My first thought was the pee powered generator is hokum, as it uses an electrolysis cell to liberate flammable gas from the urine. But just maybe it is possible to generate more power than is consumed by the electrolysis, as urine is not water. Urine has some ammonia in it for example, which burns well enough. Chemistry was never my strength though.
The claims seem pretty OTT though. The generator shown in the photo will only run an hour or so on a litre of gasoline, yet they claim 6 hours on a litre of pee.
From the description, it sounds like they’re filtering out the hydrogen pretty carefully, so it doesn’t sound to me like they’re getting any benefit by using urine vs water. People keep announcing these things, and no one in the media ever seems to catch on to the fundamental problem of how they claim to be getting free energy from nothing. The electrolysis is always going to take more energy than you get from the hydrogen. Always.
Which isn’t a problem if the primary energy source used is solar or wind and not a plug in your home. Then it comes down to storage. Can you store more energy from the sun in hydrogen or batteries within the same volume and weight? A catalyst can be used to safely store hydrogen in a liquid form if safety is a concern. I think energy vs volume and weight, hydrogen wins over bulky batteries. Hydrogen is definitely cleaner too. I think we are close to cheaper energy.
Clicking through the links, I found the source paper (PDF) for urea electrolysis, published in Chem. Communications, by The Royal Society of Chemistry. It looks legit, although I’m not really qualified to judge.
A picture in one of the links showed it hooked up to a single light bulb, although there were also a couple of unused outlets wired in as well. Possibly, even the light bulb isn’t on, and it’s just the generator idling. ETA: it is just a science fair project, so that’s not really unreasonable.
As I said in that thread, they didn’t claim to generate more power than they consumed, so it’s not hokum, Think of it as a way to get rid of unwanted urine and providing yourself with oportable energy as a sideline.
Don’t worry about mangling my nom de internet.
They’re missing out on the energy that could be generated from the flow of urine, using a hydro generator (a miniature of the ones used at dams). Some research into this was done last century by Nobel-prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman and mentioned in one of his books.
