New sustainable energy source? Scientists reveal ice generates electricity and salt supercharges it

Ice generates electricity: Most of us think of ice as something that keeps drinks cold, makes roads dangerous in winter, or forms distant glaciers we’ll probably never see up close. It’s important for sure, but not exactly exciting.

Flexoelectricity Explained: The Hidden Power of Ice

But a team of researchers has discovered something unexpected: ice can generate electricity when it bends, and when salt is added, the effect becomes a thousand times stronger, as per a report.

Physicist Xin Wen, along with his team at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China, found that ice is flexoelectric, a property that allows a material to produce electricity when it's bent or twisted, as per a Popular Mechanics report. This is different from piezoelectric materials, which generate a charge when compressed, as per the report. Ice cubes don’t bend easily, but in thin sheets, ice can show this hidden ability, as per Popular Mechanics.


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Salty Ice Generates More Electricity Than Pure Ice

The researchers also experimented with salty ice. They found that when they bent ice with different levels of salt, the electricity it produced increased with the salt content, peaking at 25% salinity, as reported by Popular Mechanics. This salty ice generated a charge a thousand times greater than pure ice, and a million times stronger than salt on its own, as per the report.

As the sheet of salty ice bends, water molecules, salt, and ions move from the compressed side to the stretched side, as per the Popular Mechanics report. Because ice is made up of many small crystals with gaps in between, ions can travel through those spaces, as per the report. At the surface, where the ice meets a thin layer of meltwater, different amounts of positive and negative ions stick. That movement creates a net charge and then becomes a streaming current, as per the Popular Mechanics report.

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How Ice Flexoelectricity Could Contribute to Lightning Formation

This process, called streaming flexoelectricity, could be more than just a lab curiosity. Wen simulated the way ice particles collide in thunderclouds and found that the electric charge they created was similar to what happens in real storms. That suggests ice flexoelectricity might even play a role in lightning, according to the report.

Wen said in the study published in Nature Physics that, “These findings have profound consequences for our understanding of natural phenomena involving ice,” adding, “Our calculations of flexoelectric charge density generated in [ice] collisions inside thunderstorm clouds compare favorably to the experimental charge transferred in such events, suggesting a possible participation of ice flexoelectricity in the generation of lightning,” as quoted by Popular Mechanics.

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How Melting Glaciers Could Fuel Sustainable Electricity

The research also points to a new way of thinking about energy. About a tenth of Earth is covered in ice, much of it salty. Meltwater under glaciers and ice sheets is full of ions, and its flow already generates electricity, as per the Popular Mechanics report. Streaming flexoelectricity could offer a new, sustainable energy source.

Could Ice Electricity Support Life on Jupiter’s Icy Moon Europa?

The researchers also say this might matter beyond Earth. On Jupiter’s moon Europa, a salty ice crust sits above an ocean. The electricity from flexoelectric ice there could even help spark the building blocks of life, as per the Popular Mechanics report.

The researchers said in another study, which was also recently published in the journal Nature Physics, “The high flexoelectricity of saline ice brings the vision of harnessing ice power one step closer to reality, and may also be relevant to the electrical activity of ice-covered terrestrial regions and icy ocean worlds such as Europa or Enceladus,” as quoted in the report.

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FAQs

Can ice really generate electricity?

Yes. According to scientists, ice can generate electricity when it’s bent, a property known as flexoelectricity, as per the Popular Mechanics report.

Can ice cubes at home generate electricity?

Not exactly. Ice cubes don’t bend easily, but very thin sheets of ice can activate this electrical property.