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
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.
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.
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 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.
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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!
