Who's working on (or thinking about) the GMO battery tree?

June 1, 2012 9:45 PM

Are there any sci-fi (or scientific) examples of people exploring the idea of "battery trees" - genetically engineered organisms which harness photosynthesis to store electrical energy?

Trees which grow batteries instead of fruit, cacti which store electricity rather than water in their trunks, or mossy solar-energy roofs - that sort of thing.

posted by unmake to Science & Nature (11 answers total)

Hm. The closest thing I can think of is in Alan Dean Foster's Sentenced to Prism, but those are alien, silicon life forms.
posted by kindall at 10:59 PM on June 1, 2012

Not quite what you asked about (storing electrical energy) but Larry Niven's "stage trees" stored the energy in the form of extremely combustible fuel, having been genetically engineered to be solid rocket stages.
posted by wjm at 11:43 PM on June 1, 2012

"Embassytown" had a lot of biotech, including pet/battery critters, but that really wasn't the focus of the book in any meaningful way.
posted by Scattercat at 12:07 AM on June 2, 2012

Treeborgs?
posted by sarastro at 12:59 AM on June 2, 2012

Best answer: It's not an example of storage, but there was a PLoS One paper which described a sustained voltage difference between a tree's xylem and the soil, and suggested that "there may be possible practical applications of these findings beyond monitoring pH changes such as a wide variety of trickle chargers for niche, low-power, pulsed, off-grid distributed systems–including forest fire detectors; environmental sensors; and “smart dust” or mesh-networked devices drastically decreasing the need for in-the-field battery changes".
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:47 AM on June 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Alasdair Gray's A History Maker has "powerplants" (groan) that provide everything the future Scotland needs.
posted by scruss at 4:27 AM on June 2, 2012

In Dan Simmons Hyperion series, there were Tesla trees.
posted by canine epigram at 5:47 AM on June 2, 2012

Best answer: Greg Egan, Distress, has trees hooked up to the municipal grid.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:59 AM on June 2, 2012

In Lem's The Invincible (Big Spoiler coming up):

The (leaf shaped) robots that make up the ecosystem of the planet recharge themselves via solar power in bush like colonies.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:02 AM on June 2, 2012

Paul McAuley's Quiet War (not a book I'd recommend as worth reading), has something called "people trees"—bioengineered trees that do all kinds of awesome stuff for... people! Here's an excerpt from the book that contains his initial description. One thing he says is that "their seed pods could be crushed to make biofuel." I don't think he really gets too deep into the details of how they work, though.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:08 AM on June 2, 2012

I came to recommend McAuley's Gardens of the Sun which feature a number of exotic, genetically engineered plant or plant analogues designed for various non-plant-like purposes
posted by shothotbot at 11:51 AM on June 2, 2012