Check out "Unruh effect" or "Unruh radiation".
I just heard about this tonight; haven't really looked into it. It's mainstream physics, though, nothing speculative about it.
Apparently, an accelerating body "sees" a uniform "bath" of radiation -- heat energy -- all around it. This "bath" comes from the fact that the equations describing pair production are unbalanced in some strange way when transformed into an accelerating frame. But spontaneous pair production is a manifestation of the ZPE, right? Apparently when you're accelerating the pair members don't behave identically; something like what happens to produce Hawking radiation.
As I understand it the radiation is isotropic and so can't actually be used for anything, but I thought this was interesting none the less.
I know there were experiments in the works recently to detect Unruh radiation; I don't know if any have been successful.
