Dive Brief:

• A consortium of companies is working to develop a single-unit home power plant that will derive hydrogen from natural gas and use that to both heat the house and generate electricity.
• It is known as a micro-CHP system with two parts – a reactor unit that produces heat and hydrogen from the gas and the electric unit that uses the hydrogen to generate electricity.
• A current focus of the consortium is called ReforCELL, an effort to devise a more efficient and cheaper membrane for separating the fuels in what is called the reformer unit than is now available.

Dive Insight:

The backers of the power plant say that it might produce enough power to sell excess electricity into the grid after the house's needs are met. It seems, however, that if these mini power plants are successful and become common, there might well not be much of a grid into which to sell power. It's unclear how power companies would serve neighborhoods where they have no customers.