Energy demands from developing countries are going to grow by about 10 per cent between now and 2040, according to the US Energy Information Administration. By that year, they will be using 65 per cent of the world’s total energy supply.
But although new renewable energy technology can be adopted quickly, the basic energy infrastructure in the developing world is lagging behind. As a result, energy supplies are nowhere near as reliable. And that’s a problem. “In some places we have hospitals that have 12 hours of blackouts a day,” says Enass Abo-Hamed, chief executive and co-founder of hydrogen storage startup H2GO.
If electricity could be stored on-site for when it is needed, outages would be far less frequent. But the cost of existing battery technology is prohibitive. Abo-Hamed and her colleagues are working on an innovative way of storing hydrogen gas that can be burned in fuel cells. The system uses nanomaterials to create a partially flexible sponge that is able to trap hydrogen atoms in its pores. The gas can later be released by heating the structure.
“Once you reach the required temperature, the structure gets distorted and releases the hydrogen,” says Abo-Hamed. It’s a bit like pushing corks out of bottles. But first, you have to get hydrogen. From splitting water molecules (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. H2GO will use a water electrolyser for this process. Abo-Hamed says that, based on their calculations, a medium to large hospital in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, would need about 50 litres of water per hour. About 80 to 90 per cent of this supply is returned after the hydrogen is burned to make power, and can therefore be used again.
The H2GO team is now working on developing a cheaper material that mimics the mechanical behaviour of their prototype, so that the technology might be made affordable to buyers in developing countries. Leaving aside hydrogen-based solutions, the vast proportion of the world’s electricity is generated in more conventional ways. And many distributers simply want cheaper and more reliable ways of storing it.
David Howey at the University of Oxford points out that lithium ion batteries, which have more or less conquered the world, still have many shortcomings. “What we know from testing in a lab is we can take ten cells from the same manufacturer, test them the same way and they spread over time – they won’t behave in the same way,” he says.