Alternative energy: The future is coming, soon

A US scientist has found a way to produce almost unlimited free energy to supply the world's burgeoning population, and is just one short step away from his goal we can exclusively reveal.

Speaking from his air-conditioned eco-suite at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Daniel Nocera outlined his audacious plan to produce hydrogen from water using nothing more than sunlight.

Nocera has already released hydrogen from acidic soutions using a rhodium catalyst and predicts that "within a few decades" plants across the planet will be knocking out hydrogen on an unprecedented scale.

He told The Rockall Times: "All we need is to reproduce the process on water using a cheaper catalyst, like iron, or cardboard. Cardboard is good becasue there is currently a lot of excess cardboard being released into the environment in the form of those totally unnecessary stiffners they put into shirt packaging."

When pressed as to how the Holy Grail of free energy might be achieved, Nocera enthused: "If we, for example, put about 10,000 top scientists on the job for around forty years we might expected to be able to produce up to 20 litres of hydrogen per billion dollars as soon as 2050."

Other are sceptical, however. Nobel prize winning boffin Arno Penzias dismissed the whole project as fantasy, huffing: "It is so far from being revolutionary that it's not even worth mentioning." Penzias is thought to favour the breeding of billions of genetically-modified superhamsters, capable of running in a wheel for years and years on just a handful of GM maize. "My calculations suggest that each überhamster might produce up to 0.2kW per week. Equipping the average home with 500 hamsters would generate enough electricity to recharge a mobile phone, perhaps even drive an electric toothbrush, if used judiciously."

Some scientists, though, slam Penzias' scheme as "complete insanity". A rival bioenergy company is looking to harness all of the energy expended by bickering eggheads and using it to drive a desktop cold fusion reactor which might one day power up to one low-energy bulb. A spokesman told us: "Penzias is an idiot. Only by harvesting the vast resourse of calories produced by bitching within the scientific community can we hope to bring light to the developing world."

Previously

• Nuclear fusion dream ten million degrees short of a limitless energy samba party
• US boffin plans ultimate chaos theory experiment
• Jap boffins to cross pig with cucumber and then accelerate it to Mach 7