Living Power: Renewable Power Generation from Animals and Humans

Generating electricity from biomass is stepping to the forefront of commercial power generation and Netherlands’ chicken-manure power plant, which started working around September 2008, stands as the largest biomass power plant in the world – supplying renewable electricity to nearly 90 thousand households. And yet more fascinating is the pursuit of developing renewable power projects that are modeled on the generation of electricity from the body of living organisms. The technologies are still in their infancy but whatever results have been obtained, thus far, are no less than amazing.

Of all the animals, studied for producing electricity in or on their bodies, none has come so stunning to the scientists as the electric eel. With its thousands of electrocytes (electricity-producing body cells), a large electric eel can generate an electric potential of about 600 volts – enough to stun a horse. Yale University researchers, in collaboration with nanotechnology engineers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), are working on developing artificial cells that would generate renewable power for medical implants and charging other small devices. The findings of these researchers, as published in Nature Nanotechnology (October 2008), show that the artificial cells modeled on electric eels’ electrocytes can be improved to produce up to 40% more electrical energy in a single pulse as compared to an eel’s natural electrocyte.

More recently, a team of researchers, led by Georgia Tech’s Zhong Lin Wang, used a nanogenerator to harvest electrical energy from the physical movements of hamsters, like running and scratching. The team used hamsters wearing specialized jackets, designed by the researchers, to run on exercise wheels. The biomechanical energy of the hamsters’ movements produced electric current in the device connected to the jackets on the hamsters. The electric power generated by the small animals is not much – only a nanowatt – so that it will take a thousand hamsters to charge a cell phone. Still, the research stands as a milestone in the conversion of biomechanical energy to renewable electric power.

Still more exciting is the quest for deriving electricity from humans (without giving them over to oppressive cyber systems, as in the Hollywood hit The Matrix). The research of Dr. Wang’s team on hamsters also tested the tapping of human fingers for nano-power generation. The result was positive, albeit very small in quantity. But German scientists have been working in another direction to reach the same goal. In August 2007, Peter Spies and his team, at the Fraunhofer Institute, used the principle of thermoelectric generation to convert the body heat of humans for producing a small amount of electric current. They have now developed circuits that can be recharged by the warmth of one’s hands. If further developed in future, these circuits can be installed in a number of devices like small medical instruments and cell phones to enable their recharging by the hands that operate them.

At the moment, biomechanical and biothermal electric power are in their infancy. But we have seen the spark on the horizon of research conducted on renewable power generation, and success in this field doesn’t sound like a fantasy anymore.

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One Response to “Living Power: Renewable Power Generation from Animals and Humans”

1. Graham Owen says:

   March 23, 2010 at 8:29 pm

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