Recently, I had a chance to listen to keynote address "The Future of Energy" by Prof. Daniel Nocera, Chemistry prof at MIT... "has successfully used solar light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Recently, they have realized artificial photosynthesis by the solar splitting of water under benign conditions. In doing so, the Nocera group can now provide solar energy/storage and clean water to the poor and those of the non-legacy world".
After the session, I asked him one question... something like this "The leaf of plant, which harvests Sun's energy... the evolution of leaf has settled at energy utilization efficiency at approx 3%... they ignore the rest of energy instead of utilizing it for their betterment... that means there is some other important need or convenience which took priority in plants' evolution... may be you are ignoring that convenience (which may be of interest to us) in the quest for achieving efficiency of 75% and beyond..."...
His answer was - yes... their important duty was to live... may be 2%-3% was enough... they didn't know they have to store sun's energy for utilization by humans :)
I had some other thoughts going on... (may be similar to millions of humans over thousands of years)... that photo-synthesis efficiency in leaves is 2%-3%... not same in all plants... not same in all regions... for example, in parts of earth where there is enough sunlight through out the year, like India, plants don't need to worry much... but, there are some places on earth where not much sunlight is available for months together... here, plants have to store more energy, to save for days/months where they don't get sunlight... meaning their efficiency has to be higher... now the point... it may be possible that the chemical composition of the leaves in these two areas is different ? if we know that, and artificially/genetically engineer leaves towards maximizing their storage efficiency, we can benefit? basically we create plants that harvest ~50% or more energy... basically they become the future fuels... energy industry shifts from factories to farms... wow!
In the same conference, in some other context, some one was saying "our airplanes don't fly by flapping wings like birds"... basically, meaning we don't necessarily need to make nature imitating machines to serve our needs... may be right.
May be, Prof. Nocera's method is the good forward step for human societies energy needs, in his terms, "the energy industry/economy will be decentralized".
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