Photosynthesis Fuel Company Gets a Large Investment. Green tea: Joule Energy’s SolarConverter turns carbon dioxide and sunlight into ethanol fuel at a pilot plant in Leander, Texas.
Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has received $70 million to commercialize technology that uses microörganisms to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. The company claims that its genetically engineered bacteria will eventually be able to produce ethanol for as little as $1.23 a gallon or diesel fuel for $1.19 a gallon, less than half the current cost of both fossil fuels and existing biofuels. The new funding comes from undisclosed investors and will allow the company to expand from an existing pilot plant to its first small-scale production facility, in Hobbs, New Mexico. Joule Unlimited has designed a device it calls the SolarConverter, in which thin, clear panels circulate brackish water and a nitrogen-based growth medium bubbling with carbon dioxide. Researchers ID Thousands of Organic Materials for Use in Solar Cells. Using donated computing power and drawing on the theory of quantum mechanics, Harvard researchers have computationally screened 2.3 million organic molecules for properties relevant to photovoltaic applications and then organized them into a searchable, sortable database.
The new library, which was released to the public today, will help guide the search for new organic photovoltaic materials. The release of the database, announced by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, marks the second anniversary of the so-called Materials Genome Initiative, a federal effort to “double the pace of innovation, manufacture, and deployment of high-tech materials“—a process that normally can take years or decades.
Agencies participating in the program, which aims to foster collaboration and data sharing among academic and private-sector materials science researchers, have awarded a total of $63 million to projects over the past year. Trees used to create recyclable, efficient solar cell. Solar cells are just like leaves, capturing the sunlight and turning it into energy.
It's fitting that they can now be made partially from trees. Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University researchers have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees. Just as importantly, by fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates, the solar cells can be quickly recycled in water at the end of their lifecycle. The technology is published in the journal Scientific Reports, the latest open-access journal from the Nature Publishing Group. The researchers report that the organic solar cells reach a power conversion efficiency of 2.7 percent, an unprecedented figure for cells on substrates derived from renewable raw materials. Georgia Tech College of Engineering Professor Bernard Kippelen led the study and says his team's project opens the door for a truly recyclable, sustainable and renewable solar cell technology.
MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings. A researcher at MIT, Andreas Mershin, has created solar panels from agricultural waste such as cut grass and dead leaves.
In a few years, Mershin says it’ll be possible to stir some grass clippings into a bag of cheap chemicals, paint the mixture on your roof, and immediately start producing electricity. If you remember high school biology classes, you will hopefully remember a process called photosynthesis, whereby plants turn sunlight into energy. Mershin has found a process which extracts the photosynthesizing molecules, called photosystem I, from plant matter. Photosystem I contains chlorophyll, the protein that actually converts photons into a flow of electrons. These molecules are then stabilized and spread on a glass substrate that’s covered in a forest of zinc oxide nanowires and titanium dioxide “sponges.” So far so good — now time for the reality check.
Biosolar photosystem solar energy harvesting chip.