Electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla imagined storing and harvesting electricity in the air, but he never nailed his idea down. Perhaps this was while he was researching early telephony, which does send messages through the atmosphere. Mother Nature has been storing and releasing electricity in the clouds since creation as lightening. Could her fractious children, humanity, achieve something similar, some day?
Storing and Harvesting Electricity for the Internet of Things
Mind you, the technology we delve into briefly here at the nano level, is only suitable for powering small internet of things. Students at University of Massachusetts, Amherst were experimenting with a humidity sensor five years ago. This was sending signals as they expected, but there was just one problem. They had forgotten to plug in the power. Where was the energy coming from?
Since then, numerous scientists have been investigating farming tiny amounts of electricity in the air. Or, to be more specific, storing and harvesting electricity from the water molecules floating naturally in our atmosphere. So we could reason that Earth’s air is like a vast battery. But how does this technology work in practice?
How Do These Water Molecules Make Electricity?
Chris Baraniuk, writing for BBC Future Now on July 11, 2023, explains how this ‘hygroelectricity’ might work. The water molecules floating in the air could transfer tiny electrical charges between them, he explains. If we could learn how to control this process it would be a good start, he continues. However, this electricity would also need to be in a useful volume.
Jun Yao from University of Massachusetts, Amherst has never let go of the idea he conceived five years ago. He published a paper in 2020 describing how tiny protein nanowires, produced by a bacterium, could harvest electricity from the air (see link below). The wires appeared to trap floating water in their pores, and transfer their charge when they rubbed the material. Continued in next post.
More Information
Distributed Utility Backup on Neighborhood Poles
Priming Battery Anodes Improves Prelithiation
