Techcrunch: This Algae Battery Could Power A Tesla With 200X The Charge

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Ryan Bethencourt

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May 31, 2014, 1:52:13 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

Ryan Bethencourt

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Jun 3, 2014, 11:14:07 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


On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Josiah Zayner <josiah...@gmail.com> wrote:
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?

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Patrik D'haeseleer

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Jun 4, 2014, 12:56:41 AM6/4/14
to Ryan Bethencourt, Josiah Zayner, diybio, sudo-discuss, countercu...@googlegroups.com, berkeley...@googlegroups.com
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

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Jun 4, 2014, 1:21:04 AM6/4/14
to Patrik D'haeseleer, Josiah Zayner, diybio, sudo-discuss, countercu...@googlegroups.com, berkeley...@googlegroups.com
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? :)

June 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM
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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