Some scientists claim they can harvest electricity from humid air:
The idea is to have a material that has zillions of nano-pores of less than 100 nm across. The article doesn’t say it, but one side of the material needs to be a sealed enclosure. The electricity is harvested from water molecules that hit the outside before going through the pore, leaving their charge on that side. So there’s a charge separation which can be harvested.
OK, sounds good, but they need to build a prototype to be more convincing.
It’s a question of how much energy you can get from a given area of material - I suspect it might not be much. If so, and you need acres of material to get appreciable power, it might have no overall advantages to other sources like solar.
I suspect you’re right. The article I posted says you could stack lots of them to increase the power. The question is how closely they can be stacked. Will they need a positive airflow, i.e. a fan? Until someone builds a prototype, they probably won’t know.
If you’re harvesting energy from water vapor, then it (and the air around it) must cool down. The ultimate source of energy is whatever created the water vapor in the first place. For ambient air, that’s the sun.
The catch is that you have to go to Toshi Station to get the power converters…
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Wait, can’t we get free electricity from the air by installing giant balloons over sidewalks and harvesting the static electricity from people with lots of hair?
Imagine all the potato electricity wasted by not powering clocks. Trees have been tapped to produce a little voltage, and potentially whole forests could power a couple of street lights or something.
And how much electricity did you have to use up drilling all those millions of 100 nm holes? Your return on electrical investment might need decades to break even!
