Energy Harvesting Market worth $1894.87 Million by 2017

Thursday 6 September 2012, Amsterdam

In developing economies, it is necessary to curb on the increasing operating cost and other energy-related cost In order to utilize the natural resources and reduce the overall cost, it has become mandatory to harvest the ambient energy available at a free scale and extract it for commercial applications. Thus, energy harvesting is becoming the crucial technique to harvest the ambient energy. The major driving factors for energy harvesting market are energy saving, increasing government support, and changing technology trends. Energy harvesting technique is useful in scavenging solar energy, vibration, motion, electromagnetic, motion, fluid, etc. This report covers most of the types of energy harvesting like light, thermoelectric, vibration, electromagnetic, fluid, motion, and others.

In the present scenario, energy harvesting can be useful in various application areas such as consumer electronics, industrial, building and home automation, military and aerospace, wireless sensor network (WSN), automotive, bicycle dynamo, and others. Consumer electronics is widely exposed to the energy harvesting technology. Energy harvesting technique is used to charging up the devices like mobile, watch, mp3 players, etc. Building and home automation is one of the fastest growing application areas and energy harvesting is the mainstream technology in this area. A wireless sensor network is also the key application area for energy harvesting technique.

Global energy harvesting market is expected to reach $1894.87 m by 2017, at an estimated CAGR of 24.31%. Europe is leading the total energy harvesting technology market; followed by North America and APAC. In the market of ROW, Middle East, and Africa are the largest contributors.

Electroactive polymers (EAPs) have been proposed for harvesting energy. These polymers have a large strain, elastic energy density, and high energy conversion efficiency. The total weight of systems based on EAPs is proposed to be significantly lower than those based on piezoelectric materials.

Nanogenerators, such as the one made by Georgia Tech, could provide a new way for powering devices without batteries. As of 2008, it only generates some dozen nanowatts, which is too low for any practical application.

Noise harvesting NiPS Laboratory in Italy has recently proposed to harvest wide spectrum low scale vibrations via a nonlinear dynamical mechanism that can improve harvester efficiency up to a factor 4 compared to traditional linear harvesters.