Plugged in: Startup hopes to tap electricity from trees
01/09/2006 08:05 AM
By Christopher Calnan
Don’t tell MagCap Engineering’s president he’s barking up the wrong business model.
His Canton company claims to be developing a process of generating electricity from living trees and is working with an unidentified business in The Netherlands as a possible investor.
But local energy experts have questions about the concept behind the proposal.
MagCap Engineering LLC wants to patent a process that converts the natural energy of a tree to usable direct-current electricity, company President Chris Lagadinos said.
He expects to find investors to help pay for the research needed to figure a way to increase the tree power from less than 2 volts to 12 volts sometime this year, creating an alternative to fossil fuels.
Jim Manwell, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Renewable Energy Resource Laboratory, questioned the potential of MagCap’s plans. “I’m wildly skeptical,” he said. “I would need to see proof before I believed it. It strikes me as pretty questionable for a number of reasons.”
MagCap announced the project Dec. 20 and was subsequently inundated with inquiries, Lagadinos said.
“It’s been a zoo, the e-mails we’ve been getting — (we’ve) been swamped with contacts (from) all over the world. Most of them verified our results to find out we’re for real,” he said.
Lagadinos declined to name the potential investor. But he said the Dutch company is in the energy-storage business.
Lagadinos said he didn’t know how much it would cost to develop the technology nor how long it would take to produce the 12-volt electricity. “I’m hoping within 2006,” he said.
MagCap is developing the system with an Illinois-based inventor named Gordon Wadle. Wadle was not available for comment.
Dwayne Breger, manager of the renewable energy and climate change group at the Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources, said he has questions about the source of the energy and whether the process would damage trees.
“My reaction is that it sounds too good to be true,” he said. “But I’m interested in seeing what they’re able to come up with. What they need to demonstrate is that there’s a sustainable energy source over time without a degradation to the tree.”
MagCap, which was founded in 1969, lists Raytheon Co., Thales Broadcast & Multimedia, Lockheed-Martin Corp. and British Aerospace as some of its customers.
Wadle became interested in the concept while studying lightning coming from the ground, “which led him to believe that there’s some type of power emanating from earth, which led him to trees,” Lagadinos said.
He said Wadle has worked on the project about one year and enlisted MagCap nine months ago. Lagadinos wasn’t sure why Wadle selected MagCap for the project.
Boston-based law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo PC filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Lagadinos said.
Mintz Levin patent attorney Jason Mirabito said he wouldn’t have filed the application if he didn’t have a reasonable amount of confidence in MagCap’s concept. He filed the patent application in early December and expects the approval process to take about three years. Mirabito acknowleged the uniqueness of MagCap’s proposal.
“This is really something out of left field,” he said. “In my 25 years of practicing patent law, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Lagadonis said tests have generated 0.8 volts to 1.2 volts by driving an aluminum roofing nail half an inch into a tree attached to a copper water pipe driven 7 inches into the ground. But the electricity is useless because it’s unstable and fluctuates.
The trick will be to learn how to filter and stabilize the electricity so it can be used to charge batteries, Lagadinos said.
“It’s a renewable source and it’s an unlimited source,” he said. “It’s virtually untapped. The issue is clean energy and it’s readily available. There are trees everywhere.”
Manwell said his skepticism is science-based.
“There’s a fundamental law of physics,” he said. “The energy has to come from somewhere.”
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