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Lewis, Paul Alivisatos, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and interim director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and others described a new research on solar cells, batteries and transmission systems at the 13th American Association for the Advancement in Science- AAAS session, "Basic Research for Global Energy Security: A Call to Action". This new research intends either to break through current disadvantages of our energy technologies or to find entirely new and much more competent systems.

"This is one of the most exciting times in memory for energy research," Alivisatos said, not the least because scientists around the country anticipate increased federal funding aimed at making the country energy self-sufficient while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

"The sun is absolutely a singular solution to our future energy needs," speaker Nathan Lewis, who researches synthetic photosynthesis at the California Institute of Technology, told an audience at the meeting. "Nothing else comes close. More energy from the sun hits Earth in one hour than all the energy consumed on our planet in an entire year."

Alivisatos's research focus is on sunlight. His AAAS talk, "Nanoscale Materials for Solar Fuel Generation," provided examples of his laboratory's cutting edge work to improve the efficacy of solar cells and to lower their price in order to make them cost-effective.

Using plants to produce biofuels is inherently far less efficient than capturing the sun's heat since Plants capture only about 1 percent of the sun's energy. But the limitation of solar cells is that they are costly.

"We now can't afford to have it, but soon we can't afford not to have it," said Lewis at the same session. "We need to do the R&D to enable us to exploit it at scale. And to do that, we need to understand how to assemble these materials, how to exploit new physics and how to capture, convert and store the sunlight so we can bring the energy to wherever people want it when they need it."