{"id":133335,"date":"2021-12-30T19:25:28","date_gmt":"2021-12-31T03:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/who-needs-plants-when-you-can-harness-solar-energy-with-an-artificial-leaf"},"modified":"2021-12-30T19:25:28","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T03:25:28","slug":"who-needs-plants-when-you-can-harness-solar-energy-with-an-artificial-leaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/who-needs-plants-when-you-can-harness-solar-energy-with-an-artificial-leaf","title":{"rendered":"Who Needs Plants When You Can Harness Solar Energy With An Artificial Leaf?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/who-needs-plants-when-you-can-harness-solar-energy-with-an-artificial-leaf2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The idea of a human-made device that can process solar energy to make usable fuels has been tantalizing researchers since the 1970s. There being no such thing as a free lunch, it is not so easy to engineer a device that mimics photosynthesis, which Mother Nature perfected a long time ago. Nevertheless, researchers at the Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California appear to have solved an important piece of the \u201cartificial leaf\u201d challenge.<\/p>\n<p><b>Solar Energy &amp; The Artificial Leaf Of The Future<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The concept of the artificial leaf first crossed the <em>CleanTechnica<\/em> radar in the form of <a href=\"https:\/\/cleantechnica.com\/2011\/03\/28\/yes-for-real-we-now-have-a-genuine-artificial-solar-leaf\/\">a card-sized photoelectrochemical cell<\/a>, back in 2011. Instead of converting sunlight into electricity, the cell acts as a catalyst that deploys solar energy to break water into oxygen and hydrogen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idea of a human-made device that can process solar energy to make usable fuels has been tantalizing researchers since the 1970s. There being no such thing as a free lunch, it is not so easy to engineer a device that mimics photosynthesis, which Mother Nature perfected a long time ago. Nevertheless, researchers at the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}