Solar cells produced from tabacco plants

Researchers from the University of Berkley developed a new technique: they modified tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic cells which can then be extracted and sprayed onto any substrate to create solar cells. The process is explained in a Treehugger article:

How? The scientists tweaked a few genes within the tobacco mosaic virus to build tiny structures called chromophores. Once the plant is sprayed with the virus, the new chromophores will group into tightly coiled formations. Chromophores are structures that turn light into high powered electrons.

Trapped inside the tobacco plant, scientists will have to harvest the plant, chop it up and extract the structures. Dissolved in a liquid solution, chromophores can then be sprayed over a substrate coated to hold them in place.

The regular silicon solar cells have a much higher efficiency . However, the tabacco-based have several other advantages: they are biodegradable and no environmentally toxic chemicals are used. Next to this, the production is much cheaper (and probably also less energy-consuming) than the regular cells.

Since the environmental cost of regular solar cells has always been an issue, this could be a cleaner alternative. I think that a breakthrough can only take place if the efficiency loss (and thus the electricity production loss over the lifetime of the tobacco cell) is compensated by the lower cost of the tobacco cells. Otherwise, it will not go beyond the testing phase.