Engineers Found a Way to Generate Electricity From Thin Air
If it can be scaled up, Air-gen technology could power everything from iPhones to car charging stations
Green energy, as far as we’ve implemented it, is at best a shade of greenish-brown — army, perhaps, or olive. Solar farms harness the sun’s renewable energy but require large swaths of land and rare Earth metals. Wind power has a minimal carbon footprint, but, like solar, gets stored in batteries made from lead and lithium. Nuclear power is appealingly low carbon, but the risk of another Chernobyl is hard to stomach. All of these options are a huge improvement over coal power, but there’s real pressure to find an energy source that’s truly scalable, cheap, and 100% green.
Last week, scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst rose to the challenge, presenting a low-cost device they call the Air-gen, which generates electricity from thin air — enough to theoretically power devices like cellphones and electric cars. And since it doesn’t require harsh chemicals to produce, “the whole process,” corresponding author and assistant electrical engineer professor Jun Yao tells OneZero via email, is “green.”
Improbable as it sounds, the device’s technology is based on a natural phenomena: electricity-generating threads of…
