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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
