Photosynthetic efficiency of plants is just…

While plants do an admirable job of converting sunlight and CO2 into food and fibers that we all use, what is the efficiency with which they convert sunlight into chemicals?

Surprisingly, it is terribly low.

For most plants, the photosynthetic efficiency is in the 1-2% range – that is, only about 1/50th of the total energy from sunlight falling on the plant is converted into useful energy or materials.

What can we do about this rather unimpressive fact?

We can try to figure out if there are ways plants could be nudged to have higher conversion efficiencies – genetic modifications perhaps?

Another possibility is to consider if we can design equipment that can convert sunlight to energy or materials at much higher efficiencies.

We have a live example: Solar photovoltaic cells already convert sunlight to electricity at over 20% efficiencies – that’s TEN TIMES higher than that of plants.

Going beyond physics, scientists are also trying microbiological methods – for instance, they are exploring if a broth of CO2, water and micro-organisms could use sunlight to produce chemicals, food or fuels, but far more efficiently than plants.