By JAMES WOODFORD

Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention. As electricity prices soar and fuel prices vacuum-clean cash from our wallets it is going to be interesting to see what new technology hard-pressed humans will conjure.
The mother of them all is nature and the latest solar research coming from institutions like the MIT in the United States is turning to her for answers to how the world might soon be powered.
Deniers like former (praise be to Allah) NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, talk about how solar-power will never be able to provide the baseload energy necessary to keep our society heaving along.
To run all those squillions of plasma screen televisions, air conditioners and skyscrapers, the argument goes, is beyond the means of solar technology.
We live in a house powered by a collection of seven panels – together the size of a large dining room table – and survive just fine as do many of our friends.
Even without a war-effort investment in technology, a well-designed solar power set-up is pretty damned impressive.
Also, the sun runs our entire planet just fine, maintaining complex natural systems that make all of humanity’s technological advances put together seem like my son’s Lego collection.
Who needs a nuclear power plant as a next door neighbour when a perfectly good one rises in the east each morning then politely and spectacularly excuses itself to the west every night?
To be fair, though, one of the crucial issues with solar is how to keep the electrons flowing when it is dark. In our case we have a battery box on our western veranda that is the size of a chest freezer. Theoretically it has been designed to guarantee electricity to our home for five days and nights of absolute darkness. In other words, think nuclear winter, asteroid strike or the ultimate nuclear accident – our sun dying.
I have to say that our battery box does seem to be very primitive – it is actually nothing more than an elaborate version of the lead acid battery in the average car.
This brings me back to the original point of how energy technology is going to change now that we know coal is ruining the planet and the oil ledger is looking more than grim.
The two big problems with solar seem to me to be making a battery that isn’t a massively expensive bone-corroding toxic soup and working out how to make panels that aren’t dependent on ecologically-damaging silicon mines and processing plants.
At the moment it is true that the maths of installing solar are a bit dubious – the embodied energy in the battery box and the silicon-blue panels is pretty immense.
One of the things that has to happen is for researchers to look to nature to try and better understand how continent sized ecosystems keep themselves fuelled up instead of fouled up.
A team of researchers from MIT in the United States, for example, recently announced they have mimicked the way plants photosynthesise to begin work on a new type of solar battery.
As the scientists reported at the beginning of the month: “Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun.
“This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT.
“…Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.”
Somewhere between the offhanded dismissal by old fashioned deniers and the hyperbole of enthusiastic researchers lies the truth of our solar future. Over the next decade we are going to see spectacular advances in both batteries and panels to the point that these technologies will be embedded into architecture, urban planning and industry. Our dining-room-table sized panels and chest-freezer-box battery bank will one day be seen as a technological oddity – as quaint as an EH Holden.
But no matter what anybody says solar power is the future and more and more often nature will provide the answers we are looking for -after all four billion years of roadworthiness is a pretty good record.