STILLWATER, NV – Researchers have solved an age-old problem in energy production with an age-old solution: Chicken pot pie.
“The problem with generating lots of power is that you have to store it somewhere,” said Trey Chaud, manager of Baked Goods Renewable Energy Labs.
“Basically most forms of electrical energy production are steam-based. Nuclear, coal, natural gas, thermal solar – that’s not including photovoltaic. We heat up water to turn turbines that generate electricity.”
“When you’ve got a heat source going, but there’s less demand, all that excess power goes to waste unless we capture it somehow. The battery technology is not quite there, so we use things like molten salt to store the heat until we need it again.”
Chicken pot pie only recently emerged as a candidate for heat storage, when Chaud burned the roof of his mouth at his mother’s house during a Sunday dinner.
“While I was tending to the blisters, the dish sat there for a good twenty minutes. When I went back it was still scalding hot.”
Chaud took samples of chicken pot pie back to the lab and performed tests, confirming that it was quite efficient at retaining heat energy.
“We perched it at the top of our solar concentration towers, where hundreds of mirrors aim sunbeams at a single point. The chicken pot pie absorbed all of that, and we are free to access that energy as we need it.”
Chaud notes that one of the remaining challenges is transporting the pies once they’ve reached critical temperature.
“There are no gloves currently in existence that can handle them.”
SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FIELD CORRESPONDENT DIRK MARSHO FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS STORY
Comments are closed.