Electricity production with living plants on a green roof: environmental performance of the plant‐microbial fuel cell

Abstract

Several renewable and (claimed) sustainable energy sources have been introduced into the market during the last century in an attempt to battle pollution from fossil fuels. Especially biomass energy technologies have been under debate for their sustainability. A new biomass energy technology was introduced in 2008: the plant‐microbial fuel cell (P‐MFC). In this system, electricity can be generated with living plants and thus bioelectricity and biomass production can be combined on the same surface. A green roof producing electricity with a P‐MFC could be an interesting combination. P‐MFC technology is nearing implementation in the market and therefore we assessed the environmental performance of the system with an early stage life cycle assessment (LCA). The environmental performance of the P‐MFC is currently worse than that of conventional electricity production technologies. This is mainly due to the limited power output of the P‐MFC and the materials presently used in the P‐MFC. Granular activated carbon (anode material), gold wires (current collectors), and Teflon‐coated copper wires (connecting anode and cathode) have the largest impact on environmental performance. Use of these materials needs to be reduced or avoided and alternatives need to be sought. Increasing power output and deriving co‐products from the P‐MFC will increase environmental performance of the P‐MFC. At this stage it is too early to compare the P‐MFC with other (renewable) energy technologies since the P‐MFC is still under development. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Electro-biosystems with mosses on the green roofs

“…Green roofs in cities are an important tool in dealing with the effects of global climate change, reducing urban heat island temperatures (Banting et al, 2005;Alexandri & Jones, 2006) and reducing greenhouse gas concentrations (Clark et al, 2005;Dimitrijevic et al, 2018;Kuronuma et al, 2018), solving the problem of rainwater runoff, reducing the risk of flooding (Mentens & Hermy, 2006;Konasova, 2014), insulating buildings from winter cold and summer heat (Theodosiou, 2003;Konyuhov et al, 2019), thereby reducing CO 2 -dependent energy costs for heating and air-conditioning (Oberndorfer et al, 2009;Castleton et al, 2010). In addition, green roofs are promising in terms of receiving bioelectricity (Helder et al, 2013a). The essence of obtaining bioelectricity from green roofs is that soil electrical-generating microorganisms produce bioelectricity, utilising organic matter released into the substrate through the root system by actively photosynthetic plants (De Schamphelair et al, 2008;Kaku et al, 2008;Strik et al, 2008) or in the process of decay of organic fall of plant foliage (Timmers et al, 2012;Dai et al, 2015).…”

Prospects of use of Caltha palustris in soil plant-microbial eco-electrical biotechnology

“…Currently, eco-electric microbial-plant biotechnology is faced with the problem of low power (Helder et al, 2013;Nitisoravut et al, 2017;Wetser et al, 2017). The methods for maximizing the collection of microbial-plant eco-electricity are the selection of new plants (Helder et al, 2010;Hubenova & Mitov, 2012), the use of new electrode systems (Picot et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2012;Rusyn & Valko, 2019), synthetic nutrient media (Helder et al, 2011;Yadav et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2013), natural media (Rusyn, 2014;Moqsud et al, 2015;Wetser et al, 2017).…”

Activated Carbon Mixed with Marine Sediment is Suitable as Bioanode Material for Spartina anglica Sediment/Plant Microbial Fuel Cell: Plant Growth, Electricity Generation, and Spatial Microbial Community Diversity

“…From a recent review paper, at least 40 plant species have been utilized in the Plant-MFC system [30]. Among those species, Spartina anglica is one of the most model species [20,21,25,28,31,32]. S. anglica is known as an invasive species that has sustained more than a century of evolution.…”