I Sing the Tree Electric

A company is looking to extract electric power from trees. The company, MagCap Engineering, is actually quite credible, especially if you look at their list of pervious clients which includes British Aerospace.

The engineering company “expects to find investors to help pay for the research needed to figure a way to increase the tree power from less than 2 volts to 12 volts sometime this year, creating an alternative to fossil fuels.” Early “prototypes” are going to be functioning late in 2006.

2 thoughts on “I Sing the Tree Electric

  1. Hmm…They found an electric current between and aluminum nail in the tree and a copper wire touching the root. I suspect the electricity is not coming from the tree; the tree is just supplying the electrolyte for the aluminum-copper battery that it forms – ie it’s just providing the space for ions to run around in. The energy is probably coming from the copper electrode dissolving, and oxygen turning into water at the aluminum nail. So the setup is very similar to the old experiment where you put a copper and a zinc plate into a lemon.
    So, unfortunately, trees are not a direct source of electrical energy.

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