DIY Solar Panels Made of Grass That Anyone Can Make

While I've yet to see nations and corporations embrace renewable energy the way I had hoped they would, the pace of technological advancement continues unabated.  New developments are announced almost daily now, and much of it involves lower costs and higher efficiencies - two factors that have kept the public from adopting solar energy faster.

From Green Prophet:

MIT researchers say that soon all we’ll need to harvest our vast solar resource is  grass and stabilizing powder. 
While Masdar and Suntech and other solar energy projects are laboring under expensive, high-tech materials in order to improve their energy-absorbing capability, MIT researchers in the United States are taking a different approach. They realized that nothing in nature absorbs energy as well as plants, so they have developed a solar technology that combines a small amount of grass (or other agricultural waste), a stabilizing powder made of zinc oxide and titanium oxide, and a glass or metal substrate which mimics the photosynthesis process. Eventually their technology will be so simple that anybody will be able to make their own solar panels for next to nothing.
Photosynthesis
According to the folks at Fastco Design, the MIT researchers have discovered how to “chemically stabilize plant-derived photosystem-I (PS-I), the structures inside plant cells that perform photosynthesis, on a substrate that creates electric current when exposed to light–all using readily-available materials.”
This solar cell then isolates PS-1 molecules and eventually carries an electrical current with the stabilizing powder.
So, instead of massive solar-panel producing factories that require a lot of natural materials, MIT’s technology could literally be packed in a small plastic bcationLng=