Efficiency

Eighteen times the acre

A yeast fed on acetate made from electricity and CO₂ used sunlight almost 18 times more carefully than a field.

22 September 2026 · 6 minute read · after Michael Le Page

A crop is a poor solar panel. Plants typically keep less than one percent of the sunlight that falls on them and turn it into something we can eat. A standard panel keeps more than 20 percent as electricity. Experimental panels, New Scientist notes, have more than doubled even that.

The interesting step is what you do with the current. Researchers including Robert Jinkerson at the University of California, Riverside, used electricity to turn CO₂ into acetate, then fed that acetate to yeast. Counted as sunlight-to-food, the route was almost 18 times as efficient as ordinary farming. The same idea with algae landed near four times. With more work on the plants themselves, production efficiency might rise about tenfold.

That is not a promise that a bakery opens next year on a substation. It is a measurement of waste. Photosynthesis spends most of the sun on staying alive, on leaves you do not eat, on seasons, on drought. A tank does not do those things.

Vertical farms are the cautionary cousin. They still grow plants, they just replace the sun with lamps, and the reporting puts the land bill near 13 hectares of panels for every hectare of growing room. Electro-agriculture, if it works, refuses that trade. You do not light a lettuce. You feed a microbe a molecule the panel helped you make.

Nolux, the Riverside spin-out, is trying the harder version: plants altered so they can grow on acetate without sunlight. If that holds, the crop does not disappear. The field might.

Primary source: How turning electricity directly into food could help save the planet, New Scientist. Commentary, not a reprint.