Up next, solar power from grass

few months ago, a researcher at the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, announced that he had discovered a new way of harnessing the sun.

Andreas Mershin, research affiliate at the MIT Centre for Bits and Atoms, managed to create solar panels from agricultural waste.
According to Mershin, “It’ll (soon) be possible to stir some grass clippings into a bag of cheap chemicals, paint the mixture on your roof, and immediately start producing electricity.”

The theory was quite simple. It meant isolating chlorophyll, the plant protein that converts sunlight into energy, by focusing on them and transforming them into electrons.

Mershin is said to have found a way to extract the photosynthesising molecules, called Photosystem I, from plant matter. It is this ‘Photosystem I’ that contains the chlorophyll.
Isolating the chlorophyll was just the easier part of the problem. It has been done by other scientists as well. The difficult part was to find a way to stabilise it, so that it did not degrade into dead matter when isolated from the living mass of the plant.

“You have to find a way to make it continue ‘living’, so to speak, to continue operating and making energy,” explains Mershin. Once this is done, the mixture, can now be spread it on a “glass substrate” and covered in a “forest of zinc-oxite nanowires and titanium dioxide sponges”.

When sunlight hits the panels, the titanium dioxide and the stabilised ‘Photosystem I’ convert the sun’s rays into electricity. The nanowires then transport the electricity.

What Mershin has done is to convert “nature’s solar panels” that are often referred to as ‘leaves of plants’ by most of us, into man-made solar panels that can now be used to generate electricity. “It is like an electric nanoforest,” he adds. “It is a fantastic and disruptive way of harnessing solar power for electricity.”

“The dream is to send to people just the stabilising powder, that is benign and inexpensive. Entirely easy to work with and has a long shelf life and can be transported by truck over un-improved roads,” said Mershin with a smile.

“All that people have to do then is to find some piece of substrate, some piece of metal or glass, spread it with the green glue which has the stabilizer. After that you can take a couple of wires and charge a battery. You’ve got electricity from sunlight.”

Mershin believes that because the MIT team has found a way to make this possible without any difficulty, he hopes hundreds or maybe thousands of people will begin to try it and figure out what works for them and what local materials they can find in their backyard and thus become not only consumers of electricity but also producers of electricity. If they are good at it, they could even start selling that electricity to others.”

But there is a problem. As Sebastian Anthony, writes in an article posted on ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/116689-mit-creates-solar-cell-from-grass-clippings), that “Mershin’s solar panel has an efficiency of 0.1%. To be of any use — to power more than a single LED light from an entire house covered in these cheap solar panels — an efficiency of 1% or 2% is required.”

Will other scientists be successful in taking the next step in boosting conversion efficiency of the sun’s rays?
That could decide whether this will become the next wonder technology for power generation.

Source:http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_up-next-solar-power-from-grass_1728485