There is a company named Solar Systems of Hawthorne in Victoria, Australia building the world’s first direct solar to hydrogen commercial power plant.
“Electrolysis is used to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, but present technology is quite inefficient, even using solar power. At room temperature every 100 watts of electricity produces just 60 watts of hydrogen."
"In Australia Mr. John Lasich’s technique heats the water to 1000 degrees Celsius, a temperature at which the process delivers 140 watts worth of hydrogen for every 100 watts of electricity.”
http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/blog2/index.php/hydrogen-fuel-production/direct-solar-to-hydrogen-plant-goes-up-in-australia/
Abstract:http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37093.pdf
The idea makes a certain amount of intuitive sense - be applying more heat energy to water, you should be able to crack it via electrolysis more easily. Note that those who dispute the energy balance of 140/100 only can do so by neglecting the large slug of heat energy applied to the feed stock of water.
OTOH, the only thing I can find on this plant is a couple of press releases that claim construction started in 08 or 09. I haven't seen anything that says this is anything more than experimental nor that it has successfully proven the process out as commercially viable.
File under "vaporware" for now. Then take a look at infiniacorp.com. Last I visited them, they had an order bank from the dreamers in Spain and FRG for on the order of billions for their solar-to-kinetic dish/free-piston system and were preparing to go to scale production. That technology is fabulous and will, I'm certain, find commercial success, just probably not in Spain and the FRG.
Of course, this was before the Spanish "green jobs" program was demonstrated to be the equivalent of a worthless rathole in which to dispose of Spain's national wealth. But hey, we'll repeat that process in the US and this time it'll be a roaring success, right?
There's nothing like divorcing a venture from the bottom line to ensure its failure. People tend to forget, the beauty of "jobs" in private-sector ventures is that they self-fund - because profitable. Or, to paraphrase Thatcher, the only problem with massive transfer-backed schemes is that they tend to run out of other people's money.
