Thermoelectric generator invented by Jean Charles Athanase Peltier in 1834. Commercially used as thermoelectric coolers.
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This is exciting!
But let's not forget all the other ways to harvest power: from tides along coastlines; from heat in the earth; from winds and snowfall.
Every community everywhere contains the potential to generate power from renewable sources. They just differ by locale -- and some of the technologies are new or yet to be invented.
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Fascinating article.
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The first cell phones lasted for 20 minutes.
Eventually this too will come around and we'll have to burn less stuff to get our electricity.
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"The cloudless atmosphere becomes a porthole to the void, through which warmth flows like air through a porch screen."
This writer needs a raise.
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Have they used vantablack or this even newer blacker black
https://www.fastcompany.com/90403784/this-is-the-new-blackest-black-in-the-world-and-its-discovery-was-an-accident
?
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Coal also generates electricity at night.
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@Steven - as do wind turbines, in a more environmentally-friendly way.
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@b fagan Coal generates even when there's no wind.
And black lung disease!
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Passive systems are a worthwhile area to explore. According to the link, the power output of this setup is useful for sensors and other low-power applications, but every little bit helps.
For usable lighting in places far from the grid, there are a number of companies in Africa, India and elsewhere with innovative systems to make it affordable - essentially they set up a customer with a solar panel (or several) and a battery and some LED lighting and a charger.
The charger is useful for keeping cell phones charged, since these same areas are seeing online banking, and metering of the power used from the small system. The customer pays for usage, and eventually gets an option to purchase the equipment at a discount. This is a viable option for the millions who live away from areas where it's profitable to push out grid connections - it's hard to remember, but a lot of rural USA was not electrified for decades after cities were. Not a lot of profit in running long wires to small villages.
10
Fun (if not very practical) science. But as one would expect, it has brought out the endlessly repetitive nuclear v renewable talking points.
Could we please move on past blah blah thorium blah blah waste blah blah intermittent renewables.... how many times does all this have to be repeated?
Let's assume nuclear plants are safe and we can deal with the waste. What exactly is the *plan* for getting them built?
Should the US Federal Government nationalize the electricity sector, like France did, and decide where plants are built, like France did? Any of you guys going to run for President on that platform?
If not, please explain why any rational person would invest in a nuclear plant when they can invest in a natural gas facility and make money with virtually no risk?
If you can't come up with an answer to that... what government policies you suggest to achieve your goal... then you are wasting time and bandwidth going back and forth with the actual anti-nuke people.
I await the response... but not holding my breath.
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"roughly 4-watt maximum efficiency"
Huh? Check your units!
6
"This is why blades of grass may be glazed in frost on clear fall mornings, even when the air temperature is above freezing."
Maybe not exactly so. See this:
"Overnight cooling of the air near the ground causes morning frost on grass and car windshields. Frost will form on a surface only where the temperature is at or below freezing. The observed air temperature may be higher than 32 degrees, since those air temperature observations are taken at about 4 feet above the ground, where it can be warmer than the ground."
https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2017/10/09/frost/
Might want to check those other "facts" too.
4
Aaswath Raman received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2013, and his A.B. cum laude in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics, and M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2006. For MAGA Americans, being a person of color, a scientist, and possessing a high level of education makes him part of the liberal conspiracy. Perhaps one day, they will be able to look past these "flaws" and see that the work he is doing will benefit themselves and the whole planet.
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@Son Of Liberty
And perhaps one day you will be able to look beyond which intersectional boxes are checked when reading a fascinating article about a solution to real world electricity supply problems.
5
Perhaps I am not your typical American as I am a scientist (a very minimally talented one) but I long ago learned to look past the ethnicity of other scientists. By that I mean someone's race or ethnicity just isn't a factor. A great discovery is a great discovery. I think more of us are like this than not. The bigots and racists are just louder.
21
People need to become familiar with the concept of Return On Energy Investment for renewables. This is the total return over the life of the system . Photovoltaics are a paltry 4 times , wind is far better at 16 times, for economic comparison coal is 30 times , nuclear 75 times and hydro 45 times. Storage cuts those numbers in half. For this reason it should be apparent that when spending on larger systems thermal solar , with a return of 16 times and built in storage of 2.5 days , is the most viable of renewables. What also should be apparent is that nuclear is the long term solution to our energy needs. With 0 carbon output , current design failsafe Generation IV power plants and with high level waste sequestered in glass , buried miles deep in subduction zones , the path forward to a stable climate is within reach.
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@Christopher Foley
And yet no state is willing to host those pesky nuclear waste..... Also, you are likely ignoring the externalities such as water pollution and global warming. So your #s remain theoretical...
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@Christopher Foley - yet utilities are finding that wind/solar/storage/efficiency are all getting cheaper every year. Meanwhile, the world cannot simply wait to see if the promises (very loud in comments to this article) can actually pan out. NuScale hasn't even built the first module for their customer in Idaho.
In the meantime, in the current world, renewables can continue to expand, several US states are nearing 40% of their total from wind power, and the non-radioactive, non-carbon energy sources are the only ones that are showing continuing drops in cost.
Call us when somebody actually gets an ROI on a nuclear plant without federal subsidy or indemnification. In the meantime, we've got lots of other options that are being put to use now, and which are starting to threaten even new natural gas combined cycle for total ownership cost.
Ten years ago, levelized cost of energy for utility-scale solar was $359/KWh. Last year it was $43.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
So yeah, they can keep working on new nuclear, but it's going to have to compete against extremely low-cost renewables and storage, and against efficiency and demand management.
11
Surely this is simply taking the sun's energy, but instead of efficiently transforming it directly into electricity, it is absorbing the sun's heat and inefficiently using that heat to produce power as it cools?
5
@Sam F. That’s right. Although it looks silly compared to a solar cell charging a battery or ultracapacitor, and certainly isn’t some kind of breakthrough, it does represent one way to time-shift daytime solar energy input to nighttime energy output. That’s the stated intent. Since the bugaboo of both solar and wind energy sources is lack of appropriate energy storage, time-shifting has some appeal, although one might say that rainwater charging a hydro reservoir, or sunlight growing a tree are also shifts, but with built in longer term storage. Other cute energy harvesting ideas based on decent science involve power generating clothing and shoes that tap our daily breathing and movement, barometric changes, temperature differentials between surface ocean water and the depths, geothermal power, etc. Lots of ways to generate electricity; some of them useful, especially for very low power uses, like milliwatt electronics or lamps. Our Congress, unfortunately, operates exclusively on hot air, and has never acknowledged science that isn’t connected with incoming cash or weapons.
10
Absolutely fantastic. A smarter civilization would be focusing all of its attention on developing alternative sources of energy, particularly in the face of the headlines today. Tired of depending on our middle eastern friends for our energy and stoking international conflict in the process? Support ideas like this and others which are slowly creeping forward through the adversity.
30
Should also mention, especially for you experimenters, amateur and otherwise, that the TE modules you may encounter, like some heat transfer paste for transistors or other white solid bits, which on a TE module, form the top and bottom surfaces, can be beryllium oxide. In theory you can touch this carcinogenic stuff, but I prefer to avoid that. The TE module active materials themselves generally are bismuth telluride, or lead telluride, which is slightly toxic, or can be a host of other materials. Whatever, just don’t grind or file any materials whose composition you can’t verify. Also wash hands.
Some ‘green’ technologies, like cadmium compound solar cells, have toxic implications for disposal, safety in fires, etc., or are just nasty to mine and refine at large scale.
10
Technologies like this are a distraction with little chance of transitioning us away from fossil fuels. In general, so are renewable forms of power such as solar and wind.
They are inconsistent which means at best they can supplement a stable form of power generation during peak demand (if the wind is blowing or the sun is out conveniently during those times). The cost per Mwh is also significantly higher than fossil fuel power generation.
However, we already have the safest and cleanest forms of power in the world: nuclear power.
Mining, construction, maintenance, operation, etc are all costs that must be considered when determining the safest form of power.
Existing nuclear technology does not effectively harvest as much radioactive material as newer, developing technologies do, but even still the waste from a lifetime supply of power at a Western living standard would fit in a soda can. That being said, much of that waste has the potential of being used in newer Thorium reactor designs.
Where is the NYT article about LFTR molten salt thorium reactors? We have an abundant supply of clean energy that will last longer than the Earth will - why don’t we invest in that?
5
@Stephen G. - where are the commercial LFTR molten salt thorium reactors for the Times to write articles about?
Oh, I know, there in The Future That Isn't Here Now.
In the meantime, solar, wind, storage are clean, are dropping in cost every single year and are being deployed everywhere in the world - from villages in Africa or India starting with a few panels and batteries, to extremely large, industrial scale wind and solar farms.
It's not sensible to slam the clean energy sources that are actually commercially viable today in favor of pie-in-the-sky promises.
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There are small scale Thorium MSR’s being tested right now. Here in the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory had a functioning Thorium reactor decades ago, but the project was shut down because Thorium had the inconvenient problem of not being useful in nuclear weapons. This is by no means a pie-in-the-sky technology.
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@Stephen G.
You might want to read up about the current cost per Mwh of solar vs fossil fuel generation in countries that have chosen to adopt the technology.
And, and in your cost comparisons make sure the numbers you are evaluating include the cost of environmental cleanup from oil spills, oil well reclamation, and the cost from climate change re: Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Dorian, the historic floods this summer in the Midwest, and the extreme drought in the West that caused the extreme fires in Paradise, CA.
Any study that omits the estimated costs form climate change regarding fossil fuel power generation is unreliable.
Side by side, when the TRUE costs are calculated, solar and wind are very cheap.
11
C'mon, folks. It's just a thermocouple exposed to a small temperature difference. This is not new, or useful. A small solar cell coupled with a small rechargeable battery will outperform it, by orders of magnitude. Raman gives a good TED talk on more interesting and truly beneficial uses of radiative cooling, but here the selling has gone overboard.
18
It seems like the word shunt could have found its way into this article, it being the correct scientific term for the underlying principle.,
I appreciate the reporting of new-ish technology and I wouldn't discourage exploration into them but as it applies to energy conservation and use, these tech articles remind me of a quote attributed to Winston Churchill. "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else."
2
@Erich Richter
I see your point , but it would certainly be positive to do a " moon shot " approach , surely using even a simple low efficiency technology is better than the current rush to the Arctic as it melts ...yikes
1
There are such huge transfers of heating and cooling in nature... deserts and mountains, It seems, this method, though cumbersome now, might work on large scales in such locations.
Very interesting science...
4
No news here. However, should you want to juice a TE generator up, it’s good to have the hotter side maximized and less-radiative. A tub of water that warms during the day is one way. Some solid surface (shielded by the device) isn’t going to get warm enough.
Anyway, I remember the Russians ‘empowering’ rural radio with interesting thermopiles (a related device) clustered around kerosene lamps, so that the necessary lighting produced a usable amount of power. This, perhaps 60 years ago.
Every once in a while, some device guy comes up with a better, cheaper TE device, but so far no commercial progress, except for cost and necessity related space applications.
3
This is the beauty of science. This is the nobility of human beings turning their intelligence and creativity toward solving humanity's problems. This is the hope and goodwill of a culture that supports discovery and development of ideas to help humankind.
This is an example of what America is when it works and when we are all at our best.
40
Nuclear plants run 24/7/365.
4
@Beatrix
And produce unstorable, unsafe waste every second of every day or every year.
12
@Beatrix
Not quite. See https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAvailabilityFactor.aspx for energy availability factors for reactors by country.
2
@Beatrix
And require huge pumped-water storage reservoirs to store the energy produced during the hours when electrical demand is low. So what’s your point?
7
I love it! Progress, clean energy, it's all possible, no matter how trump's 'nattering nabobs of negativity' want us to return to whale oil for heating, and coal for our kitchen stoves.
Thank you!
8
Cool Idea, So to Speak. I totally in-the Dark about this Process. I took Thermodynamics in College, so I can say that I can appreciate the STEM of this idea. (Pun Intended)
3
Sometimes the most modest of ideas are the seed for important changes. This might be one. I hope this research moves on. We don't have to aim at being Times Square and some light at night may be a blessing to many communities.
7
It is non-viable technology.
It will NEVER produce enough energy to justify it's cost.
You've been played. I hope you didn't 'invest' any money!
6
@George Orwell this was a prototype. It takes considerable investment (money and time) to go from prototype to a usable model. Over that period, the developer will better ascertain if the usable model is feasible from a market perspective.
This is how research works and has worked for some time.
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@George Orwell
Cost on a small scale is minimal. You are thinking of large-scale production and distribution where profits can be maximized by corporations (the current model of energy supply systems). In the future, we can de-centralize these systems (which are also vulnerable to failure or attack) and have energy generation on the local scale of houses and streets.
11
It is better to light one LED bulb than to mock creativity.
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