Eli5 – Why can’t we farm electricity from electric eels and use them for generation?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.