More Power To You

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And it's not just the military that's interested. General Motors' vice president of research and development, Larry Burns, says GM hopes to sell fuel-cell-powered cars by 2010. Deere & Co., the maker of farm and construction equipment, is working on a hydrogen-powered forklift. And the Canadian government has pulled Hydrogenics into a $6.1 million project to deliver a fuel-cell-powered transit bus to the streets of Winnipeg, Man., by March 2005. Hydrogenics co-founder Pierre Rivard says fuel cells probably won't go mainstream for another 5 to 15 years, but with GM's backing, the $128 million publicly traded company, which lost $20.6 million last year, can probably afford to wait that long.

What about that other long-promised alternative-energy source, solar power? Technology Pioneer Nanosys of Palo Alto, Calif., thinks solar's day in the sun has finally arrived. The firm is developing tiny photovoltaic cells that can be incorporated into the fabric of roofing materials to provide power to homes and other types of buildings. Nanosys is combining the science of solar cells with the science of nanotechnology, which manipulates items as small as an atom to do everything from switching electricity to storing data to sensing the movement of a bridge that is beginning to weaken. Thanks to this, Nanosys can already embed microscopic photovoltaic crystals into plastic sheeting. One prefabricated Nanosys roof could generate enough electricity to run all the appliances in a typical home, including the washing machine, the toaster, the PC and the entertainment center. Electricity generated during the day can be stored in batteries for use at night.

A single square meter of the solar-ready plastic will cost about $100 and last about 20 years, so a complete roof would cost a few thousand dollars. Nanosys' co-founder and head of business development, Stephen Empedocles, says that's a good investment, since the tiles will generate electricity at a cost of about 4¢ per kW-h, well below the 20¢ to $1 for traditional solar panels.

Empedocles doesn't expect his product to reach market until 2006. With $70 million in venture funding from Arch Ventures, Polaris and Lux Capital, along with multimillion-dollar U.S. government contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the 35-person company should make it. With persistence and that old variable, luck, firms like Medis, Hydrogenics and Nanosys could see a big payback for giving power to the people. The way Lifton sees it, that would be one happy song.