I heard this on American Public Media's Marketplace program this evening, and it really does look like a chemist at MIT has made a discovery that could revolutionize the way we produce and consume electricity. MIT's public relations department says
[W]ithin 10 years, homeowners [may] be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.
More on the flip
MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera has published in today's issue of the journal Science an article (subscribers only) announcing a major discovery involving artificial photosynthesis. I'm not subscribed to Science, but the main gist of his research is available on several sites on the web.
In essence, one element holding back massive use of solar energy historically has been the problem of storage. There simply has been no efficient way to store the electricity produced during daylight in order to use it at night and on cloudy days.
Nocera felt that photosynthesis provided a good model for energy storage, and for some time he has been looking for a cheap and efficient way to use electricity to divide water into hydrogen and oxygen. In his Science article, he details a way to do that using a room temperature, ambient pressure solution of water, cobalt, and potassium phosphate. All of these are abundant and easily accessible natural resources. When electricity is introduced into the solution oxygen is separated through electrolysis, leaving behind a proton from which hydrogen can be produced using known and proven methods.
Once the hydrogen and oxygen are separated, they can then be used to power a fuel cell, again a known and proven technology.
Nocera's contribution is using the cobalt and potassium phosphate solution to electrolyze water cheaply and safely. The electricity used to power the system, obviously, could come from any source, but Nocera believes his system is ideally suited to rooftop solar systems. All the articles I consulted about this agree there are major engineering obstacles that need to be worked out, but Nocera predicts confidently that this technology should be widely available within ten years.
If solar or wind power is used to produce the electricity to power the system, not a drop of carbon would be released into the atmosphere. As Nocera points out, you could power your entire home twenty-four hours a day from your rooftop solar array, and use the same source to power your car.
Links:
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/...
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/...
Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/...
MIT News Office
http://web.mit.edu/...
Video of Nocera describing his discovery
(link to quicktime movie)
http://techtv.mit.edu/...
(link to MIT flashvideo)
http://techtv.mit.edu/...