SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Friday September 29 2017, @08:51AM
from the Betteridges-asks-where-would-we-put-the-cables? dept.
from the Betteridges-asks-where-would-we-put-the-cables? dept.
A recently published study estimates that up to 70 percent of the United States' electricity needs could be met through a newly devised system that harvests power from evaporation. This novel renewable power source uses bacterial spores to generate electricity and can sit on top of lakes and reservoirs.
Back in 2015, Ozgur Sahin and a team of scientists from Columbia University revealed an exciting new potential source of renewable energy. The team had created a way to generate energy from the natural process of evaporation using a certain type of bacterial spore. These spores expand and contract as they absorb evaporating moisture, and this oscillating motion could be harnessed to generate a small amount of power.
Where will we water ski?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Is Harvesting Energy from Evaporating Water a Serious Renewable Energy Prospect?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 22 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
For recreational use only.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday September 29 2017, @01:51PM (1 child)
Store it how? If you have the answer to that one, then you don't need to generate anything to get rich. The best ways we have to store energy from the sun are actually fossil fuels, nature already worked it out for us, trouble is that releasing that energy then causes problems.
How about this alternative: store the energy by heating a large body of water, which is also coincidentally what you need for the evaporation...
That's actually the most interesting thing about this proposal, if it works it is actually solar energy storage that can be turned into electricity on demand.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday September 29 2017, @02:28PM
If the energy is heat energy as radiation from the sun, then storing it as heat energy in water is indeed a tried and trusted solution, this has been used in hot water systems world-wide, and the idea of thermal ballast goes back generations. However, the clue to that working is the *storage*. Evaporation is *losing* the molecules that you've imparted the most energy too.
These guys are basically building new versions of some of the famous historical perpetual motion machines:
"""
a plastic wheel covered in pieces of the flexible, spore-covered tape where half is housed inside a humid environment and the other half exposed to the dry, outside air. As half the spores expand with humidity and the other half do not, an imbalance is created in the weight of either side of the wheel which causes it to spin, again creating a constant energy source so long as the imbalance is maintained.
"""
Does that not sound *really like* the /perpetuum mobile/ wheel with taut rubber bands as spokes, which if placed in sunlight would turn, to you?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves