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Remarkably, I was just reading some old xkcd "What If"s during lunch, when I happened across this one (third question).
tl;dr: at 2012 energy costs (and assuming perfectly efficient turbines), capturing kinetic energy for electricity on a house's footprint in the rainiest place in the US takes about a century to be worth the cost of manufacturing and installing it. That's in the best-case scenario.
Edit: turns out OP's article is about charge separation, not driving turbines.
I can't replicate the findings of that equation even after doing the omitted conversion from ft²×m to L. That said I don't understand what the unit of energy even means from its SI conversion lol, so obviously don’t take my word over that of a rocket scientist.
12 LED's for 20 seconds is bad. The CO2 released just in production and even transporting them to your house will counter this.
Its a cool thought, but this is counter productive.
I can't claim to know the manufacturing but this sounds just like the "The production of EV batteries is worse for the environment than burning fossil fuels" argument that ignores the fact that batteries are reusable
It is the same argument, but you cant even start to compare it. EV emits less than manufacturing, this wont at its current state.
Lets just look at the transportation.
These will probably be manufatured in Asia. Lets just say its not, and its only 20km from your house. How much energy would it take for you to get these with a car, or how much energy would the truck require to get them to the store.
Even if the car/truck is electric, these tubes would never in 100 years generate enough for the product to move to you.
And this is only if its manufactured nearby.
For 4 tubes. The interesting thing is that they are 2 mm wide, so feasibility you could add more to bring up generation. That being said, it would take a lot of work to get it to the point where you could get OK energy levels, but only when it's raining.
So infinite energy in the UK then. /s
Maybe enough turn on the kettle once a year, it is a pretty small amount.
I have no problem with the work these scientists are doing establishing the basic research and proving the principal works. Basic research is the foundation that leads to future large scale projects. However, at this time we are a long LONG way from any large scale practical application of this. The amount of power generated is very VERY small, and that assumes everything goes perfectly.
In a real rain storm dirt could easily block the tubes cutting off the effect and stopping power generation, as an example. This doesn't mean the underlying principal is flawed, but more work will have to be done to make a practical application out of this, now proven, principal.
I wonder if this could be used with existing solar arrays to kind of use the panels as rain collectors to funnel into something like this. Would have the benefit of giving some extra power when solar is weakest.
Yeah, seems like having solar, wind, and rain energy gathering devices would be useful for small-scale applications.
You cant gather more energy out of the rain than its potential energy from you roof to the ground.
Even at 100% efficiency it wont do anything.
That's not nothing. It's almost nothing, but not literally nothing.
No, true.
But factoring CO2 emitted from manufacturing + transportation from factory to your house, it will be net negative in emission. Even from transportation alone.
Actually, Randall Munroe did the calculations for his "What If" series. It is net positive in cost over a long enough time, which means that it will eventually be net positive in emissions, assuming it lasts long enough.
Yeah, the line for when its net positive is key. Otherwise we cant really draw conclusions.