Earth, Wind and Fire: Building an Earth Battery

ABOUT FACILITATOR

Madeleine Young is a cross-disciplinary artist and designer whose practice muddies the boundaries between written, sculptural, and experiential modes of work. She investigates death and decay in natural systems and the subsequent possibilities for renewal by locating unintentional collaboration sites between humans and the natural environment to find and assemble objects as anthropocenic artifacts.

OBJECTIVE

Soil is constantly being formed and reformed by geologic and human disturbances. Rich soil produces the food we grow and eat for energy, but it can also generate electrical energy to sustain our built environment. Join us for an afternoon to learn about the power of drawing on energy sources from the world around us, and how the cycles of soil composting can fuel our futures. We will be building our own small earth batteries out of recycled materials, soil, and hardware to power a small bulb.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

• Copper wire
• Screws
• Soil
• Sandpaper
• Bulbs

WHAT PARTICIPANTS SHOULD BRING

• Old *plastic egg cartons

Curriculum

Just as energy is pulled from the atmosphere and environment, it can return back. For example, fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas) are densely stored energy sources because of the great amounts of pressure and heat which forms them over time. Solar energy is drawn from the sun’s rays, activating a photovoltaic cell to generate an electric current. As energy is generated—by whatever means—there are storage systems that have been created to allow us to draw on it when we need it, and to prevent it from dissipating back into the atmosphere. A common form of energy storage present in our daily lives are batteries. 

Batteries use chemical potential energy to store and release energy on demand. They consist of two electrical terminals, a cathode (negative) and anode (positive), separated by an electrolyte. In household batteries this electrolyte, composed of sulfuric acid and water, is what we refer to as “battery acid”, the substance that leaks out of our old and unused batteries. Similar to traditional batteries, an earth battery is a pair of anodes and cathodes separated by an electrolyte. These terminals are made of two dissimilar metals, such as zinc and copper, which are buried in soil and begin reacting. This is because zinc loses electrons faster than copper, and when the soil is moist, an electrolyte solution forms allowing the two metals to begin exchanging electrons and begin a flow of electrical current.

In large-scale examples of this phenomenon, where the dissimilar metals are placed deep enough in the earth, they can begin to draw on the earth’s telluric currents—an electrical current created by earth’s magnetic poles. Small at-home earth batteries made in recycled egg cartons or ice cube trays use the chemical reaction between the two dissimilar metals and the electrolyte solution in the soil to draw a current, typically generating between 2 and 5 Volts. 

The exchange of electrons in these soil based batteries demonstrates the (electrical) power that exists in the world around us: in the sky, the air, and even the soil. With a few pieces of hardware, some damp soil, and household items, we can power a small bulb and begin to demystify the systems of energy around us.