One of the funding rounds that the UK government listed yesterday in its press release is for something called Gigastack – hydrogen manufacture by gigawatt scale electrolysis. With strategic investment, the UK is looking to become a leader in the technology, but from smart grid and environmentalist perspectives, hydrogen has proven problematic. It takes electricity to make hydrogen, and this is energy that could be used instead of the advanced fuel. There have been many promising electrolysis approaches to creating hydrogen from water, and there is a bit of a religious war between those that use a polymer-electrolyte membrane (PEM – some call it a proton-exchange membrane) and alkaline water electrolysis – but both clearly remain options, and the PEM…