An article posted on the Medium website last week focuses on the possibilities of zero point energy as a new form of energy. The author of the article, A.S. Deller, interviews Steven Schear, a technologist who has been involved in early efforts to find ways to tap the ZPE field.

https://medium.com/predict/zero-point-energy-infinite-possibilities-f66fb3e4aeb2

Schear worked with Garrett Moddel and Bernard Haisch at a company called Jovion, which now seems to be defunct. At the time they were working on the stochastic electrodynamics theoretical model. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_electrodynamics)

He talks about the barriers that researchers in the ZPE field face, which have been discussed on this site at length. Given the nature of peer review and the need for grant funding, it is difficult to get support for research projects, since ZPE is such a fringe area of science.

Schear cites a paper by Moddel et. al. as representing the most promising approach to tapping the ZPE field. (Moddel et. al. 2019 paper, Extraction of Zero-Point Energy from the Vacuum: Assessment of Stochastic Electrodynamics-Based Approach as Compared to Other Methods. Atoms, 7(2), 51. doi:10.3390/atoms7020051). However, he cautions, “Initial experimental results were interesting, but given the lower than expected power output, inconclusive.”

Thanks to Thor Leach for posting the following here yesterday:

Oh, hey, look at that! Garret Moddel was granted a patent for his asymmetrical Casimir cavity power generation device back in February! And the device should be able to achieve Lithium Ion power densities. And it’s solid state. And he thinks it could eventually be manufactured at scale using a process similar to the printing of thin film solar cells.

The link to the patent, which was granted by the US Patent Office on February 22nd 2022, is here:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US11258379B2/en

Some excerpts from the patent:

FIELD
This invention is in the field of electronic devices. This invention relates generally to quantum devices for harvesting and generating electrical energy.

BACKGROUND
According to quantum theory the quantum vacuum is filled with electromagnetic radiation in the form of quantum vacuum fluctuations, and devices exhibiting associated quantum noise. There has been substantial discussion about whether this energy can be harvested, and if so, how. A chief problem in harvesting this energy is that it forms the energy ground state, and so it does not flow from one region to another. However, the quantum vacuum energy is geometry-dependent, and its density is lower in a Casimir cavity than outside of the Casimir cavity. The use of Casimir cavities therefore opens the possibility of making use of the quantum vacuum fluctuations to drive energy from one location to another.

SUMMARY
Devices for generation of electrical energy are described herein. In embodiments, devices described herein use two different regions in which the zero-point fluctuations are different to allow a portion of noise power arising from the zero-point fluctuations to be harvested.