‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power
theguardian.com
Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible – now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homes
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It's always a matter of how much electricity and how efficient is it.
10 kWh per day from a washing machine sized cube is nothing to sneeze at. Whether the humidity to keep it powered consistently is achievable and the maintenance to keep it running is sensible and the cost of building up enough of this stuff to output that level of energy can be commercially viable - that's the big question.
This gave me a chuckle. 10 kilojoules per second for an hour per day.
They have said it wrong, its more like 42 000 miliWat minutes 4 times a day
Is it wrong, though? Hours and days cancel out to give you the energy production rate (10,000 watt*hours/24 hours or just under 420 watts).
Zirconium costs around 30 dollars per kg. That "washing machine" gonna cost around 60k on materials alone. I'm guessing it might be great for watches and other low power devices, but it likely won't power homes as is.
Nah... The "disc" isn't 100% zirconium. I don't know what it's made out of but the zirconium part is just the nanowires which would likely be some teeny tiny percentage of the overall weight. If it's like silicon ICs (e.g. the CPU inside your computer) zirconium would probably account for less than 1% (probably 0.1 or even 0.001%) of the overall weight.
99% of it likely to be "packaging" which is tiny copper wires carefully connected to the zirconium (probably via an intermediary material) to transmit and combine the power along with loads of insulating materials and lots and lots of high temperature plastic (so it can survive short bursts of soldering).
It's a prototype and may not like getting very hot so maybe they didn't use normal soldering methods and might have used conductive adhesives or similar crimping or vacuum welding or other fancy ways of connecting things that labs have access to for such things.
Down here in Miami I feel like I've been drinking the air instead of breathing it the last month or so! I definitely think there will be climates very well suited for this technology