Posted by Mike on February 28th, 2008 in solar

http://www.physorg.com/news120216714.html

While this doesn’t look much like a power harvester, it does show what a little ingenuity can do when coupled with kinetic energy via solar energy. The idea here is collecting the energy from a falling raindrop to do useful work, like generate electricity. When the drop hits the piezo pad on the bottom of the apparatus a small current is generated. If one can store that generated power one can power virtually anything from the rain. (And the” ifs” on storage have improved greatly by some very cool harvesting circuits along with some increasingly cheap super caps.)

While this is an interesting little science experiment, the real big ah-ha is abundance of the sun’s energy in so many different forms available to power our lives.

Oh, I know we are all aware of wind, solar, biofuel, waves, temperature differential, etc…, but until I really stepped back and thought about this one, it really didn’t sink in.

There are 175 PETAWATTS of power falling on this planet at any given time. 174 Petawatts are 174,000,000,000,000,000 watts of power, which is equivalent of 2 BILLION nuclear power plants (100 Megawatts size)! About half of this real energy is absorbed in the oceans and the biosphere, so now we are about at 1 Billion nuclear power plants). The rain that drops from the sky is a direct response from that energy from the sun.

Of course, wind turbines, tidal energy turbines, wave power, temperature differential generators as well as solar cells, and solar collector are today’s efforts to harness this renewable free energy. Maybe I am just slow, but this raindrop harvester made it finally dawn on me that if we can’t find a way to power this planet with the magnificent abundance from the sun, maybe we don’t deserve to be here.