New renewable energy ideas "Plant-e". Is it real?

[pplaninsky]

Hey Dave,

I know you like projects like this.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412844945/plant-e-green-clean-electricity-from-living-plants?ref=category

I would love to hear your ballpark calculations on this one.

Enjoy!

[LabSpokane]

I'm not Dave, but I look at more than a few "energy projects" in the course of my work....

There is barely enough data to give this consideration at all.  The founder stated on the video that either 50 or 15 m2 (what she said was not clear) would generate enough to charge a cell phone.  I'm going to assume that this is 5W.  So, best case (15m2) they can generate 0.33W/m2.  They state 3.2W/m2 as a theoretical maximum, so they expect that they can get 10x better.

I live on approximately 450 m2 lot.  If I were to successfully convert all of the surface area to the plant battery system, I could generate 148.5 watts of power using the plant battery system at their current stated output. 

A typical, residential solar panel generates approximately 200W/m2 at peak output.  Covering my property in those would theoretically generate 90,000 watts of power at peak.  Or, over 600 times more power for an equivalent surface area.

Now the question is, how much energy could one expect to generate over a daily cycle?  That is unclear from the presentation.  From my standpoint, I wouldn't even consider a generation technology that took 60-600X more surface area than solar.  But that is my opinion only. 

[wraper]

It is bullshit. Even if it outputs some electricity, no way that it could be commercially viable. My guess it is approximately effective as potato battery  .

[LabSpokane]

It is bullshit. Even if it outputs some electricity, no way that it could be commercially viable. My guess it is approximately effective as potato battery  .

I was going to say that initially, but figured I'd let the numbers speak for themselves.

The one thing that I left out, and I'm going to give the developers more credit than they probably deserve at this point, but this essentially is a photosynthesis "battery."  That would all be well and good if photosynthesis was more than 1% efficient.  It's obviously good for growing plant matter, but it's a crappy way to make electricity.  This puts the theoretical efficiency for Plant-e at substantially below 1% with respect the solar input.   Poor by anyone's metric.

[miguelvp]

Since it's sugar based why don't just do this?

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175137-sugar-powered-biobattery-has-10-times-the-energy-storage-of-lithium-your-smartphone-might-soon-run-on-enzymes

596 amp-hours per kilo

and:

http://phys.org/news107101014.html

[Galenbo]

Someone has to stop this video producers, formerly payed with various subsidies, making their daily scams.

Try to fraud people with money constructions? --> Jail.
Try to fraud people with ecothinkwishings? --> Jail.

[magetoo]

Risks and challenges

The biggest risk we see is that the crowdfund becomes too successful to handle.

Um, yeah.

I could see that this might be a successful product for education.

If they can get the costs down to where the tubes they talk about for larger scale use are essentially free, then it might make sense to use this stuff somewhere where you can just bury them below a field and get a little bit of electricity as a bonus.

But since there are two conversion processes involved (photosynthesis being the first, bacterial metabolism the other), efficiency is going to be pitiful.  It'll have to be free to make any sense.

[rob77]

bullshit 

even if the principle is working and they're not talking 100% bullshit... you would have to seal the anode region from air to make sure the ions are forced through the membrane to recombine with oxygen at the cathode... how the hell would you hermetically seal SEAL the ground surface around the plant ?!