Question: How could you make your artificial leaves more efficient?

Stuart Archer answered on 20 Jun 2013:

That’s a really good question – one that we’re still trying to work out! The main problem with them at the moment is something called ‘solar conversion efficiency’ – which is a fancy way of saying that not all of the light that hits the leaf is converted into useful energy. A lot of it just bounces off, or is converted to heat, or lost in a number of other more technical ways. If we could improve the amount of sunlight that’s converted to useful energy, then that would be one really good way of improving the efficiency.