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.