Tag Archives: Stuart Thompson

Harvesting plants for electricity

A Feb. 27, 2017 article on Nanowerk describes research which could turn living plants into solar cells and panels (Note: Links have been removed),

Plants power life on Earth. They are the original food source supplying energy to almost all living organisms and the basis of the fossil fuels that feed the power demands of the modern world. But burning the remnants of long-dead forests is changing the world in dangerous ways. Can we better harness the power of living plants today?

One way might be to turn plants into natural solar power stations that could convert sunlight into energy far more efficiently. To do this, we’d need a way of getting the energy out in the form of electricity. One company has found a way to harvest electrons deposited by plants into the soil beneath them. But new research (PNAS, “In vivo polymerization and manufacturing of wires and supercapacitors in plants”) from Finland looks at tapping plants’ energy directly by turning their internal structures into electric circuits.

A Feb. 27, 2017 essay by Stuart Thompson for The Conversation (which originated the article) explains the principles underlying the research (Note: A link has been removed),

Plants contain water-filled tubes called “xylem elements” that carry water from their roots to their leaves. The water flow also carries and distributes dissolved nutrients and other things such as chemical signals. The Finnish researchers, whose work is published in PNAS, developed a chemical that was fed into a rose cutting to form a solid material that could carry and store electricity.

Previous experiments have used a chemical called PEDOT to form conducting wires in the xylem, but it didn’t penetrate further into the plant. For the new research, they designed a molecule called ETE-S that forms similar electrical conductors but can also be carried wherever the stream of water travelling though the xylem goes.

This flow is driven by the attraction between water molecules. When water in a leaf evaporates, it pulls on the chain of molecules left behind, dragging water up through the plant all the way from the roots. You can see this for yourself by placing a plant cutting in food colouring and watching the colour move up through the xylem. The researchers’ method was so similar to the food colouring experiment that they could see where in the plant their electrical conductor had travelled to from its colour.

The result was a complex electronic network permeating the leaves and petals, surrounding their cells and replicating their pattern. The wires that formed conducted electricity up to a hundred times better than those made from PEDOT and could also store electrical energy in the same way as an electronic component called a capacitor.

I recommend reading Thompson’s piece in its entirety.