2014.03.06 Is Earth's infrared radiation a potential energy source ?

At any given moment, our planet bleeds 100 million gigawatts of infrared radiation back into space. Needless to say, converting this wasted heat to a renewable energy source would be a sure-fire game changer. Physicists from Harvard University may have just figured out how to do it.

Our Earth, which is heated by the sun, is much warmer than the frozen space that surrounds it. This creates a heat imbalance that could be transformed into direct-current (DC) power. But making this happen is considerably easier said than done.

"It's not at all obvious, at first, how you would generate DC power by emitting infrared light in free space toward the cold," noted principal investigator Federico Capasso in a statement. "To generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light, that's weird. It makes sense physically once you think about it, but it's highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the use of physics at the nanoscale for a completely...."

Read the full article published by IO9.