Harvard finds new renewable energy source
 

Boffins at Harvard have worked out a way of using all that energy that the earth just chucks out into space on a daily basis.

At the moment, the Earth leaks 100 million gigawatts of energy into space where it does not even power a mobile phone.

Now researcher Professor Federico Capasso has worked out a way that you can generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light.

Dubbed an "emissive energy harvester" (EEH) it looks like a solar panel, except instead of catching incoming light, the cell releases infrared radiation to generate energy.

On paper the Harvard team has come up with two kinds of emissive energy harvesters.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first harvester, a thermal EEH device, consists of a "hot" plate at the temperature of the Earth, with a "cold" plate placed on top.

The cold plate is made of special material that can cool very efficiently by radiating heat to the sky. The heat differences between the plates can generate an average of 2.7 watts per square metr- or roughly .25 watts per square foot. This is extremely low for large-scale power generation.

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