Tapping Trees for Electricity?

dr_agonfly writes "Despite many skeptics, a Massachusetts company is getting investor interest in developing a process to tap electric power from trees. MagCap is looking to boost the current power from just under 2 volts to a more useful 12 volts with investor funding." From the article: "Jim Manwell, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Renewable Energy Resource Laboratory, questioned the potential of MagCap's plans. 'I'm wildly skeptical,' he said. 'I would need to see proof before I believed it. It strikes me as pretty questionable for a number of reasons.'"

Comments

For the skeptical, don't always dismiss ideas

[usurper_ii]

because they sound stupid. I had an ideal for putting up "speed bumps" that generated electricity when cars went over them. I e-mailed a big name in the alternative energy field, who was mentioned in a Slashdot article, and he laughed and said it would be "a good joke to tell at a party." And six to eight months later -- with serveral other people telling it was a dumb idea -- I open up Slashdot and see an article from a guy in England who has made something almost identical to my idea and has 200 cities wanting to buy his device. That just goes to show you what the big "experts" know. My good party joke was going to make some guy a ton of money. Of course, I was a little let down to see that someone had beat me to it, but that's life, I guess. And even though I researched and could find nobody working on the invention, that guy had been working on it for 11 years.

Usurper_ii