France has planned of installing 1000 kilometers of solar panels in their roadways in the next five years. The works seems to be tough but it far way possible. The 7 mm photovoltaic panel is called 'Wattway', which is produced by the French transportation infrastructure firm Colas.These panels are paved onto the existing roadways to extract power from the sun, thus providing enough grips to the cars and trucks moving on to them. The panels are coated are special silicon film that helps protect the panels form the heavy weight of the trucks and the cars.
The road is likely to encounter around 2000 vehicles a day and some 3,400 local residents. Colas says is 1000 km is enough to power public lighting for a city of 5000 people and 20 square meters of Wattway can power a single French home. The idea, which is also under exploration in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, is that roadways are occupied by cars only around 20 percent of the time, providing vast expanses of surface to soak up the sun's rays. Colas say that in theory France could become energy independent by paving only a quarter of its million kilometers of roads with solar panels.

Colas hopes to make the cost competitive by 2020, noting that the cost of producing solar energy decreased by 60 percent between 2009 and 2015 according to a French renewable energy association, SER.
Source: https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/france-roads-made-from-solar-panels/462045/

Researchers at Binghamton University are working to produce energy from bacteria. There are microbial fuel cells where bacteria breakdown organic material and create an electric current but their approach is called a biological solar cell which uses cyanobacteria are used to harvest light energy and produce electrical power.
Biological solar cells are been in research for many years because they to tend to be potentially sustainable alternative to silicon based solar cells. The team is in further research to assemble them into bio solar panel which is capable in producing continual electricity. The team has taken 9 bio solar cells and wired them together to form a single small panel. The cells are arranged into 3x3 pattern and continuously generated electricity from the photosynthesis and respirator activities of the bacteria in 12 hour day night cycles over 60 total hours. .
Temperatures can reach between 1200-1600 degrees F in the BioLite. The BioLite Portable Grill, released in 2013, is designed to work with the CampStove.

Their trial has produced greatest wattage yet of any bio solar cells up to 5.59 micro watts. The success of the bio solar panel means that technology is easily scalable and stackable which is essential for energy source.

Plants have a unique quality of producing its own food by the process of photosynthesis. This process is an inspiration for the scientists who figured out of converting sun's energy into useful power in the form of electricity. But they have thought one step further of converting sun's energy directly into liquid fuel.
Such a breakthrough can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.A team of researchers form the Harvard University has invented a bionic fuel that not only uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen but it is also capable of using that hydrogen along with carbon dioxide to generate isopropanol a liquid fuel. This system is a setup from a previous invention called the artificial leaf, which can mimic the real leaves of plant which can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This artificial leaf was developed by Daniel Nocera. To upgrade the artificial leaf to “bionic” status, researchers engineered a bacterium that can convert carbon dioxide plus hydrogen into the liquid fuel isopropanol. The bacterium Ralstonia eutropha is the main reason behind it. New pathways were engineered by researchers so that the organism can produce isopropanol as a by product of its natural metabolic process.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/stories/bionic-leaf-can-convert-solar-energy-into-liquid-fuel

Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Milano-Bicocca has designed and synthesized a new generation of quantum dots for use in solar energy system that overcomes previous inefficiencies in harvesting sunlight.
Quantum dots which are nano crystals of semi conducting materials, appeal to scientists for use in solar photovoltaics (solar panel system) because they are very versatile and are not very costly. In particular they are desirable for use in luminescent solar concentrators (LSC's), which are photon management devices that serve as alternatives to optics based solar concentration system. LSCs are constructed from transparent .
LSCs are constructed from transparent materials containing emitters such as Quantum dots. They concentrate solar radiation absorbed from a large area onto a significantly smaller solar cell. LSCs have the potential to develop photovoltaic windows, which could turn buildings into energy producing factories. Although quantum dots are highly efficient emitters, their small Stokes shift (the presence of an overlap between emission and absorption) means that some of the light produced is re-absorbed by the dots, resulting in losses of emission and therefore overall efficiency problems.
To resolve this issue, the team generated “Stokes-shift-engineered” giant quantum dots composed of a cadmium selenide (CdSe) shell which absorbs light, and a cadmium
sulfide (CdS) core which is responsible for light emission. This separation of absorption and emission caused a significant reduction in re-absorption losses which previously caused inefficiencies. The dots were then incorporated into a high-quality polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) matrix, and spectroscopic analysis revealed that re-absorption losses were minimal across distances of tens of centimeters.

*Image source: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/quantum-dot-technology-could-lead-solar-panel-windows/

*source:https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/quantum-dot-coating-could-pull-solar-energy-from-your-windows