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It's really disappointing that climate change had to progress as far as it has before all off these great advancements in renewable energy, harvesting water from ambient humidity, etc have really started to take off. I wonder where we would be now if the urgency had truly been accepted a decade ago.

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Easily portable renewalable energy sources seems ideal domain of solar, how would this compare with a similar footprint solar panel?

Yet you still have people like my step-father who is convinced global warming is a sham and that “renewable energy” and the advancements surrounding it are nothing more than a way to destroy the foundation of America, oil companies, and ultimately just charge the American people more money for “less efficient energy sources” and that the technology won’t exist for another couple hundred years before we can even begin thinking about moving part of the grid to this so called “clean energy.”

If your personality and life morals is based on a corporation you know you went wrong in life.

I kinda get it, even if its dark and cynical for folks actually involved in fossil fuels and such... Like, no sense slaughtering the golden goose when its only eating people you don't like, right? That sort of crud.

But I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the people so... conservative, I guess, that the idea of there not being an oil industry somehow fills them with dread.

That's a weird thing to stake pride in.

As the article says, it would be ideal for using instead of a battery, to avoid having to replace the battery. I'm assuming this doesn't scale up. If it's so responsive it can't be very hardy.

> harvesting water from ambient humidity

It is called a dehumidifier and uas been around as long the fridge and AC. All the kickstarter projects promising water from air are scam. It is cheaper and faster to truck water to the places that need it. Dry places won't produce any water from air. Humid places have water already amd dehumidifying it from air is expensive, your solar cell will get you a cup of water per day.

Renewable sources that can't even charge a phone are hardly sources of energy. Not the ones that can power houses, cars, etc...

Not every source needs to a power a phone. They said in the headline about the target use case.

I thought I was commenting to another comment, but nonetheless generating and powering very low power devices was never an issue. Also, these low-power devices are not causing climate change and whatsoever. They are solving a problem that doesn't exist. A small, super-efficient wind generator might be useful in some rare cases, but it is not a game changer in any way, providing such little power.

> harvesting water from ambient humidity

Has there been any major advancements in this area? Everything I've seen has been dehumidifiers under a different name or were new tech with such a poor output that it's not worth it.

290 micro watts is an incredibly small amount of power. I can't imagine any commercial sensor it could power. As a comparison, a solar panel of the same size would produce about 10,000 times the power of this device.

A solar panel of the same size would produce about 10,000 times the power of this device. That is ten thousand times.