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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

> a team at Concordia University in Wisconsin developed micro photosynthetic power cells that generate electricity from algae.

Cool! But I’m so cynical about this: there are so many cool party tricks you can pull off in a lab.

The hard part is making it scale and be economical. And that’s why 99.9% of these stories end with: “and we never heard from them again”.

Still I genuinely hope I’m wrong

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"power cells that generate electricity from algae"... in mice

Maybe specially bred mice that eat algae and put millions of them in little hamster wheels?

Eat algae -> fart methane -> fuel cell ?

The paper linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668458 doesn't sound like they've developed any power cells, only modeled what their behavior would be, so it's not even "a cool party trick they pulled off in a lab" but "pulled off in a computer"

On the other hand, section 3 iirc is the one where they discuss manufacturing, so there is some thought already going into what you're saying

Algae is very hard to scale. Do many r&d projects...is there anything that has scaled with algae?

Yeah scale is always the hard part; but it’s academia’s role largely to turn over stones and see what’s under them. It’s industry’s job to figure out which pathways are actually worth pursuing and which can be scalable/economically feasible. You never know which tech avenue might end up having some odd edge-case use unseen by researchers that ends up being a revolutionary because industry figures out how to apply it in some adjacent domain.

It's not really that disjoint, though. Academics spin out companies, and companies employ scientists.

Oh 100% - I am part-time employed by one such company and am currently pursuing a doctorate. I was just trying to point out that it’s always worth it IMO to be trying out all sorts of crazy stuff like this even if it doesn’t pan out as a deployable tech. If it makes sense to spin out the startup, it will happen!

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