Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Is Harvesting Energy from Evaporating Water a Serious Renewable Energy Prospect?

posted by martyb on Friday September 29 2017, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridges-asks-where-would-we-put-the-cables? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived.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
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 29 2017, @01:53PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 29 2017, @01:53PM (#574784) Journal

    Presumably the idea is to let the glass concentrate sunlight and trap heat to aid evaporation, then when the moisture hits the top of the structure it is cleverly designed to channel the drips so that they collect and "rain" upon the higher-altitude "collection" part of the landscape. That is likely to result in build up of algae/ slime/ moss/ who-the-hell-knows-what on pretty much any surface that gets wet. Your shiny glass dome could be opaque green within 12 months, which would negatively affect not only sunlight collection, but the potability of the water. Keeping it all clean would be a bitch. Maybe you could use some sort of automatic drone cleaner armed with lasers or sound waves or something?

    I think the solution here would be to separate the wet part from the part that needs to be clear. If moisture never collects on the glass, then you've eliminated that particular problem. And the part that is condensing water would be opaque, reducing the amount of junk growing on things. Not perfect, but still vastly less contaminants in the water.