Question: how long would it take to turn sunlight,carbon dioxide and water to make energyt

Chia-Yu Lin answered on 25 Jun 2013:

It depends on the scale of energy you want. So for the developed devices can generate fuel “molecules” in a second, which is intrinsically an energy. For example, when the fuel is formic acid (need 2 electrons per molecule) and output current of the device is at 1 mA scale, then the amount of formic acid produced in one second will be about 5*10^-9 mole. As you can see, this tiny amount won’t be enough to do any work. We therefore need to accumulate the product .