I read recently UK team made big progress in making Clostridium bacterial strain produce biobuthanol from waste plant mass, mostly celulose. Farming produces a lot of it, so much there are a lot of ideas how to tap it as a source of energy and buthanol has big advantage of being sufficiently similar to gasoline to work in modern car without modifications. Meaning, free infrastructure. Main thing stopping it from getting traction was difficulty of recovering fuel from bacterial mat without killing them, and I hear they made big developments there too.Enigma wrote:How much better is this than using tech derived from DVD\Blu-Ray discs to increase solar cell efficiency? I'm talking about that article Mr Friendly Guy posted a while ago that noone replied to. In the article it was mentioned that they used a Blu-Ray disc to increase solar cell efficiency by 22% to an efficiency level of 44%.
Granted, photosynthesis is rather less efficient than solar cell (5-8% to 20-25%) but industrial plants can be grown on simple biological fertilisers or even manure for a tiny fraction of cost of solar cell, require no infrastructure save one we already have, devour no rare minerals, and only have unfortunate side effect of requiring lots of land taken from wildlife, but to be honest, so do solar or wind generators.