Personalized Energy Production that Mimics Nature

Anyone working in renewable energy production, international development, or climate change related fields should know the name and ideas of Dan Nocera. Dr. Nocera was a guest lecturer in a course I took last fall, and is possibly one of the sharpest, most intelligent speakers I've ever seen. In his lab at MIT, he's developing a household-sized energy system that collects solar energy, uses the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is then used as fuel for a hydrogen fuel cell battery. And the battery then produces clean water as its byproduct.

The other cool idea that Nocera addresses is that if you want to take a large, centralized system and make it decentralized (in this case electricity), you can't just take the same machine or method and make it smaller, because the cost will go way up. Instead, you have to redesign the system from scratch with the perspective of making something small and inexepensive.

This is the guy who tells people like Putin and T-Boone Pickins when their numbers are wrong - check it.

Dan Nocera: Personalized Energy from PopTech on Vimeo.