2012 - Cambridge University – Generating and harnessing electricity from plants

Plant Power - Creating Electricity with Living Walls

Another fascinating project sponsored by Scotscape in 2012 was based at the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge. The P2P hub was the brainchild of researchers at the biochemistry department at the University of Cambridge’s Downing College.

The Brief was to investigate the ability to harness and store the electricity generated by plants

The process

The ‘hub’ used our fytotextile with an additional embedded layer of carbon fibre mesh. This would enable the electricity created by the waste product from the roots of growing plants to be harnessed and stored in a battery.

This ground-breaking project combined our living wall system with solar panels to further enhance the potential of this inspired concept.

The result

It was demonstrated that the power produced from 8m2 of Living Wall was enough to charge a mobile phone!

Conclusion

If the area was increased to 100m2 area of Living Wall would be able to generate enough power to run the pump to provide the irrigation to the Living Wall. Now that would be a sustainable project.