A prototype with DC appliances connected.[Note: See this introduction post for an explanation of gleaner technology.]

Forty percent of the world’s population, including a significant portion of the rural and urban poor sections of the population in India, does not have access to reliable electricity supply. But a new energy source for them e from an unlikely source: the 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries are thrown away in the U.S. every year.

According to MIT Technology Review, researchers at IBM Research India in Bangalore found that at least 70 percent of all discarded batteries have enough life left to power an LED light at least four hours a day for a year:

The IBM group, working with a hardware R&D firm called RadioStudio, tore open discarded laptop battery packaging and extracted individual storage units called cells, tested those individually to pick out the good ones, and bined them to form refurbished battery packs. Then, after adding charging dongles as well as circuitry to prevent overheating, they gave them to five users in Bangalore who lived in slums or operated sidewalk carts.

[. . .]

IBM is not considering this as a business but says the technology could be offered free to poor countries.

You can read IBM’s research paper here.

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Gleaner Technology

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