I'm betting this discovery will be worth a Nobel prize.  Not to mention it will help significantly in the quest for be totally non-fossil fuel dependent by 2020.  An MIT scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that will allow home owners to store solar energy and use it at night to heat and light their homes.  Up until now, U.S. homes that have solar panels can use that electricity while the sun is shining and can release it into the grid for others to use but then have to draw back from the grid at night or when the sun isn't shining. 

That was the problem that Daniel Nocera set out to solve. 

"If you can only have energy when the sun is shining, you're in deep trouble. And that's why, in my opinion, photovoltaics haven't penetrated the market," Nocera, an MIT professor of energy, said in an interview for Reuter which is reported at ENN. "If I could provide a storage mechanism, then I make energy 24/7 and then we can start talking about solar."

"The idea, which he has been working on for 25 years, came from reflecting on the way plants store the sun's energy."  Nocera's discovery, which he wrote about in the journal Science, is also significantly less expensive than current technologies. 

Companies have been producing fuel cells for use in industry and transportation and automakers are testing fuel-cell powered vehicles.  However, although fuel cells produce electricity without directly generating greenhouse gases, the hydrogen and oxygen they run on typically requires burning fossil fuels. 

Nocera's work is likely to open up new, cheaper, clean technologies for energy production.  His system produces oxygen from water using 90% less electricity than current methods.

"It's cheap, it's efficient, it's highly manufacturable, it's incredibly tolerant of impurity and it's from earth-abundant stuff," Nocera explained.

You can also hear Nocera talk about his research in an interview on a Science journal podcast.