Why can’t we farm electricity from electric eels and use them for generation?
Or if that’s impossible, could we figure out the biochemistry and recreate it in lab settings and then generate from that?
In: 0
Eels have static electricity… It can shock you, but it’s not that powerful in terms of wats… **IT IS HARD TO CONVERT STATIC ELECTRICITY TO FLOWING**
Animal torture aside, eels aren’t perpetuum mobile… And even if you could extract electricity from them (hard) you would have to farm them (we don’t know how) and feed them (hard and experience)
It all takes some sort of fuel, those eels need food, anything we do needs to have something to use for electricity creation.
It isn’t predictable enough.
Pretty well every method of electricity production we have is isn’t about harvesting electricity. When we talk about different methods it’s about turning a generator.
Nuclear, coal, wind, hydro dam, solar salt, these all produce electricity the same way. By using heat or kinetic energy to perform some function which then turns the generator. The generator is where we gather the power.
Solar cell is really the only other way to produce power outside of conventional methods.
Eels would not be as predictable as a generator, not to mention the physical limitations of wiring every eel, scaring them into a shock, and the type of electricity they produce is not equivalent to what we need to power our homes and industry etc
There is an issue with inefficiency that makes both of these ideas impractical.
Electric eels require food and the amount of food that they need to consume would require more energy to produce the food then the eels could produce as electricity. Living creatures are not 100% efficient.
The same thing is true for their biochemical reaction that produces electricity. Manufacture of the chemicals would require greater energy than we could capture from the process.
The planet earth if you imagine it as a closed system, has one huge external input, the sun. The sun provides the system with energy, that energy can be used to grow food to raise a donkey that turns a wheel, that wheel can be used to generate power. In each step, growing food, feeding the donkey, turning the wheel, and producing electricity. Some energy is lost. Those losses in energy are large and with each conversion heat and other forms of energy loss subtracts from the net energy.
Solar power generation is overall about 15%. That is to say 85% of the energy that came from the sun became unusable in the process.
Biological efficiency is estimated to be about 10%, leading to 90% waste.
Coal is about 33% efficient when used to generate power, this doesn’t take into account the other problems it produces.
Nuclear power generation is potentially as high as 45% with fourth generation power plants but again that doesn’t address the potential problems.
All of this might make you wonder about electric cars and gasoline, fossil fuels powered cars are anywhere between 17-21% efficient. EV have the advantage of coal or nuclear efficiency vs gasoline which can range as low as 10% and approach EV efficiency is smaller low HP engines (which are not common.)
Any form of energy we can think of using had problems with efficiency when we want to convert it to something useful.
One last thought, your body is about 25% efficient when converting food.
Latest Answers