Question: How small do you reckon the hydrogen fueled technology would get so that it could be in everyday devices i.e. TV's, computers, phones?

Jemma Rowlandson answered on 26 Jun 2014:

Hey!

I do not think hydrogen technology will ever be small enough to fit in something like a phone or laptop. There will always be two parts to your hydrogen power source; a fuel cell (bit like a battery, it produces energy from hydrogen and oxygen) and a container which stores the hydrogen.

It’s hard to store lots of hydrogen in a small space, because it’s a gas. At the moment we store it in pressurised gas cylinders which are fairly bulky. Even as technology advances I think we will always need quite a bit of space for the hydrogen tank. We won’t be able to make hydrogen technology as small as a phone battery.

What we could do though is replace boilers in homes with hydrogen technology. This was you could plug your TV/laptop/phone etc. into a socket, which would be powered from probably a boiler sized hydrogen container. This way you’re still using hydrogen and producing water, but you don’t need to carry around a large tank of hydrogen everywhere you go.