Potato-Powered Batteries Debut 284
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."
Israel and batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Puff piece (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Puff piece (Score:3, Interesting)
So... more energy efficient... because it takes no energy at all to boil potatos?
Thanks, that made me chortle :) At first I agreed completely - it seems silly to waste energy boiling potatoes just to increase battery efficiency. Now that I think about it, though, you could boil them easily enough using a solar-cooker type device. I'm not sure what the availability of those is in the third-world, though. If they're not in wide use, I'd say teaching people how to make them would be a lot more useful than showing them how to make potato batteries.
Mod parent up (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Power from Zinc/Copper?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't this consume copper like lemon batteries [wikipedia.org]? Doesn't that have to be replaced too? No mention in the article.
Re:Puff piece (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, except solar cookers could be used for other things, too. Like, you know, maybe ... cooking?
They're also something which can be constructed using basic tools and materials, by a third-world potato farmer who dropped out of school in grade 3. Solar panels and battery chargers ... not so much.
Re:food (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:food, and off topic (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bulllllllllshit! (Score:3, Interesting)
I could only wish what you think is true and Mossad would shot a bullet in your stupid head. Unfortunately, it's not and Israeli citizen will have to keep suffering with Hamas rockets falling in their heads.
One amazing thing about congenital psychopaths is that they have a marvelous facility for mangling language in such a way as to speak truth without their intending to.
It took me three readings to spot the glaring "WTF?" item in the above quote. This is largely because the normal human automatically forgives and tries to auto-correct their reading of other people's social faux-pas out of embarrassment on their behalf. Everybody makes typos, but "George Bush Jr." moments are special, they carry a certain flavor of 'Wrong', and they are one of the tell-tale signs that one is dealing with a monster.
-FL
Re:food (Score:3, Interesting)
Precisely. Isn't the #1 problem in "developing 3rd world countries" there being enough food to go around, not electricity?
Nope.
We already produce enough food to go around, the #1 problem in developing countries is their political system. It tends to be tyrannical, and they tend to intentionally keep their people starving.
This is why these home-grown operations are being attempted - if the people don't have to rely on their government to make the tools to increase their production, then it becomes harder to oppress them.
Just think about what we do with electricity - it was a major revolution when it came about, and we use it for everything now. For one simple example, if they can make small amounts of electricity they can separate hydrogen and oxygen from water. If they can do that, they can build fuel cells. This gives them a much more potent source of electricity, with which they can begin to power tools to build larger apparatus which will increase their local ability to produce food. You look at the US today, 100 years ago almost everyone was a farmer. Today, about 5% of people cover that job (and subsidies are keeping that number artificially high) and we produce so much food it's actually the #1 health problem.
If we can teach them to produce food at 1/10th our efficiency, their food problem is solved and it will be difficult for their government to use food as an oppressive tool (though not impossible - look at North Korea). Once the food problem is solved, the people can turn their efforts to industry, and before too long graduate to a "first world" country (first world and third world are really more political labels than anything).