One day, fossil fuels will eventually run out and this is why many are looking into alternative and renewable sources of energy. This includes solar, which is from the sun, wind energy, and hydro which generally relies on dams. However, it seems that researchers have found that maybe rain could be another potential form of renewable energy that we could look at.
This is thanks to the efforts of researchers who have developed a generator that uses a field-effect transistor-style structure that can generate voltage from water droplets, such as those from rain. In fact, their researcher has found that this could be highly effective as one drop is said to be capable of generating 140V, enough to power 100 small LED bulbs.
This is a huge improvement over previous efforts which apparently produced “thousands” of times less energy. While we imagine that there is still a lot of work left to be done before this can be used commercially, there is a lot of merit and potential to this.
While rain might not necessarily be consistent, and in some places it might even be rare, it could be used as a backup source of power, where during the rain, energy could be collected and stored for use later, such as at night when there is no more sun and where solar panels stop being quite as effective (although there is work being done on that).
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: sciencedaily