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Potato-Powered Batteries Debut
MojoKid writes "Yissum Research Development Company Ltd., the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has just introduced what it's calling 'solid organic electric battery based upon treated potatoes.' In short, it's a potato-powered battery, and it's as real as you're hoping it is. The simple, sustainable, robust device can potentially provide an immediate inexpensive solution to electricity needs in parts of the world lacking electrical infrastructure. Researchers at the Hebrew University discovered that the enhanced salt bridge capability of treated potato tubers can generate electricity through means readily available in developing nations."
Or they could just eat them...
There's nothing new about using vegetables as electrolytes, and all of the electricity is derived from the non-sustainable zinc and copper, not the boiled spud.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So does this mean we will be able to have our chips powered by chips?
No left turn unstoned.
Wow, what is it with Israel and weird battery technologies? Here's another story about some batteries made from sand and air. Not sure if anything came of that, either.
Qxe4
If this takes on, this means another group of people who are going to starve so that others can use more energy. Can't someone invent an energy source that isn't based on food?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Reminds me of a "Dexter's Lab" episode I saw as a kid. Boy Genius goes to an Amish village and powers a light bulb via potato.
Potato Battery
It's not an electrical grid, it's just a series of tubers.
Does this mean they can now recharge their iPhones on the Sabbath? They just can't use their iPhones.
As has already been pointed out, these are copper and zinc powered batteries.
There should be a Slashdot feature where if enough people flag an article, it gets relocated off the front page.
And don't even get me started on whoever let this get the "story" tag.
A product out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem? I wonder if these will be banned in the Gaza strip. Somebody had to say it.
I guess this company will invent the "Lemon battery" next. It's an upgrade that provides even more power!
...is it kosher?
Dissecting a frog reveals that they too have organs.
Apparently Israelis don't do these kind of things in their fourth grade science classes.
...if you overcharge or short this out, will it smell like french fries?
Willie...
If you want energy, you could ferment them tatties, distill good 'ol CH3CH2OH and burn it. You might get more watt-hours/spud this way and there'd be no electrodes to replace.
Now, if you actually need small, cheaply refillable batteries for portable devices, this would be nice provided the electrodes don't wear out too much.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Articles should be color-coded just like submissions, and if it drops below the top color or two it should go off the front page for non-logged-in users.
Logged in users should of course be able to set their own color threshold.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I tried but my mouse keeps missing the *hic* button. *hic*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Doesn't this consume copper like lemon batteries? Doesn't that have to be replaced too? No mention in the article.
The Tesla Tuber Turbo?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Great, now the potato famine can cause blackouts too.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
Obviously not. This might be a low cost way to turning some energy from an easily available form (wood to burn for cooking) into electricity. A lot of third world countries have excess lumber.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
http://bash.org/?151227
In the words of Douglas Adams, "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
we Irish are once again screwed!!
.... to give electricity to the poor and hungry.
Renewable my azz. All this will do is destroy another food source to generate energy. So destroy the environment with "modified potatoes" and contaminating the few fertile land remaining.
Guess what ethanol did to the prices of food??? And did it lowered the cost of fuel??? The scam made more money for the oil companies. Add 10% ethanol to regular fuel, and you loose 20% millage per tank. That was a 20% benefit and the fuel is still costing the same as if it was 100% petro.
Didn't anyone else leave their potato clock sitting around running for way too long as a kid?
The potato rots. It turns into a pile of mush. They even addressed this in Dexter's Lab. How exactly have they circumvented that problem by just boiling the things? I don't see anything about that in the story.
I had a potato-powered clock when I was 9 years old ... 27 years ago.
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?complete=0&hl=en&q=potato+clock&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=4996349285251584488&ei=ULAdTK3WMoLCNeDyqO0M&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC4Q8wIwAg#
I remember Mr. Wizard using a potato to generate small amounts of electricity when the show aired on Nickelodeon in the 80's when I was a kid.
http://mlgw.blogspot.com/2008/07/cow-dung-batteries.html
As far as I understand, this system is basically a zinc-air or zinc-water battery. What you get is a reaction like this:
2Zn + O2 -> 2ZnO (zinc air)
Zn + H2O -> ZnO + H2 (zinc water)
The potato is decorative, and simply acts as the electrolyte, the copper is also decorative and simply acts as substrate for the air or water reaction (it could be iron, nickel or even a graphite rod). Their are using copper, as far as I understand, because it is cheap. The copper won't be consumed. The potato won't be consumed, unless it rots. It will eventually be filled with zinc oxide, which will "clog" the electrolyte. So basically, you'll save the copper until it corrodes (likely never because the zinc protecting it from corrosion), and replace the zinc constantly. My guess is that you'll eventually have to replace the potato, but not as often as the zinc. Part of the problem with this system is that the copper is not oxidized - instead of copper wire, you need copper rust. What you really want in such a system is this:
Zn + CuO -> ZnO + Cu
That's what the Lalande cell does. It was used in the late 1880's and 90's to power stuff like telegraphs. Instead of a potato, they used an alkaline electrolyte, like potassium hydroxide. This is way, way better at conducting electricity than a potato. Before the Lalande cell, we had the Daniell cell. The Daniell cell was based on a similar construction, but it used sulphuric acid instead of potassium hydroxide. Sulfuric acid dissolves both copper and zinc oxides, which lead to problems because some of the copper sulfate would make it across to the zinc. This would lead to the corrosion of the zinc, and the copper plating of the zinc, stopping further reaction. To resolve this, a porous bot or salt bridge had to be used to stop the copper from getting the the zinc. Unfortunately, although zinc-copper is a cheap chemistry with high energy density, it is tough to recharge successfully. This is because when the reaction is reversed, and zinc oxide is changed to metallic zinc, the zinc plate will change shape. This will cause the shorting of the battery, and its destruction. Zinc-copper is not really used all that much these days. Zinc manganese appears to have replaced it because it is cheap and has higher energy. It still has the same recharging problems, and if we could solve em', lithium would be out of business.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
You really think someone submitted this news to Slashdot and then got accepted?
Do your research. This is a press-release from Businesswire, a news agency.
It's like this: You want people to pay attention to your "news", you pay a PR agency u$s 5000 to u$s 10000 and they send your "news" to their buddies at Reuters, Asocciated Press or Businesswire.
All newspapers, TVs (And reporters like kdawson) are subscribed to this news "collectors" and they pick up the news they want. It has been like this for years.
This is a paid advertisement. Open your eyes.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222 http://d116.com/spud/
20 GWh/year is pathethic. I know Sweden loves green energy and propagates excessively for it, but to put things in a different light consider this:
/rant
In your friendly neighbourhood country of Finland, where nuclear power is not considered the spawn of all evil there is a project to add a third nuclear reactor to the Olkiluoto Nuclear power plant, the reactor when done will have a energy output of 1,720MW, this means that in 12 hours it produces more energy than your wonderful Örebro biogas plants yields in an entire year. If it is producing energy 70% of the year, that means it will net 10 TWh per year.
A price-performance comparision between the two yields the following: google tells me the biogas plant netted a cost of approximately 10million € (105M SEK), now this is quite a fair bit lower than the 3 billion € price of the reactor, but then again, the latter produces atleast 527 times more energy so adjusting the price for it we end up at 5,2 billion € for the equivalent biogas plant construction costs, these costs however does not factor in manpower and maintenance required, or say, the availibility of resources viable for biogas. Still, 5,2 billion is not all too bad compared what the equivalent windpower would cost, last i did the calculation i ended up at 3k wind plants per reactor with an annual maintenance cost of close to 100 million €, which is entirely unreasonable to have in practice and a reason why sweden is still importing coal generated electricty.
This comparison is also biased towards biogas, as the calculated value is total energy content and not the part that does any useful work. If you feel like recalculating the whole mess use 4300MW as the reactor value as that's the thermal output which makes for a more fair comparision.
eat the potatoe, make batteries from shit, dung etc etc, no reason to waste good food to make batteries. India with Sanjeev Bhaskar: Indian Inventors & Cow Dung
http://totl.net/Spud/
reminds me of this satire that was created by some university friends of mine in the 90s, it was picked up by the main stream news and they were interviewed, linked constantly. It was, of course, a joke - and eventually bogged down the the constant phone calls and links they were freely saying so on their site and begging for it all to stop...
and of course, they were slashdotted: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222&mode=thread
Geez guys, this is potato battery and you have not mentioned MacGyver!
I have heard that kids these days grows crooked because there is no MacGyver on the screen.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222
SuperCharge my meal = Supersize with fries!
Oy vey, are potatoes kosher?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Brilliant: not only does this scheme consume the metals making up the electrodes, but as a bonus, requires extra heat of boiling the taters. Hilarious.
Fine, but do you numbers include the necessary infrastructure costs (plus maintenance) of electrical distribution? Moreover, what of the skills required to safely and temporarily store radio active waste, which we still cannot deal with effectively in the so-called developed world? Local or distributed sources of power might appear less efficient from a global perspective, however, too often that view is skewed towards not including real, long term costs. Plus Uranium will become increasingly expensive were it used everywhere, as you suggest.
Please recalculate with more care. Also throw in the talent to build and maintain these power stations and clean up afterwards when they are obsolete.
Spud server.
India with Sanjeev Bhaskar: Indian Inventors & Cow Dung its cheaper than wasting perfectly edible food/forage to make batteries
If they weren't, would we have the knish?
I knew they would find a way to run Linux on batteries some day.
Make America grate again!
Am I the only one who had the "Two Potato Clock" when they were a kid?
http://www.enasco.com/product/SB16423M
This sentence no verb.
Once you start buying food to make energy for a car or a home, food price skyrocket and developing nations only get poorer.
Yes, but Finland has a suicide rate slightly higher than that found in France ... and France is also a strong proponent of nuclear power.
Sweden's rate? It's lower than both.
Coincidence? I think not!
Clearly there is a correlation between the use of nuclear power and suicide rates!
So, batteries are good for them, and there is a chance that maybe possibly we're seeing some sort of scientific-economic-political strategy at work here.
Ugh.
The "Yissum Research Development Company Ltd." trying to sell this turd has come up with a way to turn a food source into a power source. Except, it doesn't work because. . .
1. The power comes from oxidization of metal and needn't involve potatoes at all. It could just as well be cow dung. Or a cup of salt water.
2. The potatoes need to be boiled first, so there's a huge amount of energy already being spent/wasted.
3. Potatoes rot and thus any power system would be saddled with ridiculous limitations in terms of maintenance, portability, and time constraints.
4. We already have wind-up radios and solar solar powered devices. Conventional electronics still wouldn't work, because you can't plug potatoes into them, so you'd need extra gear just to use the craptastic consumer-level garbage devices which don't even last in suburbia for more than a year. It makes a lot more sense to use electronics specifically designed for harsh environments.
But the thing which makes this sick is that the scientists who came up with this potato thing are not stupid. They know all these problems exist, which begs the question; what is their real aim?
It sure isn't to create great battery technology so as to stymie their oil-rich neighbors. It's probably an attempt to generate some positive media spin for their university and by extension Israel, (green is good and people are too stupid to realize when they are being manipulated through media!) -That, combined with some underlying psychopathic desire to sell a bad bill of goods to people who are already hurting.
Yeah. So, thanks, Israel. If you wanted to make sure underprivileged people have electricity, perhaps you should NOT bomb their infrastructure while saying, "Look what you made me do with the bottle rockets our own Mossad organized you into firing at us so we could have an excuse to steal your land!"
Psychopaths blame the victims for their own crimes. That's the pattern. Look for it.
Anybody disagreeing with me simply hasn't done the research or is evil.
-FL
I suppose this is what happens when there is too much latke.
Moreover, what of the skills required to safely and temporarily store radio active waste, which we still cannot deal with effectively in the so-called developed world?
You do realize the waste comes out in teeny tiny amounts, right? In the US, 50 year old reactors use 1% of the Uranium fuel (other more rational countries allow reactors to get ten times that) and almost all of the waste is store on-site. 50 years of waste, on-site, safely. Procedures needed to handle radio-active waste aren't very different than handling other types of hazerdous materials. Think about it. No other process can claim even holding 1 year of waste on site. Long-term storage of the material would be easy if it were not such a politically charged issue.
The infrastructure issue is a red herring, as nuclear plants are built where they are needed, meaning transport is extremely easy. Infrastructure costs for biogas are significantly higher, since you need pipelines to transport it long distances (given that where it can be produced may not be where it needs to be consumed).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Capitalism has jumped the shark.
When I was a child, I learned to use potatoes to produce electrical power. And that was decades ago... So if there is nothing very different with this setup, I'd call this nonsense.
Aside from that I don't know how this setup could be called green, as it produces waste of potatoes filled with different corroded metals. That doesn't sound green to me...
cb
It's nothing more than a Zn/Cu cell, albeit an efficient one. Teere's nothing green about oxidizing metals -- all the commerically viable processes to reduce the oxides again produce tons of greenhouse gases.
20 GWh/year is pathethic.
Compared to just letting 20GWh/year just uselessly dissipate into the atmosphere? Even in the, OMG they waste so much energy, US, using biogass to run pumps and generators in sewage treatment plants is SOP!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Anybody disagreeing with me simply hasn't done the research or is evil."
and
"My religion is Life and Objective Reality."
Priceless!
I'm rather impressed that my 3rd grad Science Fair project was apparently at the forefront of modern technology. Just wait until the Lemon-juice battery is invented!
20 GWh/year is pathethic.
It's not, it's enough to keep all the buses in the city + the around 100 cars the municipal have running. Plus selling some to others.
It's not much on a country or global scale but obviously it's something.
In your friendly neighbourhood country of Finland, where nuclear power is not considered the spawn of all evil there is a project to add a third nuclear reactor to the Olkiluoto Nuclear power plant, the reactor when done will have a energy output of 1,720MW, this means that in 12 hours it produces more energy than your wonderful Örebro biogas plants yields in an entire year.
We have 10 or so running nuclear reactors in Sweden, unless any of them is down for maintainance. I know a few (two? three?) in the three plants have been turned off.
That's not enough to provide most of our energy, the majority come from water, but it's still more than lots of other countries. 30 years or so ago they voted to end nuclear power by some year within Sweden but that's not something which will happen and last week the government voted for replacing current nuclear reactors with new ones as long as the total stayed at no more than 10. I assume that open up for more powerful ones.
I hear all sorts of claims that nuclear power cost more during the whole life span vs others which consider it cheap, I don't know what's true. But as long as one can get more energy out from an alternative renewable energy source than it cost to produce the facility, regardless of what it is, I think that may be a good idea. Depending on area use and environment impact and such from those facilities of course.
I don't think Swedes are against nuclear power, I just think everyone is trying to understand their environmental impact and try decide for the better alternative, atleast as long as it won't have an impact on how they can live their lives.
That is, drive less? Consume less electricity? Maybe not. Drive on another fuel source or get different electricity? Yes. Pay more for energy sources more friendly to the environment? Maybe. Want to build wind power "somewhere else"? Yes. At their own backyard? Maybe not .. The same is true for mining uranium. We've got plenty (The water back home at my mom which I've been raised on had 1500 bq/l.)
I think it's good that we are aware, people in general may not have a good idea about the impact of various actions though. For instance AFAIK coal power produce more nuclear waste than actual nuclear energy. And I'm pretty sure that if we need the energy we'll build the plants no matter what.
a cost of approximately 10million € (105M SEK), now this is quite a fair bit lower than the 3 billion € price of the reactor, but then again, the latter produces atleast 527 times more energy so adjusting the price for it we end up at 5,2 billion € for the equivalent biogas plant construction costs
Though building it isn't everything. And it's a first/the biggest one built here. I don't think they where like "omg this would be better than nuclear" but rather, "can we build it and make it work for a reasonable cost?"
Add maintainance, cost of the fuel (in the case of uranium would we mine it here in Sweden? What would that cost compared to a different company?). try to estimate the value of the environmental impact, scrapping the facilities, storage of the waste.
In the case of the bio-gas facility I doubt the environmental cost will be high, the facility is easy to break down and there's no bad waste to take care of, rather fertilizer. Of course growing and harvesting grass don't have an environmental impact of zero either.
which is entirely unreasonable to have in practice and a reason why sweden is still importing coal generated electricty.
As far as my current knowledge goes I would be all for Sweden building more nuclear power plants and exporting the energy. For t
but do you numbers include the necessary infrastructure costs (plus maintenance) of electrical distribution?
Yeah I assume as far as transportation goes running buses and municipal cars on uranium or electricity isn't something they want or can be doing right now. Converting the energy to hydrogen would lose energy from the nuclear power.
Plus Uranium will become increasingly expensive were it used everywhere
We've got plenty of uranium in Sweden. Though no-one (for good reason ..) want anyone to start mining it close to where they live. Nuclear power FACILITIES may be rather clean, the mining is not. As long as it happens "somewhere else" I guess that's just fine, but it's not that nice to the people living there .. People are less worried about farmers growing grains/grass for their bio-gas facilities I assume.
But anyway, as far as radioactive leak of material goes the coal most people rely on instead is worse, plus the global warming factor of course.
Btw, the bio-gas plant you get the 10 million euro price from produce 60 GWh/year, not 20. 20 was from the waste/sewage plants depending on which one is right (I assume the sewage since I know they got a gas tank there.)
So your nuclear reactor would still be 3 billion euro.
The bio-gas plant of much smaller scale scaled up to the same volume only by number of plants not assuming any increase in output / spent euro then wouldn't be 5.2 billion but rather a third of that compared to your 20 GWh example, for a total of 1.7 billion euro.
And that's without the money needed to scrap it all and store the waste, I assume.
I don't know what the efficiency of bio-gas in vehicles are, but I assume it's not the same as thermal vs electricity output of a nuclear plant, so that factor won't help much in calculating it. Also as far as transportation goes electrical cars and batteries are probably not something we'd see in the city at this time so they would most likely rather run on hydrogen then so then you have to calculate on the efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen power + motor efficiency of the hydrogen motor instead.
His numbers where wrong to since the bio-gas facility produced 60 GWh/year, not 20.
Anyway, I'm sure they wheren't building it because they considered it more powerful than a nuclear plant. They where much more likely rather building it because driving buses on bio-gas seem nicer than driving them on diesel. And this way they could produce enough bio-gas locally.
.. and "it's not worth doing it because the impact of this small attempt is so small" is a pretty shitty argument, because if you use that million of times over and over again not much will ever change. But eventually by that scale it would had made a difference, even at a global scale.
To be honest my post was intended as a cheap shot on sweden and promotion for nuclear energy, it was never intended to be a factually accurate post as comparing small scale biogas intended for vehicles with nuclear power intended for large scale electricity generation by just looking at the initial construction costs don't say a lot about the overall viability. To get an accurate picture it's required to do an in depth analysis of the plants entire lifecycle, which is a bit more ambitious than just doing a big post.
That said, i still belive nuclear to be one of the most viable energy production methods for several reasons: It's compact, it have very long lifetimes under which upgrades is possible to increase energy yield. It is a very reliable method for energy production with low levels of pollution. The waste problem is a small issue, for the moment, because nuclear waste is not really waste; it's perfectly possible to use it for further energy generation with the proper reactor design.
As for the efficiency of bio-gas use in vehicles compared to thermal vs electric nuclear output: i can assure you that the nuclear plant have a lot higher efficiency than the internal combustion engine in a car, the latter is on average at 20% or less, whereas the nuclear reactor operates at 40%. So for actual work done by the biogas plant products you have a number hovering around 12GWh. Though as mentioned, the comparison is not entirely valid.
I prefer the comparison to wind as you can have it on its knees just by mentioning that the base maintenance cost per KWh for wind is 0.1SEK/0.01€(according to vattenfall.se), meaning that if you replace the new Olkiluoto reactor with wind power you'll be paying 150 million€ a year just for the equivalent power output, in addition to the construction costs and the lower generator lifespan of the generators.
I'm against nuclear power, and one of the reasons is I think the total cost picture is not fully in view. For example, in the costs of a nuclear plant, are the following prices calculated and allocated for?
- after decommissioning the plant after 50 years, letting it cool down for 40 years but *keeping security up for those 40 years as well*
- after the 90 years (50+40), training and employing new personnel to safely demolish the cooled-down concrete reactor (see e.g. Dodewaard)
- storing the low-active chunks of concrete and steel somewhere for a long period (preferably *NOT* somewhere in a salt mine that's going to be under water in the next 2000 years)
To be honest I'm not aware how many of these factors, which I as a layman can think up off the top of my head, have been taken into account in the TCO picture, but since it's a commercial business, my unfounded belief is that the power company pays for the building and reaps the profit, goes bankrupt within 90 years, and the government and people can pay for the several centuries long decommissioning phase.
People aren't good in thinking long-term.
I hope Vattenfall builds wind turbines instead of nuclear plants.
To be honest my post was intended as a cheap shot on sweden and promotion for nuclear energy
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf42.html
"Sweden has a tax discriminating against nuclear power – now about 0.67 Euro cents/kWh."
2006: 43.6/46.3/9.4/0.7% water/nuclear/fossil/wind
2008: 46.9/42.0/9.7/1.4% water/nuclear/fossil/wind
"In 2008, Sweden generated almost 146 billion kWh, of which 42% was from nuclear (61.3 billion kWh)."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html
"The USA has 104 nuclear power reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different power companies. In 2008, the country generated 4,119 billion kWh net of electricity, 49% of it from coal-fired plant, 22% from gas and 6% from hydro. Nuclear achieved a capacity factor of 91.1%, generating 805 billion kWh and accounting for almost 20% of total electricity generated in 2008. Total capacity is 1,088 GWe, less than one tenth of which is nuclear."
"The country's 104 nuclear reactors produced 799 billion kWh in 2009, over 20% of total electrical output."
So more than twice as much of the energy in Sweden already come from nuclear power than in the US, and have for long since we haven't built anything new but rather closed things down. In the US it seem like they rather want to build more.
More than 70% percent of your (if you're american) energy come from coal and gas, whereas our fossil fuel based energy is less than 10%.
Guess who wins?
the initial construction costs don't say a lot about the overall viability.
Exactly.
it's perfectly possible to use it for further energy generation with the proper reactor design.
True, I've had the impression that using the right type of reactor you could both get way more energy out of your fuel and also got waste which you need to store hundreds of years, not thousands.
So for actual work done by the biogas plant products you have a number hovering around 12GWh.
I have no idea what the efficiency of the buses are. I hate them, the city is rather small, taking the bus takes as long as taking the bike and atleast as long as they where driven on diesel you had the rather nasty hot fumes coming out of them when you ride the bike behind them. Not an issue now but whatever. They should close all roads and make it bikes only, no red lights and shit like that. Don't know how to solve the transport of goods though ..
Funny how you're moderated 4 interesting/isnightful thought ..
Finland btw:
Finland generates about 82 billion kWh per year and has a very high per capita electricity consumption – some 16,000 kWh per head per year. While some of it comes from nuclear (22.6 billion kWh, 27.8% in 2009) and hydro (12.6 TWh, 15.5% in 2009), much of it is either imported (12.4 TWh, 15.3% net in 2009) or generated from imported fuels (mostly coal and some gas). Coal is imported from Russia and Poland, all of its gas comes from Russia, and 14% of 2009 electricity was from Russia.
So 27.8% nuclear power in Finland, way lower than Sweden but still more than the USA. And they may/most likely import MORE electricity than we do and use more fossil fuels. Not nearly as bad as the US though ..
How much does dealing with waste cost for each method?
CNBC did run an article on this.
If it is a hoax, they bought it hook, line, and sinker!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/37747904
http://www.yissum.co.il/upload/Potato%20batteries%20ENG%20FINAL.pdf
Not sure if that was exactly intended as 'flame bait', (def. not PC) But the point he made of probable fraud is a probably correct. New cheap energy investment schemes/scams are legend.
look sig is kool
That's just a public relations piece. They pay for that. They run apparently anything if someone pays.
The potato battery, like the others, requires copper and zinc electrodes, which are expensive.
Quote: "... five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells..."
The Energizer brand is heavily advertised and is extremely expensive, about $1.89 per AA size battery. Normal alkaline cells cost about 6 1/4 cents, $0.0625., 30 times less expensive.
The rest of the difference may be due to manufacturing and sales cost.
What is the shelf life of a potato battery? Probably short.
It seems to be fraud.
i prefer to eat that potatoes :-)
anyway, great info there..
http://the-anxiety-disorders.blogspot.com/