The next big thing?

Stuff like this rarely pans out to the extent promised in the initial news releases, but in this week's Science are several announcements that new catalysts have been found which make a solar-to-hydrogen energy economy possible. [PR here]

If that does pan out, and if solar cells continue their Moore-law like decrease in cost per kWh (halving time = 3 years), and if all of these things are scalable to hundreds of gigawatts, well then. That would be big. Set aside cars for the moment, where hydrogen storage would still be an issue due to its low energy density, and just consider a large solar cell array in Nevada - perhaps using organic cells that can be printed out cheapy - with hydrogen storage tanks serving as an energy buffer for night-time use and during inclement weather.

If you can remove the need for high-purity crystalline silicon for cells, which seems to be a limitation in scaling things up, and store energy efficiently (50% That's what NASA gets [here] [Wiki] and cheaply (?), then a good chunk of our economy and homes could be solar powered.