A solar can turn sunlight into electricity, but it cannot store the energy. That’s why we need batteries that come with all kinds of additional pollution challenges and inefficiencies. A new study by chemists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published in Science describes how a new design inspired by plants can lead to solar cells that can do double duty as batteries. These solar cells mimic a mechanism used by plants to generate energy through photosynthesis and are capable of storing electricity for as long as several weeks at a time.
Plants show the way to solar cells that generate and store energy
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