You have read and heard over and over one way to conserve energy is to turn off and unplug your computers right? Well, now World Community Grid, Harvard University and a few other sponsors are asking you to leave your computers on for their new project. The project with and eco-friendly mission is called The Clean Energy Project.

"The mission of The Clean Energy project is to discover organic materials to create a more efficient and lower cost solar cell." If you are wondering how The Clean Energy Project will help find solar cell materials, you are not alone, but it involves a lot of volunteers, the volunteers' computers, a program download onto volunteer s' computers, the data collected from the computers and a lot of research by the researchers in Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The Clean Energy Project FAQ section at the World Community Grid website explains the project like this:

Understanding the properties of new materials that are the basis of alternative sources of renewable energy represents one of today's major scientific challenges. Many of these materials are composed of large organic molecules that contain hundreds of atoms. These atoms can be rearranged in multiple ways to fine-tune the properties of the desired material. With the aid of World Community Grid, researchers will evaluate the conductive properties of at least 100,000 molecular structures (created by combinatorial methods) that are suitable for organic solar cells applications. The results of such an enormous number of computations will be used to create a database of molecular properties for data mining, which will be publicly available.

As a volunteer, other than helping make a difference, you can also receive project badges and participate in the project's forums. For each level achieved in the project a badge appears as images on a member's page. There are 3 badge levels: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. For a Gold badge a member would need to participate for 90 days. For a bronze badge 14 days of participation is the minimum required.

What about hackers? Will your computer slow down when you download the program? What is World Community Grid? How will this benefit the future? If you still have questions about this project after reading more about The Clean Energy Project at the World Community Grid website visit the FAQ section of the website and it will answer many of your questions. If instead you are interested in participating, click here and you can download and run the World Community Grid software program instantly. If you choose not to participate, please conserve energy by turning your computers off and if possible, unplugging them.

Via The Daily Green