I keep seeing this and similar announcements on biotech power generation, and have evern written about it myself. Why isn’t this being investigated with significantly more funding?
Power Up With Magnetic Bacteria
A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.
Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.
Madiraju put the free-floating bacteria, which are essentially tiny magnets, into plastic boxes less than a fifth of a cubic inch. Metal strips on two sides act as electrodes and get them spinning, generating a magnetic field and an electric current. Current and power were sustained at 25 microamps and 5.5 microwatts, respectively, beyond 48 hours at a resistance of 10 kohms.
Even if this only provided small amounts of energy, it would at least give us something valuable from otherwise useless resevoirs of waste like all those lakes of pigshit currently being maintained at factory farms across the country.
Energy from crapola? We don’t need to drill for oil. Connect a pipeline up to Washington, DC and we’ll have the ultimate endless energy source! Not to mention the hot air that can move the windmills…
WOW! Energy from tiny little microbes. Put this thing in the shitterbowl and power your home with half the energy of a AAA battery! WHERE CAN I BUY ONE???
Man … I wonder which university he’s going to … dang, wish I could do something like that …
Good for the kid, good for ingenuity!
There’s a lot of potential energy (like physics 101) in the world, stuck in chemical bonds. And there’s a lot of kinetic energy that goes wasted (wind, waves, etc).
One day, I truly believe that energy will be cheap and plentiful. It will be a better world.
Seriously, it is probably possible to grow huge amounts of bacteria a maybe power a light bulb????? Sounds like a neat science hobby, though!
P.S. Coal has about 2 or 3 percent manure in it and 2 or 3 percent wood pulp mixed in, so we ARE using biomass usefully.
Energy is cheap and plentiful now. That seems to be a problem for some people.
Yes George, cheap and plentiful for now. Won’t be too long before it isn’t though. Won’t be very long at all.
I’ve been an environmental engineer in the past.
Anerobic (e.g. no air is added to the mix) digestion of sewage in treatment plants to produce methane is nothing new. Wastewater treatment plants have been using methane from their anaerobic digesters to help power those plants for a long time. Animal feedlots can and probably do the same. Big minus point–anerobic digestion smells bad. That’s why most of a wastewater plant decomposes waste aerobically (air is injected into the waste, and it requires energy to pump the air and digest, but it doesn’t smell as bad).
I’m unsure about the practicality of using magnetic bacteria for similar purposes, though. What do the bacteria eat (not all of them will eat sewage)? Is more energy produced than is put into the system to produce the magnetic field (otherwise known as exceeding the breakeven point)?