Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working on one aspect of the home energy problem for a while now and this week announced what may lead to a breakthrough in making such systems affordable. They’ve developed a relatively inexpensive nickel-borate catalyst that, they say, can replace the expensive, short-lived and toxic-to-produce platinum catalysts that are crucial to the devices, called electrolyzers, that separate hydrogen from tap water (or rain water, pond water, river water,etc.)

The MIT researchers now say their catalyst is 200 times more efficient than platinum catalysts. The university has licensed the catalyst technology to a company called Sun Catalytix ,which says it is still about two years away from commercial applications. The idea is to tie the electrolyzer – which uses an electrical current and catalysts to separate water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen – to a rooftop photovoltaic system that uses solar energy to produce clean, renewable electricity.