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Batteryless Solar Electronics
Can we make electronics more sustainable, with lower impact to the ecology? One way is to design them differently, more like batteryless solar calculators or Citizen eco-drive watches, which never wear out. In this space I invite a sharing of DIY projects which apply this energy harvesting strategy toward consumer electronics, a traditionally “fast-cycling” industry, and an invitation to remediate the 15 billion battery discards occurring worldwide, each year.
Raghavan, B., & Ma, J. (2011). The energy and emergy of the internet. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks – HotNets ’11, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/2070562.2070571
Sutherland, B. (2021). Design Aspirations for Sustainable Energy Autarkic Systems in a Future with Limits. LIMITS ’21: Workshop on Computing within Limits, 9. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.8b56b095
Sutherland, B. (2022). Strategies for Degrowth Computing. 6. https://doi.org/doi:10.21428/bf6fb269.04676652
doi.org
The energy and emergy of the internet | Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
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4 Replies
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Hi Brian, thanks! This is such a crucial topic. I’ve been reading work by the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who tried to bring entropy and energy dissipation into focus in economics. He’s been an important inspiration for the degrowth movement. He challenges the idea of a steady-state system as a kind of fiction. There is always some kind of dissipation, entropy, loss, and so for a system to be truly sustainable, it must be open to an outside flow in some way. This is what the sun is for us generally, and so solar influx is one kind of resource to design with. But I also wonder about other forms of available energy, like the energy generated by kinetic movement. There are watches, for example, that are powered by the movement of those who wear them. I wonder if one could begin to imagine electronics also powered by incidental kinetic movement, or other forms of energy already out there in the world.
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You would probably like the raindrop powered electronics project.
Chua, K., HOR, Y., & Lim, H. (2016). Raindrop Kinetic Energy Piezoelectric Harvesters and Relevant Interface Circuits: Review, Issues and Outlooks. Sensors and Transducers, 200, 1–15.
My full thesis is now available online, for download-only, not reposting:
Energy Harvesting Information Systems and Design in the Energy Transition
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/130114 -
Can a radio run indefinitely? Maybe! Here’s my batteryless solar-charging https://thepublicrad.io #WorldRadioDay
thepublicrad.io
The simplest possible radio for your morning routine. One FM station, one mason jar.
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Not solar, not batteryless, yet relevant:
https://newatlas.com/enomad-estream-portable-water-turbine-charger/44897/
I’ve seen some of these that do not have batteries — just a turbine in the water generating electricity directly to USB device.
newatlas.com
Portable turbine provides a "stream" of power for charging devices
Portable solar chargers are perhaps the most popular means of keeping devices powered in the wilderness and, as we've seen, portable wind turbines are an option too. To cover all bases though, you may soon also be able to take … Continue reading
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