Photovoltaic Cell from Plant Proteins

TheSync writes "FuturePundit has a story about work at MIT to develop a photovoltaic cell from spinach chloroplast proteins to generate electricity. These cells convert 12% of the light energy into electricity, and researchers hope to reach 20% efficiency, better than commercial silicon solar cells."

Comments

Amazed it didn't happen sooner.

[Spudley]

Plants have this amazing ability to turn sunlight into usable energy. They're even quite good at it in the shade.

And now a scientist has worked out how to do it as well using plant protiens. Wow.

I'm frankly amazed this didn't come much sooner. Especially with the genetic technologies they're playing with these days.

Re:Amazed it didn't happen sooner.

[kinema]

I bet if you compared plants to silicon the plants would win on a TCO (total cost of ownership) basis. Silicon solar cells are far from cheap to produce not to mention all the chemicals used in their production are far from earth friendly.

Re:Amazed it didn't happen sooner.

[torpor]

So the combination of silicon production abilities, and plant-cell growth efficiency, and a little of Moore and more... might give us extremely more powerful, much cheaper to produce, solar cells.

Hope so, anyway. I'd much rather be invading a country for their spinach than their oil.