cellulosic biofuel and paint-based PVs

i was reading Power magazine this morning, an industry rag for Electric Power Engineers (exciting stuff, really) and the table of contents is roughly:

nukes
coal
nukes
coal
sequestration is ridiculous but the gov't will probably make us do it anyway
nukes
coal
nukes
look at this insignificant solar project
nukes
coal

seriously. this where our power comes from today. more than half of the new electric generation capacity planned in the Western US (a stronghold for renewable energy mandates) will be coal.

so, today, i will share two early-stage-development RE sources that seem to have a chance of impacting our lives:

one set of researchers found a bacteria that very decomposes grasses very quickly and have isolated an enzyme from it that converts cellulose into sugar. this is a big deal because converting cellulose into sugar is the key to practical biopetrol that doesn't compete with food sources. here is a video of it converting a newspaper into sugar. pretty wild stuff.

a set of researchers with very English names in a very English town studying the seemingly incredibly boring question of how it is - exactly - that sunlight breaks down paint, stumbled across the possibility of producing a paint that could capture the energy from the sunlight and convert it into electricity. they claim that it wouldn't be terribly efficient at capturing energy, but that it would be good at producing electricity even in low light conditions such as are experienced in the UK for most of the year. though it doesn't specifically state this, i am assuming that the paint would require neither silicon, nor any of the nasty chemicals (selenium, tellurium, gallium) used in the newest generation of non-silicon-based solar panels.

pretty cool, if anything comes from them.