Biosynthetic organic solar cell biorefinery to fulfil Australian baseload power demands

Renewable energy technologies are fundamental to mitigating climate change. However, the intermittent nature associated with wind and solar technologies is the biggest hurdle to their implementation in baseload grid. The other two issues are incorporation of fossil fuel derived materials in their synthesis and end-of-life recycling. These issues for solar panels have been addressed here. In this study, for the first time, a pathway for the incorporation of renewable organic materials in the synthesis of organic solar cells has been developed. While this novel biorefinery concept has been developed for Australia, it is just as applicable in other regions. In this concept, 650,000 metric tons of non-food bio-waste is consumed for the production of organic materials that manufacture solar cells with 14 GW nameplate capacity, annually. In the State of Victoria (Australia) this is sufficient for 2 GW of baseload capacity. In this baseload 12 GW is earmarked for electrolytic hydrogen production to generate 2 GW of fuel cell based power for 18 h, daily, at 50% roundtrip efficiency. The land area required for such a 2 GW baseload solar farm is 200 km
²
. These results show that less than 300,000 km
²
of area (0.2% of Earth’s surface) is needed to transition the entire planet’s power grid to solar baseload and 150 biorefineries can produce enough organic solar panels to achieve this transition in ten years. At their end-of-life, these solar panels are easier to recycle, when compared to silicon solar panels due to their organic materials.