and an ESU, then it would be an almost flawless system.
The ultimate solar power station would need at least the need to pay for the panels in 6 years, store 50% of its total daily output into a viable storage system, +40% efficient panels would halve the area needed to collect any amount of source light, good ventilation, have good temperature rating solar panels.
Here is some work done on converting the infra-red spectrum. My input was to look at peltier type collectors
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2008/05/29/new-solar-panels-80-efficient/https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_101047At last, some one turning the infra-red spectrum into electrical energy. So much of IR is produced by our and atmosphere and geography, especially in smoggy cities. And if we can transfer heat into energy efficiently then we can indeed recycle wasted watts.
This re-conversion of heat into energy becomes less important in the face of 80% efficiency electric motors.
The concept is ideal, take the heat off our roof and put it into our vehicles and appliances.
