Energy Harvesting is Charging Up

There have been a number of energy harvesting systems proposed over the years and they have seen varying degrees of adoption. The motivation for energy harvesting varies according to the class of application: 1) In green energy applications, solar harvesting has seen widespread adoption to offset rising energy costs and to reduce CO2 emissions, 2) In infrastructure monitoring applications, low power sensors have made use of solar and thermal harvesting to avoid restrictive battery maintenance when deploying sensors at scale, and 3) in mobile applications, harvesting has been used to extend device battery lifetime and the charging burden imposed on the end user. In short, mobile computing systems focus on energy harvesting as a technique to relax or eliminate dependencies on batteries.