Funded primarily by family foundation, and done at MIT
This actually has very little to do with solar. It's more about a
breakthrough in hydrogen production, which is frankly far more
important. The process they came up with could be used to cleanly and
efficiently store and transport any form of electricity, whether
solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, etc. It's fabulous news regardless.
This is why I've not been a huge fan of the cars that run on
batteries. Until cars run on hydrogen, the only option for driving
any real distance, much less across the country, is to burn dead
dinosaurs, because stopping every couple hundred miles to charge for
several hours (and that's with the newest and best battery technology)
is just not feasible. But stopping every few hundred miles to take a
few minutes to refill your tank is something we are all used to doing.
Hydrogen is the future. 
One of the oil companies (BP) is
already preparing to shift to being a hydrogen distribution company.
The others will do the same, or will go extinct, just like the
dinosaurs they pump up from the ground.
Of course, an important question for the next decade or two while they
perfect this technology for home use (as hinted at the end of the
article) is whether they'll have the good sense to use it on a large
scale at the traditional electric power companies. This type of
technology, implemented in probably less than five years, could
totally eliminate the risk of generation-related brownouts or
blackouts in the future, by having strategically placed hydrogen
storage tanks, converters as described in the article, and fuel cells
that can be switched "on" whenever there is a power emergency, such as
a super hot air conditioning day, instead of the current strategy of
rolling blackouts to "save" the rest of the grid from failing.
I can guarantee one thing -- such a strategy to eliminate blackouts
will never happen under a San Francisco government-run power company.
These are the type of people who would run a coal-powered train
through a mile-long tunnel. No, as many problems as we may have with
our city's current monopoly power company, I still think they'd do a
better job of creatively using new technology to improve customer
service -- even more so if we open up power generation to competition.
Rob