14 DAY TRIAL // Brainiacs with the Harvard University in the United States claim that there is one clean energy source that the scientific community and people in the power industry have until now ignored, but that has the potential to help society reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.
This energy source is infrared radiation emitted by good old planet Earth into outer space, they explain in a recent issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists say that our planet currently coughs out some 100 million gigawatts worth of infrared heat into outer space. Should it become possible to harvest all this energy, human society's present power needs could be met many thousands times over.
In their paper, the Harvard University researchers argue that it is possible to tap into the energy potential of Earth's infrared radiation with the help of devices that transform the heat imbalance between our planet and outer space into direct current.
“It's not at all obvious, at first, how you would generate DC power by emitting infrared light in free space toward the cold,” researcher Federico Capasso explains in a recent interview.
“To generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light, that's weird. It makes sense physically once you think about it, but it's highly counterintuitive,” he further argues, as cited by Science Daily.
Federico Capasso and his colleagues say that, in order to harvest the energy potential of infrared heat, one would have to create instruments that would not be all that different to the photovoltaic solar panels currently available on the market.
The chief difference between these newly created instruments and photovoltaic solar panels would be the fact that, whereas the latter generate electricity by making the most of incoming visible light, the former would work by releasing infrared light.
This means that they could keep up and running even during nighttime. In doing so, they would help make clean energy sources a tad more reliable than they currently are, and consequently up their popularity.
In fact, Federico Capasso and his fellow researchers argue that the infrared radiation-harvesting devices that they are proposing could be made to work together with solar cells that have already been developed. The result would be a continuous output of environmentally friendly energy.
As postdoctoral fellow Steven J. Bymes, who is also involved in this research project, puts it, “The device could be coupled with a solar cell, for example, to get extra power at night, without extra installation cost.”