will_a113

I remember taking a design class in the 1990s right after GC came out, and the professor basically said “this will be used as a demo in intro design classes for the next century.” I thought it was hyperbole, but people still talk about it.

I think this is it exactly, and in fact I found a Science Daily article that explains the cleverness of it (your assumption about the time scale is correct, and they have a clever arrangement of diodes that let you kind of “pump” the charge out). They specifically mention not violating the 2nd Law too :)

It’s more like a generator that uses ambient heat as the “battery”. With previous systems you could only extract useful work from heat if you had a heat gradient (e.g. one area that’s hotter than another). With this invention the innovation is that graphene’s unique combination of thinness and conductivity basically let you convert the brownian “heat” of the substance itself (not the environment) into electricity.