Electricity directly from trees
I have been speculating for years about alternative methods for generating electricity. Recently I was thinking about how plants are able to efficiently store solar energy as sugar and wondered if it might be possible to coax them into generating free electrons that could be siphoned off directly as an electrical current. I wondered if there might be some way to splice some genes from an electric eel or some other bioelectric organism and get a tree to produce a similar electrical field. Of course, this seems somewhat impossible since they biological systems in a tree are nothing like those in an eel. But after a bit of searching I came across this article which describes a method of extracting current directly from a tree using a method that most elementary school science fair participants will probably be familiar with from their "potato battery" experiments. Apparently Gordon Wadle, an inventor from Thompson, IL. was thinking about how lightning eminates from the ground, often near large trees. He basically did a variation of the "potato battery" experiment with a tree instead of a potato and it worked.
"Simply drive an aluminum roofing nail through the bark and into the wood of a tree -- any tree -- approximately one half inch; drive a copper water pipe six or seven inches into the ground, then get a standard off-the-shelf digital volt meter and attach one probe to the pipe, the other to the nail and you'll get a reading of anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2 volts of DC power," he said.
And apparently, no matter how many spikes you put into a tree, they all produce the same amount of energy, so a single tree is probably capable of putting out much more energy than the simple experiment suggests. Talk about a sure-fire way to get people to plant more trees! Anyway, the inventor and a company called MagCap Engineering, LLC. have applied for a patent, so hopefully we will hear some more about this in the near future. In the meantime, I think I'll see how much electricity the oak tree in my back yard is producing.
posted by minorgod @ 8:22 PM
1 Comments:
Nice find, although, and you may be surprised at this, I was initially somewhat skeptical. This is probably due in no small part to a coworker's initial reaction when I told him about this..."Oh yeah, potential difference." Since he's a lighting pro and knows his way around electricity, I figured I'd google that which lead to this [PDF] which probably could have been found more directly by going to the MagCap site since this is a press release on this exact thing. It goes into a good deal more depth including a discussion of an investigation by a MIT graduate student that included testing a potted plant inside a Faraday cage (which dismissed my initial supposition that the micro-voltage was caused by static...a supposition that was strengthened when I read the voltage was stronger in the winter when the trees have no leaves.) Anyhow, looks like the charge is caused by a difference in pH which means large scale, long term use would be bad for the trees (under most conditions at least.) "This process draws energy from the tree but it is no more harmful to it than a mild natural parasite, requiring the tree to compensate by slightly slowing down its growth" Still a very interesting idea that I hope will be exploited, probably through some sort of bioengineering ...
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