Bugpower, the energy of the future [View All]

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This sci-fi scenario may lie in the not-too-distant future, thanks to a pair of US-based scientists who say they have invented the world's first efficient "bacterial battery."

Microbial fuel cells are not new, but until now they have run into big problems of cost and energy efficieny. Typically, they yield efficiency of "10 percent or less," which makes them big and unwieldy relative to the power they provide, Lovley said. The best effort has had an efficiency performance of about 50 percent.
But this was only achieved thanks to chemicals called mediators which sneak across the cell's membranes, pick up the free electrons and ferry them to the anode.

In a Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery's source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity. Their prototype device ran flawlessly without refuelling for up to 25 days and is cheap and stable.

For people living in poor, remote communities, it should be possible to adapt the electrodes so that they used carbohydrate waste from farm animals or sewage to power batteries for running fridges and stoves. The US Department of Defense was interested in it for powering underwater microphones and sonar to spot passing ships and submarines.

Not the silver bullet we're looking for, but interesting nonetheless. Its energy efficiency is 83 percent. Good, good...

Hey,are microbes a renewable source?