Home Sweet Power Plant

We've linked before to the Rocky Mountain Institute's well-known report on what's wrong with the United States' energy grid (basically, it's over-centralized, with too few generating stations, making us vulnerable to outages). Now a company called Bloom Energy has a solution, and the technology is green: "The company's vision is to use solid-oxide fuel cells to allow homes to generate their own electricity. The fuel cells would use (but not burn) hydrocarbon fuel, and produce just half the carbon dioxide that today's power plants do."

Excess power can flow back to the grid, so you might even earn some cash back once your own power needs are met. Or better yet, as Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar hinted in an interview last year, you might be able to generate enough power to fill up your car at home.

Link via Treehugger.

image sxc.hu.