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Cake day: November 24th, 2023

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  • Maybe we’ll get to the point. This news just shows us, that solar power can really be very impactful, even in not-so-sunny Germany. And that we’ve reached a turning point, where we can no longer ‘just’ put up more solar panels, but also start developping systems to store this excess energy in an economically feasible manner.

    But actually, that’s nothing very new either. At least for home owners, who just put solar panels on their roofs, also investing in battery storage to use most of the produced energy themselves has been the economic strategy for a few years, since the price gap between what you got for putting energy into the grid, and what you had to pay for taking energy out of the grid was the only thing left that (economically) incentivized people to install solar power ever since the so called “Einspeisevergütung” subsidies have been dropped.




  • That chart is a good starting point, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. It only shows the absorption spectrum for Chlorophyll A, which is a key pigment for photosynthesis in all plant species, but there is also Chlorophyll B, and there are numerous other so called accessory pigments (beta carotinoids are the most common examples), that can work in conjunction with chlorophyll in a photosystem to collect light of different wavelengths. Algae in particular show a greater diversity of accessory pigments. They have evolved use light at different depths below the water surface, where it reaches them with a different spectrum, because water itself absorbs part of it. Have a look at red algae and brown algae, for example.

    So if you want to grow algae in a controlled environment, you should do some research about the particular absorption preferences of the species you’d like to grow.