Potato Power

[Kaere]

An excerpt:

Mashed, boiled, baked or fried? You probably have a preference for your potatoes. Haim Rabinowitch, however, likes his spuds “hacked”.

For the past few years, researcher Rabinowitch and colleagues have been pushing the idea of “potato power” to deliver energy to people cut off from electricity grids. Hook up a spud to a couple of cheap metal plates, wires and LED bulbs, they argue, and it could provide lighting to remote towns and villages around the world.

They’ve also discovered a simple but ingenious trick to make potatoes particularly good at producing energy. “A single potato can power enough LED lamps for a room for 40 days,” claims Rabinowitch, who is based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131112-potato-power-to-light-the-world

[Rockhopper]

Fascinating Ka, thanks for the link. Reminds me of my old high school science daze.

Tim.

[Rogue]

Great! We can reduce our food supply even more now by using it for energy as well

[Kaere]

Yeah, it's a difficult aspect of it all. It's one of the main reasons (besides logistics) for why it hasn't taken off.

[Rogue]

Yes might be an outcry from those golden arch customers when the fries run out

[Stirky]

I'd love to be able to run our light for our stall off potatoes!! That'd be awesome!

[Rockhopper]

Most fruit will do it too, even that which we can't eat Stirkles. Any fruit that has an acidic juice works.

I have experimented with beetroot too (messy!).

The principle is that two dis-similar metals separated by an electrolyte (acid preferably) will generate a charge.

Tim.

[Stirky]

Yes been looking into it and saw about lemons etc too. I will seriously have to try that. We have LED lights on strips that do not take an awful lot of power, so I think it would work nicely

[Kaere]

I thought it was both fascinating and hysterically funny that boiled potatoes produced more electricity than raw ones. It just tickled my funny bone for some reason hehe.

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