The same moisture that settles as dew on the grass each morning may one day keep the lights on. The EU-funded CATCHER project has been developing a technology that turns water vapour in the air into electricity, working day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows. Its converters have already run for thousands of hours in demanding laboratory tests — and at the end you can check whether you have a head for the energy of the future.
Solar panels and wind turbines have become the familiar faces of clean energy. Both, however, share the same weakness: they depend on the weather. When the sky is overcast or the air is still, their output falls, and the grid has to fill the gap with other sources. That is why researchers keep looking for renewable resources that could work around the clock.
One of the more surprising candidates is all around us. The air always contains some water vapour, even on days when it feels dry. Humidity is invisible most of the time, yet it becomes visible every morning as dew on the grass. A team of European researchers has asked a simple question: could this moisture be turned into a steady supply of electricity?
The idea is being developed within CATCHER, a project funded by the European Union through the European Innovation Council (EIC). It ran from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2026 under grant agreement 101046307. The work was coordinated in Portugal by COFAC, the cooperative behind Lusófona University, and led by Svitlana Lyubchyk, an associate professor there who acted as project coordinator.
The full title of the project speaks for itself: it aimed to create an innovative “humidity to electricity” renewable energy conversion technology. According to the coordinator, the starting point was a wider need. “The broader need was to establish a credible pathway towards future stand-alone humidity-to-electricity conversion technology and to complement conventional technologies, such as solar and wind.”
The key process is adsorption: molecules of water vapour from the surrounding air attach to the surface of a material inside the converter. The energy linked to this atmospheric water adsorption is then converted into electrical energy. The project also helped explain how the pores of different sizes inside the converter work together in this process, which matters for improving future devices.
Because humidity is present at any hour, such a converter does not need sunlight or wind to operate. That is the main promise of the technology: a source that keeps working at night and on calm, cloudy days.
The numbers quoted by the team are striking, but they need to be read carefully. “Our assessment indicates that the energy associated with atmospheric water adsorption is equivalent to about 50 times current annual global energy consumption,” says Lyubchyk.
She immediately adds an important caveat. “This is a theoretical resource ceiling that places atmospheric humidity among the largest renewable resources in the world, broadly comparable in scale to wind and greater than other renewable resources already exploited commercially.” In other words, the figure describes the upper limit of what exists in nature, not what today’s devices can deliver. The article also stresses that the technology is still at an early stage of development despite recent progress.
Big theoretical numbers mean little without evidence from the lab. During the project, the partners reported several concrete results:
Long, continuous operation is especially important, because a new energy source has to prove that it stays reliable over time, not just in a short demonstration.
The team does not present humidity as a replacement for solar or wind, but as a complement to them. The goal is a 24/7, easy-to-use and fully recyclable energy solution that could work at very different scales, from a large energy production plant to a single home. In the longer term, the technology is meant to be integrated into the European power grid and to let plants and households generate their own electricity anywhere in the world.
Lyubchyk sees a clear place for it on the market: “A disruptive new product capable of supplementing existing technologies and addressing significant energy efficiency challenges will strengthen the European renewable and decentralised energy market. This will contribute to the EU’s target of a fully renewable energy system by 2050.”
CATCHER is also a good example of how a new energy source is born. It starts with an idea and a theoretical estimate, moves on to understanding the physics and materials, and then faces thousands of hours of testing before anyone talks about products. Projects like this bring together people from energy engineering, physics, materials chemistry and environmental engineering, so students in these fields may one day work on similar challenges. The story also shows the role of the European Innovation Council, which supports research that aims to move from the lab towards the market.
CATCHER has shown that air humidity can be treated as a serious renewable resource. Its converters have worked for more than 9 000 hours without losing performance, and the team has laid the groundwork for connecting many devices together. The theoretical potential is huge, but the technology is still young, and much work remains before humidity-powered electricity reaches homes and the grid. You can read the original story on CORDIS.
Source: CORDIS, European Commission.
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