Harvesting Ambient Energy

Hybrid Power Sources Cut IoT Battery Dependency

- Tom Murphy

Remote IoT sensor nodes have a battery problem. Constant replacements send millions of cells to the landfill and imperil groundwater. Replacement costs present scaling issues for hyperscale sensor networks. Energy Harvesting technology is advancing with efficiency and hybrid sources, leading the way to a more scalable, battery-less future.

Imagine, if you will, a long line of limber conga dancers lining up at landfills worldwide. Instead of happy revelers filling up a grand ballroom, all dancing in time to a festive Latin beat, "cha-chacha-cha-boom," we see a long parade of lead-acid batteries making their way into large open pits and dropping one by one to the bottom.

Then, they are covered with dirt and sit subjected to pressure, moisture, heat, and decay as they leak toxic chemicals into the earth, contaminating our underground drinking water reserves with endless toxins.

According to some estimates, as many as 6 million batteries a day or 25 billion a year end up in landfills after expending their valuable energy generation on billions of IoT devices and consumer electronics.

The Internet of Things has promised to make our world safer and more reliable with better efficiency, intelligence, comfort, precision, and utility. But it has also created the need for more batteries to power remote sensor nodes everywhere: in factories, cities, buildings, around farms, in the home, or worn around the body.

About 24 years ago, the objective of one company was to collect ambient energy in situ from the surrounding environment, store it in a supercapacitor, and have it available to power on an embedded sensor node when it woke up to record an event for data logging.