Photonic solutions for solar bioenergy

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We are at risk of energy poverty. Fossil fuels will last only a few more decades and nuclear power stations cannot be built quickly enough to meet the predicted shortfall. Without alternative energy, rising prices will be grudgingly accepted until the oil is exhausted. Wealthy oil/gas companies will control an energy-starved world in which our descendants suffer the long-term effects of global warming, including drought, famine, disease and flood-loss of many major coastal cities and large parts of Asia. To avoid this we must focus urgently on renewable energy like sunlight, which is so abundant that it exceeds our requirements 10,000 times. Therefore, better ways of collecting, storing and using it could make a big difference. All living things rely on sunlight. We are part of a food chain that starts with photosynthetic organisms. Even the oil that we rely on for energy was slowly made using sunlight over the last 60 million years, but most of the oil that can be reached easily has been burnt in just 100 years with massive CO2 release. Growing plants for food effectively harvests solar energy and scientists have recently found ways to cultivate crops and microbes for fuels. But ?biofuels? have hit a serious problem; there is not enough land to produce both food and fuel because only about 0.1% of the energy in sunlight ends up in the biofuel or the food. New photonic materials give us the chance to ?process? sunlight and change its composition, so that it becomes more useful to the organisms that convert it to food or fuels. By combining new photonic materials made by physicists with the biofuel technologies developed by biologists, we could shrink the land requirement so that all our energy and food needs can be met by sunlight.