First off, a solar panel like the kind the world uses now is not a fake leaf. It converts sunlight into electricity by converting it into heat and that heat is used to turn turbines. So when I say "fake leaf" I mean actual photosynthesis, a chemical reaction that eventually produces energy. It's a Holy Grail of science, and a research team led by MIT’s Daniel Nocera, Ph.D appears to have achieved it.This has been done before; we've synthesized photosynthesis. But not in a practical way. By using the cheaper materials nickle and cobalt as reaction catalysts, the team's created a material that could, with an amount the size of but thinner than a playing card, power a home for a day in a developing country. "Our goal is to make each home its own power station," Nocera said at the recent National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”Basically how it works is that the "leaf" takes water and, with sunlight, converts that water into its hydrogen and oxygen. Both of the of those elements are stored in fuel cells and, when needed, are used to generate electricity.Nocera's fake leaf is about ten times as efficient as a normal leaf, but he thinks he can boost that way up in the future. "Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf," he adds.This is, naturally, great news for our future android overlords, who will no longer need to juice up at electrical sockets and can get by indefinitely with a slab of this stuff and a supply of water. That is, until we scorch the sky all Matrix style.Related:
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.Image:the Nocera Group
Advertisement