Michael Gratzel has come clean and revealed that he stole his award-winning design for a new kind of solar cell--stole it from a leaf, that is. The Swiss inventor and first prize-winner of the $960,000 Millennium Technology Prize believes he has a cheap way to power everything from cell phones to street lamps, copying plants' power to harness sunlight and turn it into energy.
"I was always intrigued with natural photosynthesis," Gratzel says in a Millennium Technology Prize video (see below), "the way the plant uses molecules to generate charges."
His solar cells aren't as efficient as the current silicon photovoltaic panels, but they do use cheaper manufacturing materials.
"Gratzel's innovation is likely to have an important role in low-cost, large-scale solutions for renewable energy," Ainomaija Haarla, president of Finland's Technology Academy, says in a prepared news release on the group's website. [CNN]
Gratzel can also make his solar cells ...
