14 DAY TRIAL // This past January 14, researcher Tom Meyer and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced that they had figured out a way to harvest solar energy during the day and use it during nighttime.
As detailed in a press release on the University’s website, using solar instead of fossil fuels to power households and businesses yields noteworthy environmental benefits.
The problem is that, for the time being at least, this green energy source is not all that reliable. More precisely, solar panels can only harvest sun energy during the day. Hence, they cannot serve to meet demand once the sun goes down.
Hoping to solve this problem, scientist Tom Meyer and his fellow researchers have developed a method to convert sun energy not into electricity, but into hydrogen fuel.
Thus, they have pieced together a so-called dye-sensitized photoelectrosynthesis cell (DSPEC cell, for short) that works by harnessing the sun’s energy and using it to split water molecules into their constituents.
The resulting hydrogen is captured and stored, whereas the oxygen, which in this case is considered to be a by-product, is allowed to return to the environment.
“Splitting water is extremely difficult to do,” researcher Tom Meyer wishes to stress.
“You need to take four electrons away from two water molecules, transfer them somewhere else, and make hydrogen, and, once you have done that, keep the hydrogen and oxygen separated,” he further details on his and his colleagues’ work.
Interestingly enough, the system for turning solar into fuel that this team of University of North Carolina researchers have developed can keep up and running while depending very little on external power.
Besides, its creators say that it does not release any greenhouse gas emissions, a feature that makes it even more environmentally friendly.
The researchers say that, now that they have developed this DSPEC cell, they wish to look into the possibility of using this approach to rid the atmosphere of at least some carbon dioxide.
More precisely, they want to find a way to trap this greenhouse gas and turn it into a carbon-based fuel like formate or methanol.
“When you talk about powering a planet with energy stored in batteries, it’s just not practical,” Tom Meyer explains the importance of his and his colleagues’ work.
“It turns out that the most energy dense way to store energy is in the chemical bonds of molecules. And that’s what we did – we found an answer through chemistry,” he adds.