It’s one thing to read a really interesting article about capturing energy in the smallest possible ways that leads to quite a large impact worldwide, but sometimes a reader’s comments about the article are even more intriguing.
The article I refer to was in the March 6th edition of Time Magazine called “Finding Energy All Around Us.” It’s about using vibration converted to energy. Vibration is unused energy and it’s everywhere. We vibrate when we walk. Scientists can transform that “micromotion” into electricity, albeit, small wattage but in times like these ever little bit helps. An engineer at the University of Southampton in Britain has even created a vibration harvester.
The article stated, “The shaking of a bridge could power tiny sensors to monitor the structure’s physical integrity.” Before the Minnesota bridge collapse, we would have considered this a minor achievement, but in light of that disaster, what a good idea. Ditto for using the steady rhythmic vibrations of the human heart to run a pacemaker so that cardiac patients won’t have to be cut open to replace batteries. Does this not sound like a racket—cutting people open periodically, at what insurance costs, just to replace batteries in a pacemaker?
Besides harnessing the energy from vibrations, a company called Thermo Life produces devices that can harness thermoelectric energy. The heat from the temperature difference between the opposite ends of a circuit can be converted for additional voltage but in the past has been too expensive. Thermo Life produces energy from some pretty small temperature fluctuations and uses it to power rechargeable batteries right now. But with more innovation, if we can ever get away from the stranglehold of big oil, Thermo Life believes it will be able to “harness the energy lost as heat in the fossil fuel plants” providing our electricity. How much heat is lost from the production of the world’s energy?—60 percent! Now that is a waste.
After reading this article I was still amazed by the notion of energy scavenging, and the amount of energy wasted in the form of heat, until I read what another reader had to say about it in the March 31st, 2008 edition of Time. He suggested that we should harvest the energy from the ocean’s tides too. Robert F. Bourque said that off the coast of New England the tides rise and fall 8 to 12 ft. twice a day. He thinks that we could generate electricity from floating pistons in the ocean. His idea is also environmentally friendly compared to the use of dams. The floating pistons wouldn’t silt up bays and would be less expensive than dam construction. He said that north of Maine, in the Bay of Fundy, a moon tide can be 50 ft? Who knew, and are floating pistons possible? A 50 ft. rise and drop in that volume of water would no longer be considered micromotion, that’s for sure.
Finding out that even the smallest movements can produce energy, and that such an enormous amount of heat is being wasted by the generation of electricity world wide, we have to wonder why the rush to drill in pristine parts of the world for more oil. We haven’t begun to conserve or recycle our waste, and now we know there is more waste out there than we thought. With more and more people weighing in like Robert, who knows what we can come up in the very near future?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1720111,00.html