Awesome

If one day in the not too distant future you can go to the dollar store, buy a thin, flat device the size of a playing card, dunk it in a quart of dirty bath water and use it to generate about 100 watts of electricity 24 hours a day, you can thank the Air Force. Along with other federal agencies, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has been pouring funds into the development of an “artificial leaf,” a low cost solar-powered device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, for powering fuel cells.

[...]

[L]ead researcher Daniel Nocera (formerly of MIT, now at Harvard) called it “one of the Holy Grails of science.”

  Raw Story

That’s wonderful. But let’s not get too excited. YOU won’t be able to "go to the dollar store" and buy any such thing. (YOU won’t be able to buy any such thing at all if the US government has a patent on it and decides it shouldn’t be sold publicly.) YOU might be able to lease something like that from a corporate energy company some day, but don’t think you’re going to pay any markedly less for it than you do now for your energy consumption.