Carroll's team found out just how basic a pokeweed panel can get when they were contacted last year by a sixth-grader in Elizabeth City. Grace Taylor, now 12, was looking for a science fair project. She wondered: Could she make electricity from berry juice?
Carroll passed along what he knew and Grace soon was picking pokeberries in her own backyard. Working in her kitchen, she built a berry-juice solar cell and attached a volt meter. Then she shone a lamp on it to mimic sunlight and watched as her homemade cell produced electricity.
Grace won first place in a local science fair, took second place in regionals and went on to enter her project at the state level. She compared the pokeberry results with those she got from Virginia creeper berries (the creeper won, but its downside, as far as Carroll is concerned, is that it isn't a foodstuff). Grace pronounced the whole experiment "pretty cool."
For Carroll, a sixth-grader's experiment proves he's on the right track.
"You don't need a huge factory to make solar cells out of this," he said. "I think the neat part of this is it's not always about the technology. The technology doesn't work that well. But it changes the microeconomic climate. If your nation can't produce large silicon solar cells, it doesn't matter how good they are."
The pokeberry cells wouldn't be a big money-maker for a corporation and that means a foundation would probably have to back development.
"You're really doing this for the Third World," Carroll said, "and your return on investment is you lower their carbon emission and raise their standard of living."
Source: News Observer