Year 7/8

The sun turns water into energy

One of the main problems with electricity from photoelectric cells is that there is often more than enough electricity made during the day for day time uses, but there is no way to store it for night time uses.

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston say they are on the way to overcoming this problem.

The spare energy from the sun is used to make electricity that produces hydrogen gas by a process called electrolysis. This can then be stored and used to run a fuel cell to make electricity when the sun has gone down.

This has been tried before but the electrodes, the metal plates, have not worked well enough to make it a viable. The new discovery is the use of different materials that speeds up the process of electrolysis and makes it a reasonable system to use in small and domestic set-ups.

The full article can be found here