Greg:
- Oh! - Oh!
Mitch:
as we try to bike enough to make our entire home off-grid.
I'm scared 'cause I have to pee,
and it's so dark outside.
Greg, this is way too scary.
Greg: Strobe light.
Mitch: I hate going outside in the dark.
Mitch:
and it's not just our sexy good looks.
- It's climate change.
Mitch:
out of the classroom and into the country.
Greg:
Mitch:
- Aah! - Oh, my God.
Greg:
Mitch:
Yes! It works!
Mitch:
Mitchell and Greg:
Mitch: Our power has officially been shut off.
We're off the grid now, which means that we can't use our lights in this cabin,
we can't use our phones or our laptops.
I am also gonna go on airplane mode.
I mean, we can until they run out of juice.
Honestly, I'm a little nervous, 'cause I don't think we realize
just how much we use electricity in everyday devices around us.
Canadians alone use 30 kilowatt hours a day.
That's enough energy to wash 13 1/2 loads of laundry.
We're hoping to power our cabin and the devices that we're using in it.
We have four light bulbs,
we want to be able to charge a laptop,
and Greg has an addiction to his phone.
I like my phone more than most of my friends and family.
It is my escape from the existential dread that is life on this planet.
Mitch:
to make power off-grid,
but we want to explore some more unique options first.
We do love renewables here at AsapSCIENCE though.
#LeaveFossilFuelsintheGround.
We are in our absolutely pitch black cabin.
Where's anything that I need?
We have our flashlight, but sadly it's in here somewhere,
but it's so dark, we can't find it.
We literally can't find our flashlight.
Mitch:
for the vast majority of emissions.
Just 5% of the world's power plants
produce 73% of electricity emissions,
but we believe that making individual change where you can
is the first step towards impacting the bigger picture,
both socially and politically.
Plus, it can be fun.
I am obsessed with pee.
I'm doing something real bonkers.
I want to charge my cell phone with pee.
And the way I'm gonna do that
is by creating a microbial fuel cell
using my urine as a fuel source.
Now in here we have anaerobic bacteria
whose waste is electrons.
Oh, for real?
Yes, and if we can feed it our urine...
- Oh, ew, is that yours? - Literal urine as a food source
for bacteria in this mud-- anaerobic bacteria.
The breakdown of the nutrients in our urine,
like the glucose and the potassium, will release electrons.
If we can harness that in a direct circuit,
I think I could power my phone.
That's cool though if that works.
It just seems really disgusting right now,
and I'm doubting myself and whether we'll air this.
Now my project is something I have been dreaming of doing for a long time.
Honestly, for two years he's been talking about this, so I hope it works there, bud.
So my dream is hook in some bicycles and use that as a power source.
I'm basically gonna be using the kinetic motion of their wheels
into a generator, and collecting that power as you can see here.
Hopefully we can get enough to charge our home.
Good luck, hons.
Before we get started on our projects,
we need to talk about what electricity actually is.
The secret to understanding how electricity works
is understanding atoms.
Now, atoms make up everything you see or touch,
and in fact, you are only just a complex conglomeration of atoms.
Sorry, hon.
In simple terms, every atom has a nucleus
that contains positively charged protons and neutral neutrons
which are surrounded by negatively charged electrons.
These electrons "orbit" the protons and neutrons
as seen here.
And there's a lot more complexity to this,
but we're gonna keep it quite simple for now
and not try to enter the quantum realm.
Now electrons, in particular the outer electrons,
can move between atoms.
Generally that movement is in all directions,
but if we can make them move collectively in one direction,
that becomes an electric current.
What's, like, the hottest way to hold a shovel?
Like, over your back?
So we're on our way to get some anaerobic bacteria.
Mitch:
Greg:
as well Shewanella bacteria.
Basically, anaerobic bacteria exists in environments
where there is no oxygen,
so not only do we have water covering this here,
we're gonna dig down under the stream, pull up a bunch of that mud,
and hopefully we'll be finding anaerobic bacteria.
- Imagine we found, like... - A terrifying animal?
Or treasure of sorts.
Like all living cells,
microorganisms like bacteria need energy to live.
They generate energy by consuming nutrients,
in this case supplied by our urine.
Greg:
go through aerobic respiration.
This means they create energy by using oxygen
as an electronic accepter, ultimately creating ATP,
the energy molecule.
But the absence of oxygen,
some special anaerobic bacteria
are able to transport their electrons
to other substances like metals or even graphite
to create their own energy.
If we can provide them with that metal
and harness those electrons,
then we might be able to create our own bioelectricity.
Heave ho.
I really hope that you guys are in there.
Oh, if you look real close, you can kind of see them.
Totally kidding.
It's too bad. We won't really know
until we start our experiment if we got them.
Now that Greg has his mud,
it's time for me to start my experiment.
The average Canadian household uses around
30 kilowatt hours of electricity per day.
We only have a few light bulbs and a laptop in our bunky though.
So I only need to generate a fraction of that,
about 0.6 kilowatt hours with my bike generator experiment.
But to pull it off, I need help from our buildmaster Paul.
Thank you so much, Paul.
For our bike experiment, we have built this rig here
to hold onto the back wheel,
and we have it connected down here to a little skateboard wheel,
and that skateboard wheel is actually spinning our generator.
Generators use magnetic fields to move electrons through metals such as copper.
This principle is tied to Faraday's law of induction,
which states that when you move or change a magnetic field
in the vicinity of a coil wire,
it induces an electrical current in that wire.
Greg:
'cause there's only one little measly electron
here in the outer shell that can be easily moved.
That's why copper wire is so good at having electrons
move in one direction along it
and having electricity flow, and we'll be using it today.
For my experiment, I'm going cutting edge.
Few people in the world have successfully built
a fuel cell with microbes that can charge a mobile phone.
The guy credited for doing it first
is Professor Yannis Ieropoulos.
It took him close to 20 years to make it work.
I'm attempting to do it in less than a week.
Okay, wait, there's a lot going on here.
I thought you were just trying to figure out how to charge your phone with pee.
I know. We got carried away.
So in this first urinal is funnel where you will pee.
Your pee will come through down here into this jar.
This jar will fill up with urine.
Okay.
- And then you get on here. - What is this?
Put this up, wash your hands.
- What? - You get off.
- Boom! We're watering our kale, first of all. - Beautiful.
But our pee now has the force of gravity
- to come down into our fuel cell. - Oh, my gosh.
Here's a good place to explain
how the fuel cells harness the electrons
being expelled from the bacteria.
We'll do this chamber with two electrodes.
Electrodes are conductors inserted into a substance
where electricity can enter or exit.
The electrons move in one direction
from the negative electrode to the positive one,
and then that creates an electric current.
Well, I'm so excited. Like, when do we put the pee in?
I mean, I have to pee.
'Tis a coffee pee. Don't judge any coloration.
So I'm in here.
- It should be coming! - Oh, there's pee!
Oh, it's not too yellow.
This is kinda gross, Greg.
Boom, boom, boom. Pee.
Okay.
Greg: Here we go! We're filling her up.
How was it?
It was a bit of a mess in there.
Okay, so we got some leakage.
So already we are getting electrons
passing through our direct circuit,
which we can tell from this volt meter.
And you're gonna see that it went from zero to two volts.
So that's power coming from here?
Yes, and hopefully the bacteria's gonna go absolutely ham
- and release those electrons. - Okay.
The pee construction is really cool.
The question remains, okay, Greg, does it work?
Hopefully we can pull it off,
and hopefully we'll get some phone power.
It's "Blair Witch." Aah!
Mitch: It actually looks way scarier in here
- without daylight outside. - I know.
Mitch: This is what we have to live with.
This is our gorgeous bedroom.
But I am actually excited to go to bed, like, out here.
Like, it's cozy. Like, it's horror vibes, but it's cozy.
Do you want me to tell you a story?
Mitch: He looks like just a pure ghost.
( wolf howls )
The one part I didn't fully count on in the beginning
was just how much I personally would have to bike.
Greg's gonna charge a phone, but I'm tasked with all the light bulbs, the laptops,
like, everything else in our cabin.
As it's spinning, we're generating electrons
that come through these wires and enter into a rectifier,
which is essentially pushing the electrons in one direction.
And then they hit our charger or regulator,
and this is gonna help us stabilize the voltage.
'Cause I might be pedaling slow when I'm lazy...
Or fast when I have a lot of energy.
So those electrons are gonna be coming at all different speeds.
So what this little device does
is it outputs electrons at a consistent rate.
So the voltage comes out of the regulator
and into three ten milliamp batteries.
When we're ready to use it,
we can turn on our inverter,
and that's basically changing the DC current,
or direct current, into alternating current,
and that's because most of our devices use alternating current.
So we can plug in our devices, and we'll have electricity
that we generated from our own kinetic energy.
Greg:
By now, they should be pumping out some electrons.
What I thought was 2 volts, I have now learned is only 0.2 volts,
so we're a lot more far off than I thought.
( blows raspberry )
The greatest challenge with pee power is that it is taking microbes
and microscopic organisms you cannot see
and trying to create electricity.
There's a lot of intense science here,
and theoretically I understand it,
but I'm having a hard time applying it.
Hello, Professor Yannis Ieropoulos.
This is my first attempt at a microbial fuel cell.
How long should I be waiting for it to work? I'm just nervous.
If you were hoping to charge a mobile phone
from a single microbial fuel cell,
that is going to be very difficult, if not impossible.
So, one approach we have been developing
is this business of stacking
multiple microbial fuel cells together, much like batteries.
And the morning pee is more concentrated
and tends to have a better kick.
Okay, so we'll make sure we get everyone's morning urine.
That's disgusting but amazing.
Everyone here, we're gonna get to know each other.
We're gonna mix streams, if you know what I mean,
and it's now time for us all to add our pee.
Rejeanne's here to let me know how legit my bike setup is.
She's a professional engineer who knows a lot
about electricity and power generation.
Do you think that a system like this has a place at all,
whether it's in somebody's home or in a gym?
If we're gonna be working out as a people, right,
then absolutely there's a place for this.
- Some gyms are 24 hours a day. - Yeah.
Think about all that energy that could be stored
and used at a later time.
Is this a million dollar business idea that we need to go shop around now?
Could be, Mitch.
Typically, we humans generate the electrical power that charges our lives
by transforming kinetic moving energy into electrical power.
For wind and water,
you can see how it directly turns turbine generators.
Burning fossil fuels and nuclear power
is used to make steam
which is then used to turn generators.
Mitch:
turns large coils of wire past large magnets.
Remember Faraday's law of induction?
The voltage and consequent power produced
is proportional to the strength of the magnetic field
and the rotational speed of the coil wire rotating.
Mitch creating mass amounts of power,
and here I am scavenging for voltage.
After doing more research,
I discovered that the most basic microbial fuel cells
generate a standard charge
of 0.25 to 0.3 volts.
So hopefully 20 of them should get us to five volts.
So here we go.
This time I used pure carbon mesh
and tried to make a larger electrode surface area to volume ratio
by making the fuel cells smaller.
Clearly this is a very unique way to get power,
and we're just honestly learning a lot about electricity along the way,
- which is all you can ask for, folks. - That's for sure.
Greg:
the build team is disassembling
the pee power Rube Goldberg machine.
Although impractical and very gross,
it was definitely fun while it lasted, my friends.
At this point, it's just throwing
a bunch of urine at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Do you feel like renewable energy is the future?
It's actually a combination of conventional and renewable energy.
Okay, what does that mean?
So instead of just being able to get power from the electric grid,
we could feed it things like solar energy,
wind energy, things like biogas, biomass.
Mitch:
No one green technology will cut it,
and we'll need to scale them up a lot.
That needs political will.
All right, let's see what you're at.
Okay, we got about 50 volts! Look at you!
That's pretty awesome.
Mitch:
which means one hour of pedaling
will give about two hours of bunky lights
or an hour of laptop charging.
I love how my workouts charge our bunky.
Mitch:
the charge we make doesn't last through the night.
- I'm getting eaten alive. - Me, too.
But we need the light!
( bird hooting )
- Mitch: Ah, there's a mosquito. - Greg: Aah!
Greg:
have fed on our fresh urine all night,
and it is time to install them.
Our 20 microbial fuel cells are now hung up.
Look at this gorgeous setup.
So we're gonna measure the voltage.
Imagine if I got electrocuted from this?
Wouldn't that be such a good sign?
Okay, so with our reading, we have 0.2 volts,
which is too low to charge a cell phone, for sure.
It's actually similar to what our first original setup was.
So I'm freaking out a little bit.
One thing we can do is hook all of these up in series.
Theoretically, the voltage should go up,
so I am gonna try and do that so that this sad face maybe turns upside down.
Fuel cells are essentially batteries,
and there are two ways that you can hook up multiple batteries.
We just connected them in parallel,
where each cell is like a rung on a ladder.
That didn't work.
So we'll try them the other way in series
where the cells look like they're all holding hands in a chain.
In theory, this will increase our voltage.
This is our last attempt essentially.
These are all now hooked up in series.
So now we're gonna test the voltage.
( groans ) Oh, my God.
It's, like, my wedding night.
I'm excited, but of course very nervous.
( muttering )
Okay, so we are at a little over five volts,
which is very exciting.
I'm just gonna plug in the phone.
Okay.
( moans )
Okay, so there is no battery symbol.
This is not charging.
Oh, God, I have to go tell Mitch.
All this aside, it might seem that my experiment is a fail,
uh, but it's not.
I still have something to show proof of concept.
Our Rube Goldberg pee is gone.
This is beautiful.
But we weren't quite able to charge a phone.
We need to show at least that we were able to, you know, create some sort of charge.
Mitch: Let's see. Oh!
- Greg: Do you see it? - Okay!
- That's what we're getting! - Okay, cute. Okay!
So it's not quite a phone.
I would've loved to charge my phone with it.
I would've felt so freaking bad-ass.
Fails in science are so common and so important.
Not only can you sometimes build off of a fail,
so you realize what you did wrong,
you adapt, you try again,
but it's so important to know what doesn't work.
This green light, I mean, in a really, really dark room
could be a gorgeous little mood light.
Let's break down what likely went wrong.
I was constantly thinking about how we need to get the voltage up
in order to charge a phone, but upon more research,
you also need to have the current high enough to charge the phone.
I've been ignoring current this whole time.
Sorry, current. Wasn't thinking about you.
One way to think about this is imaging water flowing through a pipe.
The voltage is the water pressure.
The current is the amount of water flowing through the pipe.
And the resistance is the size of the pipe.
The power is the product of that pressure
and the amount that is flowing.
One cell by itself doesn't have nearly enough current or voltage,
but if we wire them together,
we can increase one or the other.
In parallel, the current of each fuel cell is added together,
but it leaves the voltage unchanged.
In series, the voltage of each fuel cell is added together,
but it leaves the current unchanged.
And I think is our fundamental problem.
To get the voltage high enough for our phone charger
means we have to compromise on the current,
and we're just not getting enough amps to charge a phone.
Mitch:
I like this job actually the best.
So to help me fully charge the batteries, I've enlisted some help,
and together it should only take an hour to get full power.
Listen up, folks.
You have an hour to go to fill our batteries.
- Okay? Ready? Up, boys. - And up!
- Up, up. -
we've learned how difficult it is to make power.
It's hard work.
Oh, boy. Okay. Oh, wow.
It forces you to think about how much power you consume
and why conservation is so important.
- Whoa! - Whoo!
In five, four, three, two, one.
We did it!
But now I need to brag, because in the end,
pedal power came out on top,
and the batteries are full.
- Checkmate, bud. - This is checkers.
Well, I couldn't see. I guess I need my second light!
- Boom, baby! - Oh, fair, we did actually collect enough power
for some extra lights now.
'Tis hot. Maybe I need a fan.
- Okay, what about our laptops that have both been charged? - What a rush!
Cute little pic of you over here.
That's me in a YouTube onesie. You're welcome.
Whoop-ah!
Mitch and I, we're bio chem guys,
and so this has been an amazing experience.
We both finally understand that our climate crisis
is an electricity crisis.
We need power for every aspect of our life,
and how we get it is what's creating a large part of our CO2 emissions.
Mitch:
so the best thing we can do is think about how to supply that energy
in a way that's not going to destroy the entire planet.
Greg:
we must rapidly increase the use of wind, solar,
geothermal, carbon neutral biomass,
and hydroelectric energy generation.
When used in unison, green energy sources
will help to ensure a reliable flow of power.
And if there's any shortfall, nuclear power can help fill in the gap
until we achieve 100% green power.
And who knows? Maybe even one day pee power can help, too.
With more interest from not only communities
and environmentalists but politicians, we can change that.
The more movement and money that goes into renewables,
the better chance that we have at making them more efficient
and actually more sustainable.
Greg:
that subsidize green technologies
and tax polluting industries.
- Ow! - I got one!
- Mitch! - Every episode, we're gonna shut something off,
whether that's our water, our garbage system...
We don't know what we're gonna be doing
with the waste from our bodies.
And we're gonna have to use science and live off-grid.
- Time to test if it actually works. - Yes! I'm loading a video.
That is a bit of a gorgeous meatball.
What did you season it with?
Herbs, salt, pepper, and oil.
Oh, that one was bad.