Home > Energy Storage >

Ecofriendly Bacteria Batteries Powered by Dirt


By on October 13, 2009

harvard bacteria battery 2 v3H4Y 69 300x222 Ecofriendly Bacteria Batteries Powered by DirtHarvard scientists have found a solution that could light up homes of some 500 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa. They have created microbial fuel cell (MFC) batteries that derive power from naturally occurring bacteria in soil.

These eco-friendly batteries come in the form of a layer of sand that acts as an ion barrier, mud with manure, salt water, which acts as an electrolyte, a five-pound bucket that carries a graphite-cloth anode and chicken wire cathode. The energy that is released out of the bucket could power a few LED lights and even small electronics.

Lebone is the company created by the Harvard team. They buried 100 units in dirt that will provide energy for several months to Namibian families who lack access to electric energy. When watered to keep the microbes munching, the buried cells can produce power for months.

Rural Africans are used to getting resources out of the ground,” says team member Aviva Presser Aiden, a doctoral student in applied math and genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “We want to tap that familiarity.” This system is ideal for developing nations or poor countries because the MFC batteries are eco-friendly, easily made and cheap to produce.

[Source: Inhabitat/Popular Mechanics]

Liked it? Share on
Facebook and Google +1:
No comments yet.
Break the ice!
E-mail Updates

Also share story on:

Become our facebook fan


Read next:


I Charge My Batteries With Water. How About You?

You go somewhere for the holidays. You have your mp3 player to forget about the “dead times” during not-so-interesting-travels. But what? Suddenly your mp3 player stops working! Noooo!

Cheap Printable Batteries Designed for Low Consumption Applications

A team of researchers from Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz and their colleagues from TU Chemnitz and Menippos GmbH have recently developed a printable battery which is environmentally friendly as it contains no mercury.

MIT Using Viruses To Create Power In Batteries

MIT researchers have developed a new method of building batteries, solar panels and transistors by using… viruses! They announced the discovery of a new way of making the nanomaterials by using viruses as microscopic components. These viruses, inoffensive to the human body, were created to serve as microscopic assembly blocks. Initially, they were used for [...]

Paper Batteries In Cosmetics

“Enfucell”, a Finland-based company, has developed a flexible thin battery named “SoftBattery”. This 0.3 – 1.0 millimeter battery (1.5 or 3.0 V) can produce a peak electric current of 4mA/cm². Enfucell was founded in 2002, after nearly ten years of research on power sources for low-power application conducted at the Automation Laboratory of the Helsinki [...]

Remarkable Lifetime Results for EV Batteries

Scientists from Southern California Edison (SCE) have developed an tested for two and a half years a lithium-ion battery sub-pack with very encouraging results. The battery tested survived 180,000miles with no significant deterioration.


Comments from our readers

3167 total comments so far. What's your opinion ?
  1. No comments on this article yet.
(will not be published)



7 × four =

Not what you were looking for? Search The Green Optimistic!


Tags: Bacteria Batteries, Dirt-powered batteries, eco-friendly batteries, electricity, Harvard, Lebone, MFC, MFC batteries, microbial fuel cell batteries