Dan Nocera's SolveForX film, The Artificial Leaf, is full of high concept ideas. His statistic is that in the next thirty five years the world's energy needs will double, and a short time spent googling the Harvard professor's research and body of work makes you believe that his ideas might help us meet that need.
The moonshot idea here is that sunlight and water can be used to power the earth. Using the energy from the sun to split water can create hydrogen and oxygen. This method can be used to store sunlight and hold the energy until needed by an end-user.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/09/artificial-leaf-science-aaas.jpg
The artificial leaf operates inside a glass of water, and as sunlight strikes the silicon the catalyst splits the hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough moment came when he decided not to use a stable catalyst and found instead a self-healing mechanism. This allows the users to control energy production and consumption using only sunlight and water.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/the-artificial-leaf
Nocera gives us the idea that a house can be its own power station and gasoline station. Instead of large centralized power plants Dan proposes another way to scale up production and meet the world's growing energy needs. Instead of making a super-sized artificial leaf he suggests making more and more leaves, out of inexpensive metals, and locating them with the users. The process can be done efficiently and the artificial leaf can be easily manufactured.
This short film is part of General Electric's Focus Forward series in 2013 but Nocera has been presenting these ideas since 2010, working through MIT, PopTech and many others.