Australia is blessed with certain natural advantages over the UK when it comes to generating clean energy.
It’s a little easier to cover vast tracts of the outback with solar panels and wind farms than England’s green, rolling fields.This is one reason why our Antipodean cousins are jostling for pole position in the global race to generate hydrogen in industrial quantities.
Countries around the world are investing in hydrogen power as they scramble to cut carbon emissions. But they are also anxious not to miss out on what experts believe is destined to become a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
Still hugely reliant on coal and natural gas, Australia has been widely condemned for refusing to commit to becoming ‘carbon neutral’ by 2050.
But the country’s ambitions to produce clean-burning hydrogen – the most abundant molecule on earth – are on a truly epic scale.
Plans have been tabled to build the world’s biggest renewable energy hub in the Western Australian outback covering an area ten times the size of Greater London.
Costing up to £54billion and spanning nearly 6,000 square miles, it would produce up to 50 gigawatts of wind and solar power – doubling the entire country’s generation capacity.
But this energy would solely be used to power machines called electrolysers, which run electrical currents through water to split each H20 molecule into two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. The bonus of this energy intensive process, of course, is no carbon emissions are produced.
It is hoped vast quantities of hydrogen can be sold around Australia and overseas to help power a new generation of green buses, cars and ships – and to heat homes - link - picture link - more like this - link
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