One freezing day in February 2006, physicist Andreas Mershin huddled with others around a tree on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to watch an unlikely demonstration. An engineering company claimed it could produce electricity simply by wiring a nail in the tree’s trunk to a metal rod in the ground. Sure enough, the demo worked—but nobody knew exactly why.
Two years later, Mershin and MIT undergraduate Christopher Love have not only figured out the source of the tree’s electricity, they’ve joined a new company—Voltree Power—that wants to use that energy to power wireless networks of environmental sensors.
As reported in PLoS ONE, the electricity stems from an acidity difference between trees and soil. The area that is more acidic contains a higher concentration of positively charged hydrogen ions. Those ions attract electrons, generating a tiny current that travels between the tree and the ground.
Using a device that extends probes underground, Voltree’s invention harvests the energy and uses it to continuously recharge a battery, which in turn powers radio-equipped sensors. Voltree is now working to assemble a wildfire alert network that can feed sensor data to a central location. The devices could also monitor climate conditions or even detect illegal radioactive materials at the border.
While other monitoring tools have been hampered by the need for costly solar panels or frequent battery replacements, tree-powered sensors could be deployed over vast areas with little maintenance. And not to worry, Mershin says: the amount of energy harvested is so tiny that the trees won’t feel a thing.?
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Sadly true! Does the metal the nail is made from affecrt voltages? Can voltages be lowwered of raised by fertilizing around the tree roots with nitrogen based electrolite fertilizers? Can you get more power from attaching a self charging flashlight to a branch waving in the wind on the same tree?Can trees be connected in seris to up the voltages or does the common ground limit?
Obviously, different materials have different resistances. I would assume that the system runs off of the static electric charge produced by the whole process in which static electricity is produced. Electrolytes really don’t have anything to do with electricity, but like the article said, it’s the pH difference that matters, and the charge isn’t produced by the amount of light the tree receives. I wouldn’t doubt the idea of connecting trees into a series, since they’re in a sense just self-recharging batteries.
I’ve nailed so many in the trees and now I finally understand why I got such a charge out of it.
Nailem Toowa’s comment for the win.
I usually nail a golf ball to a tree…
What was their succes rate, in volts x amps ?
Electric Trees!! acid!!! It all sounds so Timothy Leary…lol
but really, “a step forward for mankind fusing technology with nature”
May need it one day when people head for the hills with final stages of this new system we got. The only question is will it be socialism, communism, or fascism?
or zombie apocolyps.
yes!
is this a myth or something like that? i still cant believe it, can we make this in our homes, what r the things we need to create an electricity from nature
Yes this is a true story. The energy released is very tiny compared to what we are used to, so we are a good ways away from having this technology power our homes or even an appliance. Read more about this at http://www.411onenergy.com/?p=43
Get more info from http://voltreepower.com/ and by using the contact information there. That’s what I’m doing.
Come on – we’re talking potato/lemon clock levels of power here.
Wouldn’t leeching metals into the trees poison them? You can also graft turbines to the circulatory systems of wild animals. Or place electrodes in their stomachs and in the their blood stream and get electricity from the acidity difference. These ideas are of the same line of reasoning as the tree battery.
isn’t there a peta rally you need to get to?
I’ve seen a prototype cellphone idea that was implanted under the skin and had a tiny turbine hooked up to a vein. I thought it was an awesome idea until I thought about upgrades!
The human body eats food to produce energy, can we not invent a machine to produce energy as we do?
Electrical energy can only be gathered if the process that yields the energy consumes less energy than produced. A biological generator like a human would be very inefficient and unless you have a farm the size of the one in the matrix with a steady and autonomous stream of resources to feed the bodies, it would be horrible. And there is much waste that accumulates as well; and lifespan/monitoring would be an issue. An organism for this would have to be engineered as nothing efficient for this exists in nature because most have food/reproduction in mind.
The purpose of this post was mostly likely to simply show a fairly noninvasive instance of gathering energy from nature and providing a real world application for the amount of energy produced.
Truth be told, all forms of electrical energy (solar, geothermal, hydro-electric, wind, fossil fuels) except nuclear (fission) can be traced directly back to the sun.
Geothermal? Are you referring to how the sun helped form the planets? Because the molten core of our planet is that causes geothermal… and that hasn’t been re-heated by the sun in eons. I guess it’s true if you go back all the way to planetary formation though.
If that’s the case I can do you one better. All energy is produced by atomic reactions. This includes the sun, other suns (stars), and is a much more direct explanation of batteries. (rather than somehow linking the sun to the formation of the acids and metals used in batteries… god that’d take forever.)
Additional Reference:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2493036
Now if they can just convert our power plants to plants that power.
[...] conditions or even detect illegal radioactive materials at the border." Full article: HUMACON A Way to Harvest Electricity from Trees Im more of a business man than a scientist. Does this sound like it could be turned into a new [...]
I wanted to ask the procedure to do it!! could anyone quench the thirst of my knowledge!!!!!
How about chopping a branch off and using that in a fire to generate electric, so long as you dont chop the whole tree down. I bet if you work it out it’s more efficient.
Si
Will this cause any harm to the tree? Making a battery out of lemons or potatoes, for example, causes them to become toxic and inedible. I think that if this holds true for trees as well, there will be many repercussions as far as the plants and animals near the trees.
[...] Bron: http://www.humacon.org/2009/08/26/a-way-to-harvest-electricity-from-trees/ [...]
Is the current harvested from the tree can light a bulb as u shown in the above picture ?
[...] 4, 2010 by envirolibertarian Didn’t think this would ever be possible, but it seems fairly simple. I don’t know how much electricity could actually be harvested [...]
This is pretty fascinating. Can you imagine the implications here? Using a renewable source of energy while helping the environment at the same time.
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