Solar Power

“Hydricity” is a new Green power innovative solution, that will couple solar thermal and hydrogen power.

“Hydricity” is a breakthrough solution for continuous and efficient power supply, with coproduction of solar thermal power and hydrogen.

Image credit wikimedia

“Hydricity” has been realized by judiciously integrating solar water power cycle, solar thermal hydrogen production techniques, and turbine-based hydrogen power cycle.

Solar thermal power plants are more effective, by using more wavelengths of the solar spectrum, but they can only operate in direct sunlight.

Researchers now propose that coupling solar thermal power plants with hydrogen fuel production facilities, could result in “hydricity” systems, a round the clock power system.

We introduce a paradigm—“hydricity”—that involves the coproduction of hydrogen and electricity from solar thermal energy and their judicious use to enable a sustainable economy. We identify and implement synergistic integrations while improving each of the two individual processes. When the proposed integrated process is operated in a standalone, solely power production mode, the resulting solar water power cycle can generate electricity with unprecedented efficiencies of 40–46%. Similarly, in standalone hydrogen mode, pressurized hydrogen is produced at efficiencies approaching ∼50%. In the coproduction mode, the coproduced hydrogen is stored for uninterrupted solar power production. When sunlight is unavailable, we envision that the stored hydrogen is used in a “turbine”-based hydrogen water power (H2WP) cycle with the calculated hydrogen-to-electricity efficiency of 65–70%, which is comparable to the fuel cell efficiencies.

via sciencealert