Sun + Water + Microorganisms= Renewable energy

Photovoltaic cells have considerable potential to satisfy future renewable-energy needs, but efficient and scalable methods of storing the intermittent electricity they produce are required for the large-scale implementation of solar energy.

Renewable-fuels generation has emphasized water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen. For accelerated technology adoption, bridging hydrogen to liquid fuels is critical to the translation of solar-driven water splitting to current energy infrastructures. One approach to establishing this connection is to use the hydrogen from water splitting to reduce carbon dioxide to generate liquid fuels via a biocatalyst. 

Fig.1 Schematic diagram of bioelectrochemical cell (Torella et al., 2015)

An alternative approach to the direct reduction of CO₂ to liquid solar fuels is to engineer fuel production in organisms that naturally use light energy to fix CO₂ to biomass. Notwithstanding, photosynthetic organisms suffer inefficiencies arising from nonideal light-harvesting properties that are not likely to be addressed in the near term.  As a result, the observed solar-to-biomass efficiency by plants typically approach only 1% of the thermodynamic maximum annually or between 1.4% and 2.0% over the growing season when calculated on the basis of total solar radiation.

This way providing a foundation for the development of new biological, H₂-based CO₂ reduction strategies to produce liquid and solid fuels.

For more information about the article you could click on the link:

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2337.full.pdf?sid=c8601066-7ada-49bf-9f64-2557223b9a9f