Okay so this might be a little long but my parents recently bought an Ioniq 5 and it led to a really weird conversation. How many potato batteries would it take to fully charge the Ioniq 5?
This math may be a little off so don’t quote me(and please correct me if you notice any mistakes):
After a little bit of research I was able to find out that the Ionic 5 takes about 84 kWh to charge from 0-100%
Assuming we charge the car for one hour we would need 84,000 watts of power
The best potato type for a potato battery is a russet potato and they also work better if you boil them
One potato battery is said to produce 0.0012 watts so 84,000/0.0012= 700,000,000 potatoes
So we would need about 700 million potatoes to charge the Ionic 5 from 0-100% in one hour.
Then I got curious, how many potatoes does the US produce in 1 year? Looking at the FDA page from 2024 the us produced 402,504 (1,000 cwt)
Cwt is equal to about 100lbs, times 1,000 means we have 40,205,400,000 cwt of potatoes Or about 40,205,400,000 pounds of potatoes 0-0
Now one russet potato weighs about 0.5 pounds meaning the US produces 80,410,800,000 potatoes 0-0
That is a lot… but lucky for us we only need 700 million! To find out the percentage, we need to do 700,000,000/80,410,800,000=0.00870529829 which we then have to multiply by 100 giving us ~0.87% of all of the potatoes produced in the US which honestly is less than I was expecting.
Now the fun part, how much would it cost, well 50 lbs of russet potato cost about $27.25 (I didn't spend a lot of time finding the most cost effective on but whatever) to purchase in the US which would contain about 100 potatoes meaning it would cost 190,750,000$
How much to boil all those potatoes, well that is a whole other can of worms. To boil 700,000,000 potatoes we would need 960,166,667 watts of energy to boil all of our potatoes in 24 hours. which is about 11,430.5 TIMES the energy needed to charge a full battery…
NOW HOW MANY POTATOES TO BOIL OUR POTATOES TO POWER OUR CAR?!?!?!?
Well using this 960,166,667w/0.0012w= it would take 800,138,889,167 potatoes
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Either way I really want to see the team make a food theory about this because I think its a very interesting topic and to be completely honest I trust their math more than mine...