Green is everywhere here at the Marriott Hotel across the street from the MIT campus. This morning's Energy 2.0 conference began with keynote addresses by MIT President Susan Hockfield and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt -- the latter of whom told the sold-out crowd, "Environmental thinking is now mainstream economic discussion. ... If you're a businessperson or investor, this is part of the mainstream that you have to come to grips with."
This morning, Hockfield lauded the world-changing potential of students and the innovative thinking they bring to the centuries-old energy market. She could probably not have found a better exemplar of her conviction than the three students (Peter Weigele, John Craven, and Andrew Hoy) behind the BEInG collaborative, who last night displayed their wetware at the previously-blogged "New England Energy Showcase."
Their inspiration is to steal a page from Mama Nature. If anyone has figured out how to optimize the problem of converting sunlight into usable energy better than she, they must have had more than the few billion years of evolutionary optimizing that's today working on her behalf.
"We want to use algae as a solar collector," said Craven (pictured here by his zeroth-gen solar panel). "Nobody's researching this right now, and it has the most potential of any (solar technology)."
Craven was quick to point out that their algae-panel version 0.1 now has a lower conversion efficiency from sunlight to electricity than conventional silicon photovoltaics. But, he said, apply a little genetic engineering to the algae blooms, and the physically and chemically staggering process of photosynthesis could be harnessed for electricity generation.
"We know we can make it better," he said. "We don't know far we can take it yet, but we know we can make it a lot better."
