Soiled Power Lamp

Normally when it comes to energy, we talk about biofuels and hydrogen sources like methanol. But one designer decided to go for a more natural, easily accessible power source. One of Marieke Strap's rather interesting projects is a lamp powered by nothing else other than your run-of-the-mill garden soil. Aptly called the "Soil Lamp," it exploits the naturally-occurring electrolytes in healthy garden soil to provide energy enough to power a simple LED light bulb.


According to Inhabitat, because soil contains metals and microbes similar to those used in fuel cells, all Strap needed to do is devise zinc and copper conductive plates to harness the potential energy. Aside from having to design plates to harness energy from the soil, all the setup needs is regular watering, just like a plant. While the design itself is small in scale, it will be interesting to see where this idea leads in the future. To note, a couple of other soil-powered projects we featured before are Harvard's microbial fuel cell and Living Power System's fuel cell.