Hydrogen from Electrolysis
How to bottle the lightning bolt.

Fuel-cells are making a lot of news lately.  Environmentalist groups are hailing them as a non-polluting source of energy.   Well, yes and no.  Fuel-cells react hydrogen with oxygen in the air to produce electricity and pure water as a byproduct.  The question is, where does all this hydrogen come from?  Traditionally, hydrogen is extracted from natural gas in a process which actually emits more greenhouse gas into the environment than burning the natural gas in the first place.  The fuel-cell itself is indeed clean, but it is still dependent on fossils for it's fuel.  Or is it? 

Another way of making hydrogen is to use electricity to 'crack' water into hydrogen and oxygen. The process is called electrolysis, but we're not talking about unwanted hair here.  The question the becomes, where does the electricity come from?  The answer is powersats!  We can use the excess power at the receiver to produce hydrogen by the ton.  This helps with a nagging problem of powersats...  Since there is no fuel, and no additional environmental impact, there is no reason to 'turn them down.'  In fact, the responsible thing to do is run them full-on all the time, to maximize the return on investment, both in capital and materials.  Electric loads aren't very flat though, they have peaks and valleys.  Since we can't store this much electricity efficiently, the extra capacity would normally be wasted.  Not so with a hydrogen plant co-located with the receiving antenna.  The electrolysis plant runs with whatever extra power is available, converting water (any water, it needn't be fresh or pure) to valuable hydrogen which is piped or stored for shipment, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a 'byproduct.'  Imagine, a power/chemical plant that's producing clean fuel and releasing pure oxygen to the atmosphere.  Now that's a win-win scenario!