Quantsuff sent me a link to an article about a table that is used to grow moss and which furnishes a small amount of electricity. It is in the research stage, so not enough power is generated to do anything more than power a small device such as a LED for a short while. But it does have potential (no pun intended) to turn into a useful source of electricity.
The amount of electricity developed by each moss pot is minuscule, only a half volt at 5 to 10 microamps. It would take several thousand in series-parallel to give enough current to light a LED to reasonable brightness. I could see using this to do something in a location that has limited or no sunlight. A small solar panel could put out thousands of times more power than this moss, but only during daylight hours.
I have seen some “Free Energy” fanatics discussing about how to make electricity from a tree. They thought there would be enough to power a small device such as temperature / weather monitoring equipment and power to be able to send the data periodically to a satellite or cell site. I didn’t take it too seriously mainly because some environmentalists might take offense to draining their trees of electricity. But maybe they could let the researchers play around with moss without complaining.
Update – Another link from QS, this one about a spinach powered solar cell. It doesn’t sound serious, but the process of photosynthesis is a very efficient way to use the energy in sunlight to make biomass. Also, I would like to point out one thing they said in the article: the very first sentence. I quote:
“Earth Day 2012 proved exceptionally green for a Vanderbilt University team of five engineering seniors who designed a biohybrid solar panel that substitutes a protein from spinach for expensive silicon wafers that are energy intensive to produce, and is capable of producing electricity.”
The key part is “expensive silicon wafers that are energy intensive to produce”. People don’t realize that silicon solar cells take a lot of energy in the manufacturing process. If the amount of energy it takes to make a solar cell is a substantial amount of the total energy it will convert in its lifetime, then one has to realize that it is not making totally renewable energy. One has to include the amount of energy it took to manufacture into the total amount of energy it is putting out. Say for instance a solar cell puts out a million Joules of energy in its lifetime, but it took a half million Joules to produce, then it is really only 50% renewable energy when you look at the overall picture. At the present time, almost all of the half million Joules of energy used to produce it was derived from non-renewable energy sources.
The same thing applies to any form of generation. I believe that the nuclear power industry has large hidden costs incurred during production of the fuel. Those centrifuges and other equipment used to enrich the fuel take a lot of power and may not be running on renewable energy. And there are substantial costs to transporting, refueling and storing the fuel of the nuclear power plants.
These hidden costs must be accounted for in any renewable energy system. If they are not, then we are not getting the true ‘renewableness’ of a supposedly renewable energy system. And it also makes these biophotovoltaic solar cells look more attractive since they take less energy to produce.
I also believe that there needs to be more of an awareness of what is happening to our existing matter and energy that is being made from the sun.