“Green Energy” is not quite as green as we’d like it to be. Solar and wind farms, for example, require large amounts of land and rare natural resources, while nuclear energy is not yet trusted as safe. In the search to find an energy source that is truly green, scientific engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have managed to invent a piece of technology that creates electricity from thin air! It’s called Air-gen, and while it is still very small scale, its inventors believe that it could be scaled up to power our cell phones, computers and even our electric cars. But how does this seemingly impossible technology work? It's actually a completely natural occurrence. Threads of protein called nanowires emerge naturally from the bacteria Geobacter sulfurreducens, and these nanowires, as the name suggests, generate tiny amounts of electricity.
However, the researchers discovered that the driving force behind their electricity generation is moisture in our air. In its most basic, unharnessed form, electricity is simply the natural flow of electrons from an area of ‘high charge’ to an area of ‘low charge’, and water is a great source of these highly charged electrons. The team behind Airgen claims that by creating a mesh from these nanowires, the moisture from the air is collected at the top, creating an area of ‘high charge’. The bottom of this mesh remains an area of ‘low charge’, and thus ideal conditions for electrical flow are created.
The researchers next step was to insert this nanowire mesh between two gold electrodes to create a functioning electrical circuit. Using this circuit, they were able to produce a very small, but scientifically significant, 0.5 volts of electrical current. The next step for these pioneering researchers is to find a way to mass produce these nanowires without causing any harm to the environment. If they succeed in doing so, the world will have its very first source of 100% clean, green energy.
