laney said:
THe main problem with solar power is that it's unreliable - what are we going to do during night time for electricity? We can store energy from the sun except the problem with that is that it becomes very expensive and technology so far doesn't allow us to store enough energy to make the costs of storing the energy worthwhile.
I suppose I haven't been very clear with my claims or statements.
If the photolysis process is refined adequately, the energy would be stored in hydrogen gas. Whilst it is true that currently, technology for storing hydrogen gas is not very good (though it does exist), there is the major benefit of the fact that hydrogen storage is something which many researchers from governments, universities and private labs around the world are working on. Some novel methods of storing H2 gass include glass microbeads and carbon nanotubes.
Oh, and photolysis is the process of catalytic dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen. With the right catalyst (which looks to be Titanium Oxide or Titania, which Australia has immense amounts of), water can be split into its constituents far more easily than with a process like electrolysis. There's also the benefit of the energy used to split it coming from the sun, so you don't need to generate it. This is useful not only for energy production but also for things like the industrial production of ammonia, which the 2nd most important industrial chemical.
Oh course if you want to use good old fashioned solar arrays, you could simply make them electrolyse the water to produce H2 gas, when excess energy is produced.
Japan is also looking into harnessing the sun's energy in space and them beaming it back down to Earth as EMR. This process works regardless of time of day.
Indeed, the storage of energy is perhaps as big as or a bigger problem than acquiring the energy itself.
Further, when the sun goes down, that's when your other renewables kick in, like hot dry rock, hydro, wind, biogas.
Hot dry rock is a curious technology which is currently being explored by France, Germany, America and Australia. Whilst not technically renewable since it is powered by radioactive fissures in rocks, it is constant and reliable for a few hundred years. And whilst not renewable, the Earth reshapes itself often, creating new areas of such activity as it does so.
