Debut of the first practical “artificial leaf”

[DudeGuyMan]

Couldn't you just take the desalinization salt and chuck it in the ocean? All the water you separated from it is just going to end up drank, pissed, evaporated, and back in the sea eventually anyway. Hydrological cycle, yo.

[Guardsman Bass]

That depends on where you dump it. Throwing a ton of salt back into the coastal ocean temporarily drives up its salinity, which can fuck with a lot of coastal sea-life.

[Sky Captain]

Any large scale application of solar and/or wind energy will require energy storage on a massive scale. Currently cost effective energy storage can be achieved only with hydroelectric plants and dedicated pumped storage power plants, but those are somewhat location limited. If you use fossil fueled backup plants that turn on when solar or wind is not enough you don't really solve anything regarding dependency on fossil fuels.

Are there any cost estimates of how expensive it would be to supply say 1 GW of electrical power from intemitent energy sources in Europe that also takes into account costs of energy storage (suppose a pumped storage plant of suffiecient capacity)?

[someone_else]

Any large scale application of solar and/or wind energy will require energy storage on a massive scale.

Solar thermal can already do its job day and night, by storing heat in molten salts for night operation. For the other two (solar-electric and wind) you either need huge batteries or hydrogen/oxygen (and quite a bit of R&D anyway).
Placing turbines in the seas is another good idea, to either exploit the tides (reliable) or from sea currents/waves (again reliable).

If you use fossil fueled backup plants that turn on when solar or wind is not enough you don't really solve anything regarding dependency on fossil fuels.

Well, covering the base load with renewables is more than enough to drop the fossil consumption considerably. Technically France does fire up fossil power plants when there are spikes in energy consumption too, even when they have fucktons of nuke plants.

Are there any cost estimates of how expensive it would be to supply say 1 GW of electrical power

Spain has already around 700 MW of solar thermal, up and running. Is also currently building more stuff to double that amount. Some work at night, some don't.

[DudeGuyMan]

That depends on where you dump it. Throwing a ton of salt back into the coastal ocean temporarily drives up its salinity, which can fuck with a lot of coastal sea-life.

Sure, but even if you have to drive your cheap-ass barge a thousand miles this way on this dump, and a thousand miles that way on that dump, you'd still think it'd be cheaper/easier than anything else.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

the article even says it doesn’t yet match current solar tech in terms of cost effectiveness and that isn’t cost effective enough to roll out in most of the world in comparison to fossil fuels

excuse me, but did you read the whole article(s)? To me looks like it's saying the thing is practical to make and use, due to inexpensive catalysts that work even in not-totally-pure water (a major drawback of most machines doing electrolysis nowadays). The solar panel is a solar panel like any other, just of a small size (they talk of 10 times a leaf's photosynthetic efficiency, and plants usually reach between 3% and 6% of photosynthetic efficiency so it seems to be between 30% and 60% efficient).
They have problems in separating oxygen and hydrogen, though. That will be the thing making a difference.

The cost effectiveness of this system isn't just a function of the solar cell. You also need to account for the fuel cell, and IIRC, those are jolly expensive, since they require such substances as platinum in order to work. If you can just use the awesome tiny solar cell to generate loads of electricity, why not use it directly rather than using that electricity to generate hydrogen to put into a fuel cell in order to... generate less electricity than you had to use to create the hydrogen in the first place...

[someone_else]

The cost effectiveness of this system isn't just a function of the solar cell.

Already pointed out, and yeah, it's a pretty valid point.

Although... wait a minute, I have read stuff around that regenerative fuel cells can be optimized to either "burn fuel to generate power" or "suck power to generate fuel" without requiring totally different designs. Wikipedia
Now, if this is right (and don't count on me), the article above means that the same inexpensive catalysts used to produce the h2 and O2 from the panel can be then used to make a fuel cell doing the reverse and make electrical power without expensive rare earths (platinum and its friends).

Am I right?

Anyways, I tend to agree with madd0ct0r above, that this could have good potential as a water desalinator/detoxificator that also generates some heat to cook stuff (when you burn GH2 and GOx and store the steam somewhere to have 100% pure water), more than The Holy Grail of solar energy production.

[madd0ct0r]

most catalysts work both ways if I recall.

It might not be able to act on gases though, requiring you to compress the oxy hydrogen mix. a lot of energy, and a nice little powder keg.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Well, even if you can engineer a relatively cheap fuel cell, I'm still not sure why you would want to. The solar cell generates X amount of electricity. You can either use that directly, or send it through the fuel cell to turn it from electricity into chemical energy and then back into electricity. Because nothing is 100% efficient, after the end of that process, you would have less than X amount of electricity being produced by the fuel cell. So, why bother? It's extra hardware and maintenance costs for less output than you'd get without it.

[mdiinican]

Well, even if you can engineer a relatively cheap fuel cell, I'm still not sure why you would want to. The solar cell generates X amount of electricity. You can either use that directly, or send it through the fuel cell to turn it from electricity into chemical energy and then back into electricity. Because nothing is 100% efficient, after the end of that process, you would have less than X amount of electricity being produced by the fuel cell. So, why bother? It's extra hardware and maintenance costs for less output than you'd get without it.

Because you can't drag the power grid with you everywhere? Fuel cells are supposed to be a replacement for rechargeable batteries, not municipal power supplies.

[CaptHawkeye]

Where the fuck are you getting your numbers from?

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB14/eib14g.pdf

If you knew anything, you'd be able to tell from your own link, too. There's no city on Earth the size of any of those boxes.

I never claimed there was, moron. Go back and read what my post actually says.

So what? The logistics and resources needed to turn a land mass of that size into a giant solar farm in a reasonable time period don't exist.

Even if they did, it turns out the funny thing about cheap energy is that it's got to be, ya know, cheap.