The home power source of the future?

As anyone who dreads opening their monthly utility bill knows, home heating and energy costs are wildly unstable. You never quite know what you’re going to get — especially if you live in a cold climate and it happens to be winter — when you tear open that gas bill.

In Japan, some developers are doing something about this.

Yuri Kageyama, a writer for the Associated Press, wrote an interesting story this week about the way many developers in Japan are relying on hydrogen fuel cells to provide power to homes in that country. So far, about 2,200 homes are getting their heat and hot water from the cells. You can read the story here.

Fuel cells generate energy from the chemical reaction that occurs when hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water. According to the AP story, these cells create one-third less of the type of pollution that causes global warming than does convention electricity generation. The cells, on average, drop a household’s power bills by about $50 a month.

The fuel cells used in homes are typically about the size of a suitcase.

We haven’t seen much of this in the United States because fuel cells themselves are expensive. Scientists and researchers hope to change this.

This can’t happen soon enough. Anything we can do to reduce our dependence on traditional fossil fuels is a step in the right direction.