Scheme to 'pull electricity from the air' sparks debate

[pampango]

Source: BBC



Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say. Dr Francesco Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect. Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.

Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator - a capacitor, in effect - and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them. What the team found was that charge built up on the metals - in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.

The effect is incredibly small - gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces - but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.

Dr Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics. However, while the prospect of free electricity from the air is tantalising, the prospect of harnessing enough of it to be widely useful is still a matter of some debate.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11100528

[FBaggins]

1. DeKalbs?

:)

[sakabatou]

2. I can see Nikola Tesla smiling.

[rjones2818]

4. Just wait...

until they decide that they're able to transmit the power from one point (say a tower) to another point!

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[Javaman]

7. More like Tesla saying, "I told you so".

His Colorado Springs lab and Wardenclyffe Tower.

[truth2power]

11. My first thought on reading the OP...Tesla. n/t

[KurtNYC]

3. they are already doing this with some in-home devices

such as calculators. The air is so loaded with electricity that they have now created battery-free devices that gather their current from what is in the air.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/brilliant.html

[nashville_brook]

6. that is an excellent article! i read it when it came out. very exciting.

[nashville_brook]

5. you know how sometimes you look at something familiar, and think, "that's weird" or,

"that doesn't seem right." i feel that way about electrical transmission lines. it's technology from more than 100 years ago, and it's still our unexamined standard. it seems so archaic and inefficient to me.

[gristy]

9. A lay observer may feel it is unexamined. Trust me - it is very much examined.

[gristy]

8. 1/100000000 as efficient as today's solar collectors. So why is this news?

[glitch]

10. Possibly the abundance of its source. nt

[TheWraith]

12. Except that the abundance doesn't matter.

You could have a banquet table set for 1000 people, but if you're only allowed to take 15 grams of food for yourself, the rest of it is irrelevant. The sun dumps more energy on the Earth than we could possibly use right now, but the gross inefficiency of how we could capture it makes it near impossible to harvest.