News sources the world over are trumpeting the news: a 13 year old boy has discovered a new world-changing way to better harness energy from the sun!
Aidan Dwyer with his invention (Wall Street Journal)
Aidan Dwyer is obviously very smart and very talented. If only we had all been soldering electrical creations together in middle school instead of listening to bad music alone in our rooms and being miserable! His idea is also very appealing. Leaves are nature's solar cells. Why not mimic the patterns of leaves on branches, since plants are so good at absorbing the sun?
He then set his considerable skills to work and built an artificial tree limb out of metal. Twigs, bearing solar cell "leaves," were set at certain intervals along the main limb, governed by the famous Fibonacci Sequence.
The new solar "tree limb" was then placed in the sun and compared to a traditional flat panel solar cell. Here is where things go wrong. Aidan should have measured the power, in watts, produced by his invention. Instead he found a higher measurement of another electrical property, voltage.
Voltage is a measure of how strongly electricity wants to flow across the cell. It is a way of measuring how strongly the sun pulls the electricity out of the solar panel. Higher voltage is good, but, it is not necessarily an indicator of how much power the cell produces.
Power is the amount of energy that flows out of the cell per second. A 60-watt light bulb for example uses 60 Joules (units of energy) per second. If this tree had produced consistently more watts of power, this would be huge news! Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case.
When we step back to think, there is no logical reason why this idea should work. If you take two solar cells and set them one foot apart, they should produce some amount of watts. If you move them closer together or further apart, they should still generate the exact same amount! There is a small gain to be made by rotating the cells, but their separation distance from one-another should have no effect (so long as none block others from the sun).
Unfortunately, reporters and investors who have no understanding of how electricity works have taken the story and run with it. Now, two bad things have happened. First, incorrect claims were spread. (Even the magazine Wired made a mistake in its headline, claiming higher power!) Second, a 13-year-old boy gets criticized for being curious, having a good idea and attempting to test it scientifically!
We should applaud Aidan for his pursuit of science. We should blame the media and general public for the debacle of misunderstanding the results.
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