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posted by martyb on Friday September 29 2017, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Friday September 29 2017, @02:10PM

    by ledow (5567) on Friday September 29 2017, @02:10PM (#574796) Homepage

    Yes, but this is DIRECT USAGE not use of previously-stored energy.

    Evaporated water hasn't been stored underground at the same energy level for millions of years, slowly building up on planetary scales, for millennia (and if it had, releasing it quickly for our temporary and brief but high-power uses is no different to burning oil).

    You're literally getting "energy of sunlight" minus "energy needed to evaporate" over a large area, which is always going to be less than you need (it's really NOT that much, even with 0% conversion losses) and on a par with a solar panel / solar heating setup.

    It will be quicker, cheaper and simpler to mirror the sun to a pot of water and boil it to steam than it would be to try to capitalise on tiny bits of movement in evaporated air. And that's already an established and proven technology which only works in some parts of the world and needs to be deploy en-masse to make any kind of dent in power usage.

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