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.
The
idea may seem absurd, yet it is rooted in sound science. Still,
Rabinowitch and his team have discovered that actually launching potato
power in the real world is much more complex than it first appears.
While
Rabinowitch and team have found a way to make potatoes produce more
power than usual, the basic principles are taught in high school science
classes, to demonstrate how batteries work.
To make a battery
from organic material, all you need is two metals – an anode, which is
the negative electrode, such as zinc, and a cathode, the positively
charged electrode, such as copper. The acid inside the potato forms a
chemical reaction with the zinc and copper, and when the electrons flow
from one material to another, energy is released.
