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Batteries Powered by Leftover Food
Lazyhound writes "Technologists at the University of the West of England in Bristol have come up with a cheap, organic battery that can run on household leftovers, and be manufactured for just £10." There's also a New Scientist article. The New Scientist would like to point out that they broke the story, and the BBC followed up.
No, they don't want more refinement, they want less. As in you stick the raw sugar beets or sugar cane inside.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
What's the price of 50g. of sugar?
I can nip down the supermarket and buy a bag of sugar for 54p (0.54GBP). This bag contains 1Kg of sugar. So 50g. of sugar would cost under 3p.
So threepence worth of sugar would keep my 40 watt light bulb on for eight hours.
If electricty is charged at 6p per Kw/h (can't remember exactly, not got electricity bill on me) then the cost of lighting that 40w bulb is just under 2p. So there's not a lot in it!
However this is mere nitpicking and missing the point entirely. At the moment they're using sugar in the prototype. They intend to refine the bio-generator to use first carrots rather than pure sugar, and move on household waste. STUFF YOU THROW AWAY and is therefore worthless. At that point, the running cost is effectively zero.
So not only would this reduce the amount of rubbish thrown away by the average household, but it also reduces environmental damage done by power generation.
Just don't throw your old antibiotics in it!
"Information wants to be paid"
The benefits of this are enourmous in a place like Papua New Guinea where subsitance farmers don't really have a true cash economy and as such don't have any way to adequately pay for kerosene or "zoom" - motorboat fuel as I like to call it. Solar is to expensive, but fruits and vegitables are really cheap and plentiful.
Their numbers contain a little of the stench usually associated with products containing Ecoli---
:: .04kw*8hours=0.32kWh=1152kiloJoules
:: 187.5Calories = 785 kiloJoules
-lets do a little math...
The article claims 8 hours @ 40 watts from 50 grams of sugar: 40watts=.04kW
according to the domino box in my hand, 4grams sugar=15 Calories, so the sugar contains 12.5*15=187.5 Calories
So-- they claim to be getting 1152kJ output for a 785kJ input???? 146% output is impressive, but not likely.
--honestly, not flaming you-but please, take a holiday and spend a month out in the countryside and do some farm work. You really need to get some basic education to where food comes from and how we as humans are tied to the earth. Animal manure is spread on fields. there's your answer. You can touch it and not die. Really. Humans have been exposed to this "contaminant" for millenia. You'll appreciate the education you get, really. This is a small rant, but this is the reason there's such a schism between the urban elitist and centric laws that get passed and how they are contantly dumping on the rural people we have every year, especially in the US. I constantly get reminded of this with events like this post. Tech education is one thing,learning to use the subway and the stereo and the ability to open packages of food from the grocery store is Ok as far as it goes, but real world outside where the sun shines and the plants grow and the animals live education shouldn't be neglected, at least some basic 101 "how things work" education. all people need this, everyone, I don't care how rich they are or what their jobs are, IMO everyone needs to know and have an appreciation for real-world "nature" besides a drive in the park and watching discovery channel. this needs be hands-on doing it. Really, take a month and go work on a farm someplace, it'll be worth a degree to you in practical balanced knowledge. You won't get a piece of paper with a "certification" on it, but the education will be just as real.
I don't know about you, but I can get a 2 pound -- oh hell, let's call it one kilogram to make the conversions easy -- for about a buck. So, each gram costs $.001. Fifty grams, then, costs 5 cents, not fifty cents.
I don't know where you're shopping, but you're paying too much for sugar.
It gets even better when you buy it in bulk. Also, consider that you would no longer necessarily have to use sugar that was intended for human consumption. With that in mind, I'm sure there's probably "waste sugar" -- maybe its discolored, maybe it got contaminated in some way -- that still is suitable for the battery. That might be cheaper.
Also, don't forget that the ultimate goal is to use leftovers, not pure sugar.
Finally, you're using the traditional "free-market" technique of *not* looking at *all the costs*. Continuing to use traditional power plants running on oil means that we're constantly having to defend our "interests" in the middle east, spending billions and billions of dollars on military equipment and personel. This military intervention is what keeps our oil prices low. Thus, part of that cost has to be figured in to the cost of the electricity, and at that point the sugar wins hands down, I think.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Well, the advantage might be that currently most people don't compost, as they have no reason too. Food scraps make up a decent amount of landfill waste, but it's all mixed in and can't be separated out.
However, if people had a incentive for composting, they would put all of their waste into the battery located in the back of their house, say. While not all of the scraps would be gone, it would probably decay much more quickly than it would in a landfill, and it would generate some electricity.
Waste management crews could pick up the waste once it had been decomposed, filter it, sanitize it, and sell it as a fertilizer or soil filler.
The improvement is that chemical batteries actually add to our trash volume and these might reduce it.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Too optimistic - we don't even know if a battery produces more energy than it is needed for its manufacturing, let alone smelting a thousand tons of steel without turning a continent into a carrot monoculture.