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El_Phil said:
Burning water into helium and loose oxygen sounds very tricky. For starters where does the helium come from. You could fuse together two hydrogen atoms to get helium, but that isn't really burning, that's nuclear fusion.
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Nuclear fusion is just a special kind of burning..... also, it's four hydrogen atoms -> one helium atom.
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El_Phil said:
As for the first part I'll hold my hands up and say I have no idea what that means. As I understand it you could call water 'hydrogen ash' as it is fully oxidised (burnt) hydrogen. So how do you burn something that is already burnt? And how do you store energy by doing so 
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You use electricity to un-burn it. You use electrical energy to separate the water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, changing electral energy into potential chemical energy (2(h2O) -> 2(h2) + o2); as long as nothing sets it off, and you keep the two gas types thus produced around (and separated, hopefully), the stored energy is very stable. With the application of a small amount of energy (and mixing the two types of gas back up), you can convert that potential chemical energy into another form of energy - electricity, say. Sure, there's energy lost to an unuseable form at every stage.... but you can store it just about forever.