Opportunity
I
Today, 96% of the global hydrogen production is by the reforming of rapidly depleting and polluting conventional fossil fuels. This approach is neither clean nor renewable and has several problems related to its suitability for distributed and de-centralized production. The cost of transporting hydrogen to its final destination of use is itself 2 to 3 times higher than its production cost using this approach, keeping aside its highly polluting and fossil fuel dependent nature.
We aim to solve this problem using our onsite renewable hydrogen production system where we use concentrated sunlight as the only energy input and produce no emissions.
OPPORTUNITy
ii
The share of the renewable energy is increasing day by day. However, the renewable energy sources like sunlight , wind etc. are highly intermittent. This leads to a mismatch between supply and demand. In fact, the residential energy consumption during the day is the lowest, when the solar energy is at the highest production capacity.
One way to tackle this mismatch is to supply the excess generation over the grid where it can be used by other needy consumers. However, this creates the grid instability problems and most of the conventional grids are not designed to transfer power in a bi-directional way. Another approach is to use batteries for energy storage but they are not good for longer term (weekly, monthly or more) storage and can't store large amounts of power without being highly-expensive and in fact also polluting.
Converting solar energy into a renewable fuel such as hydrogen can be the only viable and scalable approach for solving the world's energy storage problems. This is what we aim to achieve with SoHHytec's Arb system that too in a cleaner, greener and cost-effective way.
Technology
SoHHytec's technology is based on our patented photoelectrochemical approach. Our product is called "Arb" taking its roots from the Latin word Arbor for a tree. We use the sunlight which is concentrated by a factor of 1000 using a parabolic concentrator/dish. The energy equivalent of 1000 suns is then used by Arb's ''Pod'' which sits at the focus of the parabolic dish.
Arb's Pod is an advanced system which utilizes the incoming concentrated sunlight to produce Fuel, Electricity and Heat at the same time achieving system efficiency as high as 70%. Arb's Pod features SoHHytec's patented innovative reactor.
The operation of the system during its lifetime and in response to the realistic disturbances, caused by weather fluctuations and system's ageing, is equally important for having a long lasting performance. Our proprietary and patented controller operates the system to give a lifetime of ~20 years with minimal maintenance during the operational years.