Harnessing the sun’s energy during the day for use at night

Earthsky.org-1/14/14,

Tom Meyer at the Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill built a device that converts the sun’s energy not into electricity but hydrogen fuel and stores it for later use. He says his group’s findings could provide “a last major piece of a puzzle for a new way to store the sun’s energy – it could be a tipping point for a solar energy future.”

Researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill have built a system that converts the sun’s energy not into electricity but into hydrogen fuel. The system then stores this fuel for later use. Chemist Tom Meyer at UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences led the research. He said in a press release on January 14, 2014 that it’s not practical to talk about powering a planet with energy stored in batteries. It’s more reasonable, he said, to store energy in the chemical bonds of molecules. He said:

And that’s what we did – we found an answer through chemistry.

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