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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This article is obviously so watered down as to be useless, but the underlying paper seems to be https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/7/1749 (found by Googling the author)

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> The six µPSCs in series connection have a predicted Pmp of 1079.9 µW.

> A maximum power of 985 µW was predicted with these configurations. In addition, the conversion efficiency of the micro-photosynthetic power cell, which is discussed in this manuscript, has a light input to electricity conversion efficiency of 0.18%. This is smaller in comparison with conventional photovoltaic cells.

The most important part.

Wow, that's tiny. I think solar modules have efficiencies up to 40% these days (47% in the lab), with 20% to 30% efficient modules being very common.

But I guess if land use isn't an issue, the algae could potentially be cheaper on a dollars per watt basis? Floating algae farms in the oceans and such.

Could you find any hint about the "surplus O2" claim in that article? The only thing I found was fig. 1 which seems to imply a cycle which completely turns glucose and oxygen back to CO2 and water, making the whole thing a fancy solar cell without any emitted oxygen.

Ha! This article is from Concordia in Montreal, while the newsweek article says Concordia in Wisconsin.

When I first saw Concordia, I was disappointed it wasn't the one I knew, but it actually is.

Notable that this paper doesn't seem to make the "only byproduct is water" and "negative carbon emissions" claims of the Newsweek treatment.

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