Personalized Energy
Further to my January post Home is where the Batteries Are, below we have MIT Prof. Dan Nocera talking about "personalized energy." His key point is to shift our perspective on energy generation from one of centralization and infrastructural distribution using massive coal, nuclear or hydroelectric facilities, to a system of individual production and storage. Using a metaphor of how computes evolved from expensive mainframes to individual laptops, he extrapolated that the energy demands of 2050 can not possibly be served by massive centralized infrastructure. Instead, he offers up the idea of the "home as battery", both producing and storing the energy it will require. At the heart of his vision is a system that uses a novel means of splitting hydrogen from water using solar energy, allowing water to become the fuel of the future.