Harvesting Electricity from Plants


Much Peace and Understanding

This is very cool! It would be great if they could make it competitive or even better than conventional solar panels. It seems like it would be more environmentally friendly to build. I love technology that uses the tools life has developed over billions of years of evolution. It has a huge jump start to anything we hope to do, so why not learn from nature? No need to reinvent the wheel!

I really like this idea, it would certainly encourage more greenthumbs. One thing I'm curious about is the effects this has on the plant and the environment around the plant. For starters the plant isn't going to have nearly as much energy if were sucking energy from it. That said a few trees with a broad canopy and you've got yourself a nice surface area of near 100% efficient solar power in theory.

Thanks for sharing,
A.

That's very cool. One of the problems in normal photovoltaic cells is the reliance on indium, for creating conductive and transparent indium tin oxide. Due to increased demands in smartphone screens and photocells, the nonrenewable resource indium is growing increasingly rare and expensive.

Carbon fiber nano-tubes show promise, but like the other emerging technologies, production is still very much in the experimental stage.