Techcrunch: This Algae Battery Could Power A Tesla With 200X The Charge
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Ryan Bethencourt
May 31, 2014, 1:52:17 PM5/31/14
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Hi All,
We're super excited for the first bit of coverage on techcrunch of what we hope will be transformative tech for batteries.
Adam's company, Algas Biotech is developing early stage technology to replace the use of rare metals in batteries (i.e. much more eco friendly and it would remove CO2 from the atmosphere as part of the production of Algae). The technology is still early (with all the expected caveats that early stage science has) but Adam's going to have more news to share in the near future!
All the best,
Ryan
Josiah Zayner
May 31, 2014, 2:30:53 PM5/31/14
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No actual mention of how anything works and the video doesn't explain anything. Are you just passing a current through algae in the video? One can pass a current through tap water.....
No offense, but it seems like the TechCrunch article is a paid advertisement.... It doesn't say anything.
Is the goal to using algae as electrodes maybe, like previous work of others?
Do you think using anything living, like algae could even be used in a Car battery? how would it survive heat?, cold? Anything that isn't a normal environment?
Don't algae need light to grow?? How would this work in a battery?
No offense, but it seems like the TechCrunch article is a paid advertisement.... It doesn't say anything.
Is the goal to using algae as electrodes maybe, like previous work of others?
Do you think using anything living, like algae could even be used in a Car battery? how would it survive heat?, cold? Anything that isn't a normal environment?
Don't algae need light to grow?? How would this work in a battery?
John Griessen
May 31, 2014, 2:32:41 PM5/31/14
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On 05/31/2014 12:52 PM, Ryan Bethencourt wrote:
> We're super excited
So, besides showing conductivity, has he got any diode action to show? Polarity?
Does his cell design depend on algae being alive as it appears in the jars?
How does that impact use in a car battery pack?
> We're super excited
So, besides showing conductivity, has he got any diode action to show? Polarity?
Does his cell design depend on algae being alive as it appears in the jars?
How does that impact use in a car battery pack?
Simon Quellen Field
May 31, 2014, 3:15:28 PM5/31/14
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I agree the article and video are nearly content free.
However, using a nifty tool called Google, I have found some web pages that might shed more light on how to use algae in batteries. This page talks about a 200% improvement over lithium-ion, and I can see how that may have been garbled into "200x" if someone were not reading or listening carefully. Here is another page about the same research.
The person in the video seems to be talking about a carbene coating, which if applied to high-surface-area nanofibers could make a nice conducting electrode in a battery or supercapacitor. Perhaps he is replacing the polypyrrole conducting polymer with one based on conductive carbenes, but I may not have heard him correctly -- the audio in that piece was pretty bad.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/538A2041.1050807%40industromatic.com.
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Biotech Ryan
Jun 3, 2014, 8:06:55 PM6/3/14
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Yeah this article is fairly content light because Adam wasn't able to share all the details yet and the Techcrunch team wanted to publish ASAP, so it was definitely rushed out. After the article came out Adam and I were both flooded with questions, excitement, criticism, trolling, offers of partnerships and all sorts of odd emails but in response Adam's currently pulling together a FAQ (which I'll share here) and he's staying focused on building the tech to demo it soon (hopefully in the next 2 months).
Just to explain the relationship between Adam and I, Adam's company, Algas Biotechnologies, is currently one of the incubees at Berkeley Biolabs (one of five currently) and my co-founders and I are supporting him on both the scientific and business end.
It's still very much early stage science but if it works as hoped, it would be pretty transformative for battery tech and of course, it's a big if as science doesn't always work as you'd hoped/planned. More info to come soon!
Ryan
On Saturday, May 31, 2014 12:15:28 PM UTC-7, Simon Field wrote:
I agree the article and video are nearly content free.However, using a nifty tool called Google, I have found some web pages that might shed more light on how to use algae in batteries. This page talks about a 200% improvement over lithium-ion, and I can see how that may have been garbled into "200x" if someone were not reading or listening carefully. Here is another page about the same research.The person in the video seems to be talking about a carbene coating, which if applied to high-surface-area nanofibers could make a nice conducting electrode in a battery or supercapacitor. Perhaps he is replacing the polypyrrole conducting polymer with one based on conductive carbenes, but I may not have heard him correctly -- the audio in that piece was pretty bad.
On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 11:32 AM, John Griessen <jo...@industromatic.com> wrote:
On 05/31/2014 12:52 PM, Ryan Bethencourt wrote:
We're super excited
So, besides showing conductivity, has he got any diode action to show? Polarity?
Does his cell design depend on algae being alive as it appears in the jars?
How does that impact use in a car battery pack?
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Ryan Bethencourt
Jun 3, 2014, 11:14:15 PM6/3/14
to Josiah Zayner, diybio, sudo-discuss, countercu...@googlegroups.com, berkeley...@googlegroups.com
Hey Josiah,
Thanks for asking, there have been a lot of questions around Adam's algae battery and he's asked me to help with responding briefly to the questions. He's going to be pulling together a FAQ for a lot of the questions that he and I were asked (we were pretty much flooded with emails and calls the last couple of days). In a nutshell, this is very early tech, so it's most definitely a work in progress and as with much early stage science, there's no guarantee it will definitely work but Adam's working hard to finish off the prototype.
I'll be sharing the FAQ in a few weeks and we're looking forward to having a prototype to show in about 2ish months. Bear with us as the article came out a lot faster than we expected it would.
R
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Patrik D'haeseleer
Jun 4, 2014, 12:56:48 AM6/4/14
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Yeah, I think the TechCrunch article was really poorly done. But it just goes to show there's no such thing as bad publicity...
Looking forward to hearing a bit more than that a 9V battery can light up an LED. ;-)
Patrik
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Ryan Bethencourt
Jun 4, 2014, 1:21:10 AM6/4/14
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Cool thanks for the update
Alan, so there's the start of the prototype :)
Patrik - it was definitely a rush, we didn't expect it to go live so quickly and there were a lot of claims that were made that were just theoretical limits, although not yet proven. The idea though did excite some people about the possibilities of consumer biotech which is always a good thing and this is hopefully one of the first of many many more projects. Vegan cheese next? :)
Patrik - it was definitely a rush, we didn't expect it to go live so quickly and there were a lot of claims that were made that were just theoretical limits, although not yet proven. The idea though did excite some people about the possibilities of consumer biotech which is always a good thing and this is hopefully one of the first of many many more projects. Vegan cheese next? :)
Yeah, I think the TechCrunch article was really poorly done. But it just goes to show there's no such thing as bad publicity...Looking forward to hearing a bit more than that a 9V battery can light up an LED. ;-)Patrik
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