chlorophyll = carbohydrates = electricity
You very likely have kilowatts of electricity growing within a few hundred feet of you.
If you are reading this article somewhere near growing plants or water, you are reading near something capable of producing bioenergy, the term scientists and engineers assign to electrical, heat, or fuel material production by biomass-primarily from plants, algae and bacteria.
Some power plants around the country already burn biomass as fuel in an effort to reduce emissions from coal. Second generation biofuel plants are beginning to produce ethanol from biomass sources other than food plants at a far better energy ratio. Now, scientists are developing systems using algae and bacteria that produce diesel fuel and gasoline.
But the real promise of bioenergy lies in the fact that some biomass can produce electricity itself.
If you remember back to your high school biology class, many living things produce energy for their survival via mechanisms that produce small amounts of electricity-the electron transport or ATP chain. If properly extracted and manipulated, it is possible to harness this process to generate and store electricity using the almost infinitely renewable resource of biomass materials.
The advantage of such a system is that it will grow, repair itself, and its byproducts are recyclable. The most sophisticated versions of these systems would be hybrids that collect energy from the sun and convert it into electricity using the creation and break-down of carbohydrates. The emissions from such systems would typically only be oxygen, carbon dioxide and water, which the hybrid systems would continue to use internally with very little additional investment of resources.
Unfortunately, the promise of such systems are still years away and the technical issues of generation capacity using biomass have yet to be addressed, but the potential is there, and with continued emphasis on reducing emissions, more money and effort will be invested into this field.
In the mean time, the next time you look at a plant, imagine it with a wall socket in the side because that is where bioenergy is headed.