Energy moves in new directions
Meeting our needs with cleaner, more efficient energy is absolutely critical to our quality of life. It helps provide for the continued prosperity of the United States as well as helping raise the standard of living in the rest of the world. Energy is important to global and national security and is at the core of DOE's mission.
As a nation, we're growing more conscious of the environmental consequences of energy use, particularly global warming, so we have to meet our need for increased energy in a way that protects the environment. Hydrogen is a potentially limitless energy source that doesn't emit greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide so it can play a major role in meeting our country's energy needs with further research and development. PNNL has a diverse portfolio of energy projects, including hydrogen, so we are well positioned to address many of the significant scientific challenges involved with transforming our current fossil fuel economy to a hydrogen-based economy.
Hydrogen economy supports grid modernization
In the transition to a hydrogen economy, current sources of electricity generation, such as coal, natural gas and oil, will be used to generate hydrogen. Fuel cells will use this hydrogen to produce electricity, particularly for transportation and for distributed generation.
Distributed generation is a concept that involves moving energy generation closer to the end user rather than transmitting it long distances. Fuel cells support distributed energy because they can be located at the point of use and energy production can be increased incrementally by adding more fuel cells as energy needs increase, reducing the need to build more power plants.
We're working on an exciting new way to modernize the energy grid and make distributed energy a reality. This concept, called GridWise™, allows a back-and-forth flow of information from generation to end use, where end users decide whether or not they want the electricity at a given price and the system is smart enough to operate automatically based on customer preferences.
The system's interactivity would monitor the grid in times of stress so that if there is a disruption and a plant goes down, interruptible appliances such as hot water heaters could immediately detect a problem and shut themselves down briefly, reducing the load and giving the system time to heal.
Fuel cells would be part of distributed generation in GridWise™ as would windmills, solar power panels and small hydro plants, in addition to large central station generation. All will be "plug and play" resources, but it will take an information-rich grid such as GridWise
It will take 20 to 50 years before we really see an impact from hydrogen on the market, but GridWise™ will start making an impact immediately because it will allow the electricity system to routinely operate at a higher capacity without the risk of overload. Taking steps toward energy efficiency is always the cheapest, simplest and best thing to do first.
Barriers to a hydrogen economy
Hydrogen storage is the single greatest challenge to making the hydrogen economy a reality. Although hydrogen has tremendous energy, it is dilute rather than dense, making it difficult to get large quantities into a small space, release it and have it continuously available. We are using our capabilities in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) to look at various chemical storage mechanisms to ensure hydrogen can be reused and recharged safely in a practical time frame without pricing it out of the market. Our scientists are studying interfacial, small area chemistry to see how the hydrogen is bound up in molecules, how it is released and the catalysts that could be used to facilitate that release.
We also must ensure that the processes used to generate hydrogen are economical. We don't want to use more energy to produce hydrogen than hydrogen energy saves nor do we want to produce more greenhouse gases in the process. Examining entire systems rather than isolated points is key to ensuring hydrogen technology is economically viable and PNNL excels in this type of systematic approach.