Electricity from trees?

[Meat Face]

hmm

 

 

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.”