The declining supply of oil, natural gases, coal, and petroleum, coupled with the costs of extraction, has many people fearful of the future sources of energy. Scientists have been using renewable energy resources such as wind and water to help maintain our energy supplies, but even building a hydroelectric dam can damage ecosystems while wind turbines can take up useful space. Although the sun is our most abundant resource, humans have yet to master how to efficiently harness its energy.
However, a new review paper in Nature by University of Toronto chemistry professor Gregory Scholes and his colleagues from the United States and Europe have revealed new ways to combat the demand for non-renewable energy sources by tapping into the powers of photosynthesis.
The chemical process of photosynthesis assists plants in their growth by transforming carbon dioxide with the sun’s rays into sources of energy that can nourish them. Scholes and a team of scholars believe that more of the sun’s light can be used efficiently by studying the antenna complex of plants, also known as the light-harvesting complex. Doing so would allow for the capture and routed flow of energy over long distances.
When sunlight hits a plant, it is absorbed by pigments. However, a challenge arises because the sunlight absorbed is only stored for about a billionth of a second. This raises the question of how to efficiently harvest the captured energy before it leaves the artificially designed pigments. Electricity needs to be delivered fast enough to run advancing technologies and cities, but if it cannot be harvested properly, then the whole system fails.
It is up to innovative design to come up with systems that can properly harness the sun’s intense energy. A single leaf absorbs over 10 billion photons of light each second, meaning that if artificial antennae can be designed to absorb light the same way plants do, and then solving energy problems would stand a chance.
