“Air humidity is a vast, sustainable reservoir of energy that, unlike solar and wind, is continuously available,” said the study, which was published recently in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” said Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

In fact, researchers say, nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air.

(via Instapundit)

[As always, the question remains as to whether one can make *efficient* use of the source, ie, not use more energy than one harvests in the process. How much energy will go into building these “air gens,” and can one expect more energy produced over its life cycle than it takes to produce and later dispose of them? Do we have the raw materials to source them ourselves, and the will to retrieve and use them? Assuming that the answers to all of these are favorable, then it would do far better than sun or wind power, because it would run 24/7 under any weather conditions except extremely low humidity levels — AND would be able to operate in a completely decentralized fashion. That latter capability is why I predict that nothing much will come of it, unfortunately. — Ed]