Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible – now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homes
According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.
That’d be cool if it worked, even if it does it will be cost prohibitive for quite some time.
Put so many together in a small space and you’ll incur in more issues. This might be huge in the future, but for now just a cool concept.
10mA @1.5 volts is plenty for all sorts of things! Just two of those things and you’ve got 10mA @3V which is more than enough to power a Bluetooth Low Energy microcontroller and some occasionally-lit LEDs, displays, sensors, buttons, etc.
Simple, real-world example: Nest sells these remote temperature sensors that you can place around your home to use any given location (e.g. your living room) as the place where you want the thermostat temperature setting to apply. They take a 3V CR123A battery that needs to be replaced about every 3 years.
A CR123A battery only holds about ~2.4 watt-hours of power. That’s 2500 milliwatt-hours or 250 hours of 10mW @3V. That means the Nest temperature sensor uses about 0.0095mA of current (@3V). In reality it uses a lot more than that; it just stays in a sleep state nearly all of the time and only powers up every few minutes when it needs to take a temperature reading and send it to the thermostat.
TL;DR: Just one or two of these energy harvesting devices could power a Nest temperature sensor forever (assuming they don’t wear out or lose much efficiency over time).
There’s zillions of low-power devices that today use batteries (that often corrode and need to replaced every few years even if they might not run out of power) that could be powered by these humidity power harvesting devices. It could change low-power engineering forever!
It’s always a matter of how much electricity and how efficient is it.
10 kWh per day from a washing machine sized cube is nothing to sneeze at. Whether the humidity to keep it powered consistently is achievable and the maintenance to keep it running is sensible and the cost of building up enough of this stuff to output that level of energy can be commercially viable - that’s the big question.
10 kWh per day
This gave me a chuckle. 10 kilojoules per second for an hour per day.
They have said it wrong, its more like 42 000 miliWat minutes 4 times a day
Is it wrong, though? Hours and days cancel out to give you the energy production rate (10,000 watt*hours/24 hours or just under 420 watts).
Zirconium costs around 30 dollars per kg. That “washing machine” gonna cost around 60k on materials alone. I’m guessing it might be great for watches and other low power devices, but it likely won’t power homes as is.
Nah… The “disc” isn’t 100% zirconium. I don’t know what it’s made out of but the zirconium part is just the nanowires which would likely be some teeny tiny percentage of the overall weight. If it’s like silicon ICs (e.g. the CPU inside your computer) zirconium would probably account for less than 1% (probably 0.1 or even 0.001%) of the overall weight.
99% of it likely to be “packaging” which is tiny copper wires carefully connected to the zirconium (probably via an intermediary material) to transmit and combine the power along with loads of insulating materials and lots and lots of high temperature plastic (so it can survive short bursts of soldering).
It’s a prototype and may not like getting very hot so maybe they didn’t use normal soldering methods and might have used conductive adhesives or similar crimping or vacuum welding or other fancy ways of connecting things that labs have access to for such things.
Down here in Miami I feel like I’ve been drinking the air instead of breathing it the last month or so! I definitely think there will be climates very well suited for this technology
Farts have to be pretty humid, right? I look forward to being able to charge my cellular telephone by simply expelling gas from my rear using specially made underwear.
Self recharging vibrator
If that was the case I’d be able to power a building by myself.
The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy – the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime – from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production…
So next to the fact that these nanotubes will clog with bacteria/particles from the air, and that they’d likely solve it with another device that completely purifies and pushes the air, I’m not hopeful.
Waiting for that Thunderf00t video on this.
It sounds interesting, but I don’t quite get where the energy comes from - it sounds like they are harvesting the kinetic energy from the water molecules? So what is the net effect when scaled up? Does the device get very cold? an ELI5 would be appreciated
I hope one day we will be able to charge devices without plugging them in - even if the amount of charge is small, it might be able to trickle charge all the time.
check out energous.com stock ticker WATT
Singaporean: Take my money!
Dam. I really hope this turns into a thing. Something like this that works and is cheap to produce will be so beneficial.
The issue is the amount of energy produced (minuscule) and the requirement for very humid air. It’s also likely that the device needs to be colder than ambient temperature if I’ve got my thermodynamics right, so removing heat might be necessary, obliterating any gains and turning it into a dehumidifier that produces a small amount of waste electricity.
It might be another option in the pile of ‘energy harvesting’ solutions, where you need microwatts to miliwatts to power devices like remote temperature sensors, to avoid fitting ten-year lithium batteries. It doesn’t seem likely to go beyond that.
I don’t believe it requires any temperature differential. It looks like it works by using something similar to static electricity.
I just want us to dehumidify the whole South
I don’t know how humid this air has to be, but summer in Georgia hits 100% humidity fairly regularly so it’ll definitely work
Sorry to hear the scientist commited sudoku tomorrow with 2 gunshots to the back of his head. /s
I’m going to assume you got auto corrected from seppuku to sudoku. Because that is hilarious.
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It doesn’t say how humid the air needs to be. Will it still work if humidity is low?
There’s always some humidity, so I guess in the end it depends entirely on how efficient they can make this technology. It’s probably a bit too early to say.
That said, if you live in a tent in the Sahara you probably shouldn’t postpone investing in solar panels over this.
I imagine this having practical usage in maybe keeping things like sensors working in a plumbing or caving kinda context considering the low power currently created. Awesome!
It doesn’t matter how complex we get, it always breaks down to moving water in a varied state of matter.
This is a really neat accident and I am hoping to follow this one closely.
