la violette pensée

heysammy:

anderjak-o-lantern:

colonelgathers:

scienceandweedbro:

MIT’s artificial leaf is ten times more efficient than the real thing

The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.

Nocera’s leaf is stable — operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests — and made of widely available, inexpensive materials — like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It’s also powerful, as much as ten times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.

With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14 terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.

Read more…

SCIENCE.

I, too, welcome our incoming Synthetic future

YEAH! SCIENCE!

Not for nothing, but people in developing nations tend to have better uses for scarce fresh water resources than using them to generate power, and I really doubt they’d appreciate us employing these things en masse. What is the ecological lifecycle of this product? More technology is not the solution to their problems, our ours.

And, by the way, let’s do a litle math, shall we. Let’s say the total amount of solar energy available is 1500 w/m^2 (it’s somewhat less). Let’s say that this solar cell is 100% efficient (this is, of course, impossible). That thing looks to be about, what, 3” in diameter? Let’s say its surface area is about a 6 cm diameter circle, so about 19 cm^2. That means the total energy available from thing cannot under any circumstances exceed 2.85 w. Even if the sun shined on it for 12 hours every day, that’s a total of 34.2 watt-hours per day of power. You’re telling me that can power an entire home, even in a developing nation? And that consumes a gallon of water?

(Source: , via madgastronomer)