What if every home could become a mini-powerplant? Instead of sucking power from some central repository, houses across the nation would create enough energy to support those inside and maybe a little extra for the grid. This is the ultimate idea of distributed generation–producing power at many small sites rather than a few big ones. Perhaps the most exciting recent development in making this sort of dream a reality is new science out of MIT. It is what many would call a hybrid system, and it is impressive because it combines solar and hydrogen technologies to produce energy even when the sun is not shining.

The system relies on solar panels to provide energy during the day when the sun is available, and it borrows a small amount of power from the panels to split water into its basic parts: hydrogen and oxygen. Then, at night when the sun has gone down and the panels are no longer producing power, it combines the stored hydrogen and oxygen over a fuel cell to create electricity. Power during the day or night. What is so great about this system? It is energy that is almost free. If a homeowner were to have an all electric car, she could recharge the batteries with energy produced right at home. No more trips to the gas station. In addtion the scientists working on the system say that they are designing it to be closed, meaning that you would put water into it once and it would hum away creating electricity for the duration of its lifetime. This is exciting stuff.

There are still hurdles to overcome, but technologies like this are just the kind of thing the world needs right now. Information about the scientists (Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanan) and the technology can be found all over the internet as this has been a hot topic over the last few weeks. This Wikipedia page is a good start.

See a video interview with Daniel here.

Consider that there is hope and there will still be light tomorrow–if, that is, people continue to work toward a better future.