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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."
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.
It's not an electrical grid, it's just a series of tubers.
Or they could just eat them...
+1 Insightful. If I am a 3rd world citizen, lacking food or means to purchase it, and I have some potatoes, and I am hungry and I have a flashlight or radio or whatever that needs juice, well, they are going to remain without power as I gobble down. Now if it was something like a person with an iPad, even if they are starving and impoverished, I think they would choose differently due to reality distortion fields. How they got the iPad I don't know, that is an exercise for the reader, and that reality distortion field is strong enough these days that there should be some sort of energy harvester for it in the works anyways.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
NEWSFLASH - not everyone in developing nation is starving and short of food. For some, an alternative power source such as this is appropriate.
THANK YOU. That sort of mentality disgusts me. I stayed at a place in Belize near the Guatemalan border once, and that place is third world by anyone's definition. And walking down the streets you had to dodge the chickens and keep an eye out for falling mangoes. I'm sure that if they had a way to power their cell phone towers with mangoes and chickens (and other plentiful items, they'd be thrilled to do so.
The CB App. What's your 20?
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus. In fact, potato production could be increased to accommodate use for batteries, and in any case th ere is actually a surplus. Total world food production is adequate - the reason that some people starve is poor distribution of the available food, in considerable part due to political reasons. (Starvation in North Korea, for example, is the result of the incompetence of the country's government.)
Possibly because solar power is pretty big in Israel, so high tech batteries are in their best interest. And, just some baseless postulating here, but when you're surrounded by neighbors who don't much care for you whose biggest asset is oil, improving those alternative energy techniques might be a good idea. If Israel perfected solar power & storage, that could conceivably go a ways towards helping the world kick it's oil habit (solar powered batteries for your house and car), which would cut into the cashflow of said neighbors. 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.
Hell, many of them probably eat better than we do... less reliance on hyper-processed junk.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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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.