Science club investigates alternative energies

An ocean of clean energy pours from the sky. We could forget about nonrenewable climate-altering sources, like gas, oil and coal, if we could fill the tank or power our homes with a sunbeam. Current solar technologies aren’t quite up to that task. Conventional solar panels are inefficient; electric batteries are expensive and can’t store enough to light a city through the night. If only the sun’s rays could be converted into an easily stored fuel.

But how do you bottle sunshine?
The Hydrogen Club at Oregon State University is on a mission to develop new technologies to tap the sunshine. Inspired by processes that already occur in nature, they’ve found several surprising biological and chemical ways to make hydrogen fuel.

Hydrogen is a near-perfect way to store the sun’s energy. It emits only water vapor when burned and can be converted into electricity using a fuel cell. And it’s practically limitless — an hour of sunshine has enough energy to power the planet for a year.

The need is exploding. The Department of Energy projects a 50 percent increase in worldwide demand by 2030. To provide that much power with conventional technology, we would need to open two new coal, gas or nuclear plants every day for the next 20 years, says Roger Ely, Oregon State professor and adviser to the club.

“Everybody is kind of locked in that vision of the world we’ve experienced for the last 100-plus years,” Ely says, but the club looks in a new direction.

Since the sun shines everywhere, the club wants to make hydrogen from solar energy right where it’s needed. Their new technologies can be integrated directly into individual homes and neighborhoods, powering them without the distant power plant. That notion is as revolutionary as replacing large centralized mainframes with personal computers was in the early 1980s.

The bacteria can do tricks that engineers struggle to reproduce. “They do particularly well under low-light conditions,” says David Dickson, a graduate student in Ely’s lab. “In fact, they do better when they’re not receiving blasting direct sunlight.”

This means bacteria-based solar panels could hang on all sides of buildings and would work even on cloudy days. In nature, though, bacteria generate only a trickle of hydrogen. But with small changes to the environment that bacteria live in, the Oregon State lab has attained a 600-fold increase in hydrogen production.

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