Back to the roots: the real meaning of a "power plant"

April 26, 2015 12:16 PM

Three researchers develop E-Kaia, a phone charger that plugs into a plant.

E-kaia (a product that goes against all logic in the world of electronics) consists in a biological circuit that channeled the natural energy and allows portable electronic items, mainly cellphones, charged with energy from a plant, without relying on a power grid.

The type of circuit used is, of course, a secret that is expected to receive its patent in May this year.

Evelyn Aravena, Camila Rupcich and Carolina Guerrero, the three women who invented E-Kaia also have a Facebook site.

posted by ipsative (17 comments total)

I am slightly skeptical.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:19 PM on April 26, 2015

No details, cagey about the 'secret', patent to come? There is no way this isn't going to turn out to be either an elaborate joke or a 'lamp powered only by gravity!'-tier scam.
posted by fifthrider at 12:22 PM on April 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is essentially an inefficient solar panel that takes twenty years to grow.
posted by FallowKing at 12:29 PM on April 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Wow, a Facebook site? You'd think they have a proof of concept to show a VC and get that polish and funding that they need. Unless of course there is no proof, only a concept.
posted by oceanjesse at 12:50 PM on April 26, 2015

i'm sure this can all be explained by the perpetual motion device inside the patented chip.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 1:24 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Great now I can literally suck the life out of the biosphere in order to look at Facebook I was tired of it just being a metaphor :/
posted by dephlogisticated at 1:26 PM on April 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

That's... not how plants work. That's not how anything works!

This won't work.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:29 PM on April 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

This isn't even.
posted by Devonian at 2:19 PM on April 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

The electricity is NOT in the lemon!
posted by chavenet at 3:32 PM on April 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

The award that these three women won in November [translated].

Allows charging a cell in one hour and a half, with capacity to run low-power electronic devices such as notebooks, batteries, or lights. In addition, E-Kox managed to generate a circuit underground, which generates 5 volts and 600 milliamps, without damaging the trees at all.

posted by Revvy at 4:16 PM on April 26, 2015

Finally! It is about time plants started pulling their weight! What else are they good for?
posted by pashdown at 4:43 PM on April 26, 2015

Here's a video of the women and their device. It looks like if anything, it's drawing power from the soil, but I don't see how that would work with a few inches of soil in a flowerpot. I wonder if the device is actually just completing the charging circuit and making the charge indicator come on without any actual power generated.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:55 PM on April 26, 2015

What's the Lorax have to say about all of this? He does, after all, speak for the trees.
posted by ostranenie at 6:46 PM on April 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Back when I was in school, a soon-to-be-legendary student in the computer science department designed an asynchronous logic CPU that used local handshaking between subcircuits instead of a global clock to ensure that data streams remain consistent with each other. To demonstrate that the chip worked correctly even with super low power supplies, he plugged it in to a potato.

No joke.
posted by brambleboy at 9:54 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Finally! A way to subjugate those lazy inedible plants that have been leeching off of OUR world for far too long.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 10:54 PM on April 26, 2015

The feasibility of the device depends on what scientific principle this device relies upon and the article is scant on actual details. The gravity lamp was easily disproven with back of the envelope calculations based on given information. It would have worked, it just required a much larger rock (think boulder), so wasn't interesting as anything more than an art piece.

Given that the article specifies that the device produces 3 watts (which is what a cheaper cell phone charger will output), I doubt it's just completing the circuit.

The World Bank Group ranks Chile as 41st on list of companies to do business in, behind Hungary and Kazakhstan, so the local climate is probably not so amenable to "show a VC", Shark-Tank style fund-raising. Forbes mentions that Lilliputian Systems, a portable fuel-cell company (a somewhat similar product) raised $140 million and still barely got a product to market (according to Forbes). (They have since folded, though there are other portable fuel-cells on the market.)

There's a good number of non-tech businesses like cafes that use Facebook as their primary online presence, so while we can judge them for it, it's not unheard of, even in the US.

Depending on the limitations of the technology, it may not even be all that interesting - 3 watts isn't very much. It could be interesting for camping, but outside of that, access to electricity in the US can be considered ubiquitous.

So; we'll see when the patent comes out.
posted by fragmede at 11:18 PM on April 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's probably like those cars that “run” on aluminium and water (but really run on the evolved H₂), and the moisture from the plant is the only thing required to get it going.

I get a lot of crank energy schemes in my line of work. The best one was the water car that was supposed to use aluminium and water, but it turned out that they'd substituted magnesium for aluminium (‘it's lighter!’) and sodium hydroxide for water (‘it's quicker!’).
posted by scruss at 5:03 AM on April 27, 2015