Energy harvesting (EH) or scavenging is the use of ambient energy to provide electrical power for small electronic and electrical devices. The technologies employed variously convert human power, body fluids, heat differences, vibration or other movement, dirt, vegetation, ultraviolet, visible light or infrared to electricity. Most are in the laboratory and many are solutions looking for problems, yet practical applications of some harvesting technologies have been around for some time. They vary from the bicycle dynamo to the solar powered calculator or road sign. Proven solutions often store the energy usually either with a capacitor, as with some bicycles, or with a rechargeable battery as with some wind-up lanterns. However, certain wind-up radios manage this with clever clockwork that releases the energy at a required steady rate. We therefore have a considerable repertoire of energy harvesting technologies and uses today but there is a tsunami wave of new technologies and applications that they will be both affordable and usable in the next few years. A multi-billion dollar market awaits.
The emerging applications are analysed by sector in the new IDTechEx report, "Energy Harvesting and Storage for Electronic Devices 2009-2019" RFID & Printed Electronics Research. They include:

1. Buildings - a huge market, where over 500,000 wireless control devices with no battery or ac mains connection have already been sold. These sharply reduce up front and ongoing costs, including huge gains in the cost of energy used for air conditioning etc. in buildings.

2. 90% of envisaged uses of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are impractical without energy harvesting. These mesh networks are rarely feasible because, in the biggest projects envisaged, such as those where nodes are embedded in buildings and machines for life or on billions of trees, the batteries would be inaccessible or prohibitively expensive to access.

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