Nothing is a power system without efficiency figures. Otherwise it's just a chemistry experiment.
Then, powering a Raspberry Pi computing device (PRPi = 4W) for an autonomous measurement device year-round at the > Neumayer III station (70.68°S, 8.27°W, Tavg,y = −15.5 °C) would prospectively require a module area of 0.41 m2, whereas at Paranal observatory (Chile, 24.63°S, 70.40°W, Tavg,y = 0.4 °C) 0.18 m2 would suffice.
[0]Known, boring technology with 99.9% of the engineering warts and technical debt already solved.
Arguing that, in the judgement of process for the conversion of one form of energy (sunlight) to another (hydrogen), thermodynamic efficiency, or the measure of how well a process converts one form of energy to another isn't relevant is somewhere between obnoxiously pedantic and wishful thinking.
Funnily enough I read the article after your comment, and it is even less useful, interesting, than my initial assessment (not even direct solar to H2). It has approximately the novelty and utility of porting DOOM to <insert processor here> and running it in a refrigerator.
If you need the end product at a particular location, the transport costs can overwhelm any differences in efficiency.
The same also applies if you have excess energy in a particular location that you want to use.
In either case, the transport costs can make using the less efficient process, the more energy efficient choice overall.
The petrol in the ground is free, sunlight is free, biodiversity is free. The cost is only a human factor.
Higher efficiency on the other hand usually means lower resource consumption.
A weak proxy for cost ? Or a strong one for survival ?
A cheaper steel bike is less efficient than an expensive carbon fiber bike when your goal is to get to the mountain top before the flood submerges the valley.
So the efficiency of hydrogen split-store-generate needs to beat the efficiency of store-release of the battery and the costs of the equipment.
But it isn't yet competitive with "store energy collected in the summer for use in the winter".
For that usecase, far more energy must be stored for far fewer dollars to make it competitive vs just having a big fuel tank and a winter-only diesel generator.
Keeping lakes of water for a few months for hydropower are also competitive - the storage capacity of a big lake on a mountain top is immense.
I've heard pumped water is like 90% efficient, but you need a gradient and space.
Does wind power decrease in winter? I also remember schemes for making a huge solar farm in the Sahara and a superconducting conduit to Europe, and that was several paradigm shifts in solar cell performance ago (15 years). But almost all large countries seem to have a sufficiently sized desert to do this with (US, Russia, China).
If solar gets good enough, and it is still on some prime parts of the economies of scale price drops, you don't care as much about long-distance transmission loss.
What we need is a proper international standard for cars to be able to interact with the grid, to be able to charge and discharge based on grid conditions and pricing.
Its stupid to have everyone coming home from work at 6pm and plugging in their cars to charge right at the existing afternoon demand peak, when solar is waning. Just getting those cars to delay charging until around midnight (allowing user override) would shift a huge amount of peak demand.
Same concept if you don't use your car during the day - it should be able to discharge right into the morning and afternoon peaks, at your control. The user should be credited for this onto their car account.
It might even make sense to have dedicated high-voltage circuitry in houses and apartment blocks, to be used for EVs, solar, etc.
And we should really figure that out immediately since EV production is ramping up right now. We can't just rely on single automakers (Tesla) to work out these societal problems.
The greenest time to charge here in Northern CA is between 11AM and 1PM, when solar production is maximum.
This is a development that makes electrolysis practical in those regions.
It is neither a development[0] nor does it particularly make electrolysis practical in those regions[1] (or more so than it was yesterday). Unless there is something about keeping solar cells warm that is beneficial, I'm really not seeing it.[2]
>Hydrogen electrolysis is most efficient at elevated temperatures
negligibly until you get into the realm of solid oxide cells (100's of C) -20 to +40 is negligible, and moreover a moot point because of [1]
[0]>> The method works by using electrolytes with low freezing points, such as dilute sulfuric acid, to allow the use of water at lower temperatures.
A common electrolyte for making H2, at room temperature and otherwise. Not novel (or interesting).
[1]>> resulting in an interior working temperature of around 10°C.
Approximately 30-40 percent inefficiency in an electrolyzer manifests as heat -- all they did here is wrap their electrolyzer in a blanket. Any electrolyzer of appreciable (read: useful) power has trouble keeping cold, not warm. The square-cube law applies here, electrolyzer power (and heat generation) scales w.r.t. volume, heat loss with area. For intuitive purposes, a device capable of fueling a car (driving 24/7) would be outputting about as much heat as that car's engine.
[2]There might be, (chemistry is my meat and potatoes, more so than physics), but I've always seen the issue being more with keeping solar cells cool.
Perhaps there might be some actual merit when the end product of your process is compressed/liquefied H2? Still reads more like the usual make up some hypothetical use case for the highly impractical niche you chose to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. But who am I to judge, I did semantic web in multi-agent systems back when ai was symbolic.
It can be slower to produce the gasses, though. High efficiency, low throughput.