NREL Summer Internship

During a summer internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory I helped develop hardware and software which was used to test the durability of Polymer Electrolysis Membrane electrolyzers. Durable electrolyzers could be part of a system used to store and transport energy harvested by wind turbines by electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen.

"But there are two prerequisites for all progress of this kind, namely continuous supplies of human and mechanical power. […] As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only. As it has often been assumed that their exhaustion would lead to the collapse of industrial civilization, I may perhaps be pardoned if I give some of the reasons which lead me to doubt this proposition.

Water-power is not, I think, a probable substitute, on account of its small quantity, seasonal fluctuation, and sporadic distribution. It may perhaps, however, shift the centre of industrial gravity to well-watered mountainous tracts such as the Himalayan foothills, British Columbia, and Armenia. Ultimately we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol. If a windmill in one’s back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy), our coalmines would be shut down to-morrow. Even to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of the wind into continuous electric power.

Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains. At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses will be liquefied, and stored in vast vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably sunk in the ground. If these reservoirs are sufficiently large, the loss of liquid due to leakage inwards of heat will not be great; thus the proportion evaporating daily from a reservoir 100 yards square by 60 feet deep would not be 1/1000 of that lost from a tank measuring two feet each way. In times of calm, the gasses will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more, or more probably in oxidation cells. Liquid hydrogen is weight for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. On the other hand it is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one third of the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use in aeroplanes, where weight is more important than bulk. These huge reservoirs of liquified gasses will enable wind energy to be stored, so that it can be expended for industry, transportation, heating and lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable, but the running expenses less than those of our present system. Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced.

It is on some such lines as these, I think, that the problem will be solved. It is essentially a practical problem, and the exhaustion of our coal- fields will furnish the necessary stimulus for its solution. Even now perhaps Italy might achieve economic independence by the expenditure of a few million pounds upon research on the lines indicated. I may add in parenthesis that, on thermodynamical grounds which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity."

From: JBS Haldane: DAEDALUS or Science and the Future. A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, 4th February 1923