Spinach to Make Solar Panels More Effective

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wait a sec... isn't this a reprint of an article done a few weeks ago (which cannot be found now)?
If memory serves correctly, in that article the 40% improvement was over traditional bio-solar solutions, which is still years behind traditional PV panels, and there was also an issue of the panels only being good for 3-5 years compared to the 20-30 years of traditional PV panels.
 

eklipz330

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[citation][nom]tobalaz[/nom]Because Popeye knew best!Whodathunk a cartoon would have been prophetic right?[/citation]
you think that's crazy? a study was done with spinach... those who ate it before and after had 20% more gains in muscle than those that didn't.. of course it was like 2 lbs of spinach but IM PRETTY SURE THOSE CANS HE ATE WERE PACKED!
 

f-14

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hold the horses, i read the linked article and i believe this author has jumped the gun thru misunderstanding or manipulative presentation on the linked site. vanderbuilt seems to be talking about hybrid solar cells vs other hybrid cells and not the 100% man made solar cells with no green tech in them aka metallic solar cells vs plant silicon solar cells is not being directly compared, just hybrid vs hybrid.

am i missing something? my present lack of knowledge on solar cell manufacturing is very weak as i view this a poorly viable energy source from my experience of living in the northland where winter daylight hours and snow and ice and hail would make this tech worthless and is not able to produce power on demand 24-7 like hydro electric

cite:
spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion that produces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by previous “biohybrid” solar cells.

That is nearly two and a half times more current than the best level reported previously from a biohybrid cell.

Photosystem 1 (PS1), continued to function when it was extracted from plants like spinach. Then they determined PS1 converts sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, compared to conversion efficiencies of less than 40 percent achieved by manmade devices.

note: only the ps1 as it is in the leaves which happen to be very well aligned unlike the extract which is not aligned very well because it's random when bonded to the silicon and deteriorates over a matter of years at the most as quoted in the evergreens and was never tested or measured beyond 9 months, hmmm i wonder why because the ps1 extract died? i still have a 10 year old solar calculator that works, will these solar cells work after 1-3 years when the extract dies and or just lose efficiency?

PS1 efficiently from leaves. They have demonstrated that it can be made into cells that produce electrical current when exposed to sunlight. However, the amount of power that these biohybrid cells can produce per square inch has been substantially below that of commercial photovoltaic cells.

Another problem has been longevity. The performance of some early test cells deteriorated after only a few weeks. In 2010, however, the Vanderbilt team kept a PS1 cell working for nine months with no deterioration in performance.

In a leaf, all the PS1 proteins are aligned. But in the protein layer on the device, individual proteins are oriented randomly. Previous modeling work indicated that this was a major problem. When the proteins are deposited on a metallic substrate, those that are oriented in one direction provide electrons that the metal collects

while those that are oriented in the opposite direction pull electrons out of the metal in order to fill the holes that they produce. As a result, they produce both positive and negative currents that cancel each other out to leave a very small net current flow.


Biochemical engineer Kane Jennings. (Daniel Dubois/Vanderbilt University)
The p-doped silicon eliminates this problem because it allows electrons to flow into PS1 but will not accept them from protein. In this manner, electrons flow through the circuit in a common direction.

“This isn’t as good as protein alignment, but it is much

better than what we had before,” said Jennings.
 

f-14

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i forgot to mention in this citation
PS1 converts sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, compared to conversion efficiencies of less than 40 percent achieved by manmade devices.

the 100% efficiency still produces less power than the man made devices if i understood the manipulative wording.

“This combination produces current levels almost 1,000 times higher than we were able to achieve by depositing the protein on various types of metals. It also produces a modest increase in voltage,”
PS1/silicon combination produces nearly a milliamp (850 microamps) of current per square centimeter at 0.3 volts. That is nearly two and a half times more current than the best level reported previously from a biohybrid cell. in current solar cells it's 1.1-2watts per centimeter
cite:
Efficiency is usually low, therefore the power production per square meter is low. An average of 110 to 200 watts per square meter. {100 centimeters to 1 meter or / by 100} and idk at what amperage
http://www.kompulsa.com/index.php/energy-index/solar-power/

would be like the system builder marathons with the power consumption factor negating the score where the performance score would lead a crushing victory for the high end machines.

when you live outside of the rolling black out land every summer known as ecoterrorist california, you don't care about how much electricity you use and at $0.08 per kwh, you build more power plants as needed, heck there are even some brand new power plants not even being used in the midwest such as north dakota spiritwood station run by great river enegry
 

IndignantSkeptic

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[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]You know what else increases the effectiveness of solar panels? A magnifying glass.[/citation]

Wouldn't that only really work if the magnifying glass is bigger than the solar panel?
 

SirTrollsALot

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You know... If the U.S. oil/energy companies weren't in bed with the government. We'd probably had more time in the past to figure this out back in the 1950/60's... But whomever solicited that whore of a country China (I'm not dissing the people, but their gov.) , that basically fakked it up and nailed lid to the coffin shut for any of this to really matter anymore...
 

caparc

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Plant a tree, wait 100 million years, dig up the black carbon remains, use it to fire a boiler, drive a generator, send it down the wire to your toaster, viola! Solar power. If that causes the seas to rise, guess what, we'll all move to higher ground before we turn off the lights. The spinach project has to be government funded.
 

bin1127

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[citation][nom]IndignantSkeptic[/nom]Wouldn't that only really work if the magnifying glass is bigger than the solar panel?[/citation]

It's like those solar condenser arrays they're building in deserts around the world.

This is a great find. Biomimicry should be our direction for all future technological development. Nature had 5 billion years to figure this out, we should be copying it instead of destroying it. If only renewable energy didn't have a budget of a garage hobby then things would really take off.
 

IndignantSkeptic

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[citation][nom]bin1127[/nom]It's like those solar condenser arrays they're building in deserts around the world. This is a great find. Biomimicry should be our direction for all future technological development. Nature had 5 billion years to figure this out, we should be copying it instead of destroying it. If only renewable energy didn't have a budget of a garage hobby then things would really take off.[/citation]


Are you talking about those setups where they just have a tank of water connected to pipes with turbines and they just have mirrors that all direct the sunlight at the water tank to heat the water in it causing it to turn to steam which expands and shoots through the pipes where it passes through turbines causing them to spin?

BTW funny story: People keep on saying we have to get rid of our dependence on foreign oil so some other people proposed we use solar power and the best place to put solar panels is in desert countries because that's where the most sun is. What countries are desert countries? That's right Arab countries. So basically they had to be told "I think you got confused about which is the keyword in the phrase "foreign oil'".
 
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