My Previous Post on Generation Electricity from Waste Material which gave all the possible ways on regenerating energy (electricity, water, fuel, chemicals etc) from the waste materials around us. Here is something more to add to it, but a very eco friendly way than before.

Babak Parviz, a professor of electrical engineering at Washington University has found a new way to generate electricity from the most widely available natural resource: Trees:

Unlike generating electricity from potatoes, lemon and sound waves, University of Washington scientists have made this discovery of Generating electricity from Trees, the only difference between generation electricity from Tree and that from lemon and Potato is that it (Tree) uses only one electrode instead of two as in case of potato and lemon.

By stacking one electrode into a big maple leaf, and another in the ground, the tree generated a tiny stream of electricity. The amount of energy generated by this tree is very less a few 100 mili Volts , but this energy is insufficient to even light a bulb, so the scientists built a custom made Voltage boost converter using nanotechnology that stores input voltages of as little as 20 mV (20 thousandths of a volt) and produces 1.1 volts

Application in Future:

This energy is enough to run low-power sensors

• This will help monitor environmental conditions, like giving up that vital atmospheric data situated in the most remote area.
• It can also be made possible to charge an iphone in future, so probably you can just plug in an electrode into a tree and charge your gadget devices on the way. As these devices can be expected to be on a nano scale so they would we portable as well.
• Monitor the health of trees: This will majorly help scientist and researchers of biotechnology to track the real-time tree behaviors.
• Detect forest fire: early detection of fire can save a lot of forests, embedding a small device into tress at equal intervals sending the data at time interval to a control room could make us understand and make a quick action to control the damage.

Note: Normal electronics are not going to run on the types of voltages and currents that we get out of a tree. But the nano scale is not just in size, but also in the energy and power consumption,” Parviz said, according to an UW release.

More information can be found in the publication in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Transactions on Nanotechnology.