'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution - MIT News Office

(((Okay, either MIT's press agency has gone bonkers, or else chemistry scientists in two major schools on two different continents have lost all sense of restraint, or else it's suddenly open-season for easy, cheap, plentiful homemade hydrogen.)))

(((I'm not quite sure what the solar connection is here; it sounds like you could hook this gizmo up to pretty much any source of voltage and make hydrogen. But if you make hydrogen at some central power station, you still have to
SHIP the hydrogen, which is a major pain in the neck.)))

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

Link: 'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution - MIT News Office.

(...)

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. (((You don't often hear that kind of statement from tenured British biochemists.))) "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

'Just the beginning'

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."...

(((Found it on Cascio's blog. Gosh, maybe some day he really
WILL open the future.)))