I’ll reserve my applause until they can prove this is efficient energy. You can’t get more energy out than you put in without a natural potential energy source providing the difference.
My hunch is that the apparent hydrolysis process that this entails requires massive amounts of energy input. Just rearranging the furniture in the room, essentially.
correct
Your hunch is correct. The best round trip efficiency I'e read about from using electrolysis (using electricity to make hydrogen from air and water) to store it as hydrogen gas, then later using that hydrogen to generate electricity with a fuel cell, is 50% to 70%. Thus you lose 30% to 50% in the process from start to end.
That makes it horrible except for certain use cases. However, if you're in a good situation for it (one of the use cases) then this news could be a significant breakthrough. One hurdle with electrolysis has been filtering the water to give the unit nothing but pure water; a hurdle they're touting they've crossed (if their claim is accurate).
For me, personally, my only interest in a hydrogen electrolyzer and fuel cell is if the Dims keep ramping up their stupid war on energy. Right now our all-electric home is 80% energy independent, including charging our EV for most of our driving (we have an ICE pickup for some driving). It'd be infeasible to make my home fully 100% energy independent because I'm running into the law of diminishing returns. But if the Dims use their energy policies to go full boar with their mark of the beast type promises they every now and then threaten us with, then I might consider an electrolyzer/fuel cell combination for long term energy storage beyond my current battery bank. On the days I have great sunshine and have already charged my home solar batteries and EV battery and have nowhere else to put the excess solar power, I might use that power to run an electrolyzer to generate hydrogen gas to store in a tank that my system can later power a fuel cell with when home battery power gets low. It would be an inefficient use of the solar power on a kWh-by-kWh basis, but on a dollar cost basis it's a lot cheaper to store many kWh's in a hydrogen tank (and increase capacity further by buying a larger tank) than it is to expand the battery stack an equal amount. Especially for the last 20% of power (which I don't need as often as the first 80%, thus I'm not as concerned about over 30% to 50% round trop loss).