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."

Comments

Re:food, and off topic

[durrr]

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:
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.
/rant