{"id":104482,"date":"2020-03-30T09:07:22","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T16:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/electricity-from-the-coldness-of-the-universe"},"modified":"2020-03-30T09:07:22","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T16:07:22","slug":"electricity-from-the-coldness-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/electricity-from-the-coldness-of-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"Electricity from the coldness of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/electricity-from-the-coldness-of-the-universe3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, from <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.idtechex.com\/en\/timeline\/american-institute-of-physics-aip\/c83148\" target=\"_blank\">AIP<\/a> Publishing, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night. For more information see the <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.idtechex.com\/en\/timeline\/idtechex\/c4601\" target=\"_blank\">IDTechEx<\/a> report on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.idtechex.com\/research\/reports\/energy-harvesting-microwatt-to-megawatt-2019-2029-000615.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Energy Harvesting Microwatt to Megawatt 2019\u20132029<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe vastness of the universe is a thermodynamic resource,\u201d said Shanhui Fan, an author on the paper. \u201cIn terms of optoelectronic physics, there is really this very beautiful symmetry between harvesting incoming radiation and harvesting outgoing radiation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,219,1633,8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-physics","category-solar-power","category-space","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}