I hope they get it to work in the real world. From my office I have a view of an (artificial) shipping channel. A few weeks ago we head heavy rains and for days after the entire channel appeared to carry a lot more mud than usual. I wonder how these membranes would hold up under those conditions.
(Also rivers are used to dump any number of pollutants - from farm runoffs to human and industry waste. By the time any river reaches the oceans it's by no means an ideal clean watre/salt water system).

I started looking at the volume required to power just one house at 12.6 watts per square meter. If you figure an average usage of 29.6 kWh per household per day, and 12.6 watts per cubic meter, that comes to roughly 2350 cubic meters of water per household per day.

To put that in perspective, that's roughly one Olympic sized swimming pool of water for just one household per day.

If that's right, then a river the size of the Potomac with flows between 1 to 2 Billion gallons per day would power about 1500 to 3000 homes.

It's an interesting niche source of energy, but I don't see the density of this energy source making a significant dent in the need for electricity.

I started looking at the volume required to power just one house at 12.6 watts per square meter. If you figure an average usage of 29.6 kWh per household per day, and 12.6 watts per cubic meter, that comes to roughly 2350 cubic meters of water per household per day.

To put that in perspective, that's roughly one Olympic sized swimming pool of water for just one household per day.

If that's right, then a river the size of the Potomac with flows between 1 to 2 Billion gallons per day would power about 1500 to 3000 homes.

It's an interesting niche source of energy, but I don't see the density of this energy source making a significant dent in the need for electricity.

Wrong, the article only says that for every square meter of electrodes SURFACE you can get 12.6 W, nothing about how much Wh you can get for a cubic meter of water VOLUME. By the way you can cramp a big surface in a very small volume, if the electrodes are very thin

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