The Climate for Change:

Those projected values are still 50% more expensive than wind is now off the shelf.  Keep in mind this is not just going to be lighting our homes in the future, but powering our cars and heating our homes too.  We're going to need a lot more electricity than we need now, and if we pick more expensive options for no particularly good reason, it will slow the pace of adoption and foster resentment and resistance as tax and utility bills rise.  We're not going to solve these problems with irrational solutions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

Thanks for the link - interesting article. 

The one thing I didn't understand:  Isn't electrolysis (the breaking of ionic bonds to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water by passing an electric current through water) high school science?  Why a catalyst?  I don't get it.

Anybody read the article and get that part?

Using solar or wind power to conserve hydro power is 100% efficient at 'storing' solar/wind.  The molten salt setup of solar thermal plants also likely have a higher efficiency than could ever be achieved if there's an energy to hydrogen to energy detour being taken between the panels and the consumer. 

The article said the machine produced oxygen, not hydrogen, and by the same mechanism that plants do.  Sounds like he's got some compound that when you put energy in strips the hydrogens from water, dumps the oxygen and makes glucose with the H's.  It kind of confounds me though why we'd need factories and huge amounts of energy to make the same thing plants do.  Whatever the hydrogen is going into mustn't be something that we normally use for energy, like CH4, or he'd have been talking about that instead of hydrogen. 

I think the best way to deal with intermittent renewable energy sources is a smart grid + plug in hybrid cars with smart chargers, which modulates demand to meet whatever the supply happens to be.  It's simple, cheap (compared to hydrogen factories and assuming we get plug in hybrids anyway), and 100% efficient.