Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tree around the house that can charge a phone? With all of the energy consuming wireless devices we have today, people would undoubtedly want to add more of these ‘charging’ trees willingly. Scientists at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, have developed a prototype of a tree that harvests solar energy from its surroundings and turns that energy in to electricity to provide energy to small devices such as cellular phones, LED lights, humidifiers and more.
The leaves of these little mini powerhouses have unique solar panels, specially developed by VTT via 3D printers. The leaves harvest a grid of a complete electronic system, including special wiring that transfers energy into the converter that then creates electricity for the device, as per its energy requirements.
The main trunk of the tree was created with bio-materials, specially developed for this project, which were then put into shape using a 3D printer.
Here is the video of the solar power energy harvesting tree:
SOURCE: fossbytes.com
Although this is some nifty piece of technologie, as long as it doesn’t produce clean air, its a waste of space, in terms of tree talking. This looks like a product that could save a lot of problems, but it stil doesn’t fix the biggest one in relation to tree’s, and the cutting of tree’s.
Jelle… You keep it inside your house to use light that would fall on the floor or a wall. This tree basically allows you to use light in your house twice, once for illumination and once for trickle charging so I would say that is a big benefit. What if you had these indoors in your sun room or any south facing window? I just really hate when the first thing anyone has to say about new ideas is negative. Also anywhere we can produce electricity that is not fossil powered means we are not making CLEAN air DIRTY. That being said: Plant more trees! 🙂
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This is actually a pretty silly idea.
Its basically the equivalent of a garden solar light. There is no reason this needs to be the shape of a tree. The tree element is merely so it looks cool. Wind power and temperature fluctuation are another pretty feature that won’t achieve much.
You could have one actual solar panel and a hectare of actual trees, or several hectares of the silly fake trees, that don’t even produce oxygen.
that being said, it is cool how it is so modular.