Some inventions or discoveries never seem to find the light of day for very long. Has anyone seen any more of this one?
This article linked below from March 2011 - thats over 6 years ago, describes a useful invention/discovery which could really help getting us off fossil fuels. However, I suspect it has been buried becauase it was too efficient.
Developed by MIT
this artificial leaf is over 70% efficient, using a multielectron photoreaction catalyst developed at
Nocera at Harvard University.
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Placing the artificial leaf it in a single gallon of water in bright sunlight could produce enough electricity to supply a house in developing countries with its daily electricity requirement, Nocera has claimed.
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The catalyst operates at 100mA per square cm at 76 percent efficiency.
"Look at the numbers," the Yankee Group's Howe said. "At 100 mA per square cm, you get a pretty high density, so they're probably getting some good power from the device."
The efficiency of the artificial leaf is also impressive, Howe suggests.
"Overall, solar panels are typically in the 10 percent efficiency range nowadays, so they're not high-efficiency devices," Howe remarked. "If you have something that's able to absorb sunlight at anything close to 70 percent efficiency, it's practically turning sunlight into gold."
The ability to split PH-neutral water has led to the discovery of an inexpensive hydrogen-producing catalyst that operates at 1,000 mA per square cm at 35 mV overpotential.
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And... from 2008, again
an article from Nocera at Harvard University, a storage method for solar power too. My bolded text.
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Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient.
With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy. Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science
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