SUSTAINABILITY The end of battery obsolescence: energy harvesting as the backbone of green electronics

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Energy harvesting is gaining traction as a route to maintenance‑free, lower‑waste IoT, propelled by the EU’s 2027 battery removability rules and the high cost of field battery swaps. This article outlines the economic case for battery‑free nodes, surveys the most active industry adopters (building automation, industrial monitoring, automotive and medical), and explains the technical and lifecycle trade‑offs — from PMICs and buffers to materials and regulation — that decide whether harvesting is the right choice.

Energy harvesting is increasingly sold as the answer to a waste problem the Internet of Things created, and two forces are driving this: a European regulation that reshapes how batteries sit inside products from February 2027, and the economics of servicing sensors that nobody can easily reach.

The most-quoted figure in the field — a projection that the world would discard up to 78 million IoT batteries a day — comes from a 2021 position paper by the EU-funded EnABLES project coordinated by Ireland's Tyndall National Institute, which forecast that the total for 2025, alongside an estimate of one trillion connected devices.

Those numbers are projections rather than measured counts, and they have circulated unverified for years, but the disposal problem they describe is what vendors of harvesting power electronics now position against.

The battery math behind adoption

The strongest driver is by far economics. A coin cell costs cents, but sending a technician to swap it inside a sealed wall sensor, a rooftop unit, or a machine in a hazardous area can cost orders of magnitude more, and many such devices are built to be inaccessible by the time they need service. The same point can be made from the sustainability side, stressing that batteries should outlive the devices they power, with EnABLES’ paper singling out medical implants and sensors in harsh or unreachable locations as the clearest cases.

That gap is why a harvesting front end and a low-leakage buffer can justify their added component cost. A node that never needs a battery change removes the largest lifetime expense of a large sensor fleet, and it also removes the failure mode where a dead cell silently takes a sensor offline. The arithmetic scales brutally against batteries: a commercial building or factory can carry thousands of wireless sensors, and a single truck roll to replace one coin cell can cost more than the sensor, so a fleet on a staggered three-to-five-year replacement cadence turns into a permanent maintenance line item.

The research firms tracking the category credit its growth to this pull toward maintenance-free, battery-less operation, though they disagree sharply on its size. Mordor Intelligence values energy harvesting systems at $4.10 billion in 2025, rising to $5.78 billion by 2030, while MarketsandMarkets puts the 2025 figure at $0.61 billion, a spread that reflects how differently each firm draws the category's boundaries rather than any real disagreement about direction.

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Which industries are buying

Building automation is the most active sector. Self-powered light switches and sensors avoid both wiring and battery service across thousands of points in a building, and the category's established player, EnOcean, partnered with NXP in November 2025 to integrate its energy-harvesting wireless switches with NXP's smart-building silicon. Industrial monitoring is the second, where vibration and thermal harvesters feed predictive-maintenance sensors bolted to machinery that already supplies the gradient or motion they need.

Automotive sensing is a third, pulling harvesting toward tire, chassis, and cabin sensors where running a wire is impractical, and foundries are building dedicated automotive processes around the broader power-semiconductor demand, with Samsung's SF2A automotive node due in 2027. Medical technology is the fourth, spanning wearables that harvest body heat and implants where a battery swap means surgery; that’s also the application EnABLES is repeatedly cited as the reason to design for power autonomy. Across all four, the common thread is a low duty cycle: a sensor that sleeps for minutes and wakes for milliseconds is exactly the load an ambient source can carry, which is why harvesting tracks sensing rather than the broader electronics market.

EU battery regulation requirements

The regulation tightening the screws is Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, which entered into force in August 2023 and phases in over several years. Its most-cited provision, Article 11, requires that from February 2027, portable batteries in products sold in the EU be readily removable and replaceable by the end user with commercially available tools, without heat or solvents. The rule also sets battery-collection targets that climb to 63% by 2027 and 73% by 2030. Nintendo has already confirmed a Switch 2 variant with user-replaceable batteries for the EU to comply.

The regulation doesn’t mandate energy harvesting, and its removability rule cuts the other way for sealed harvesting devices, since a battery-free node has no cell to remove. It also reaches well beyond removability, layering in carbon-footprint declarations, recycled-content minimums for materials such as lithium and cobalt, and supply-chain due diligence rules that phase in through the early 2030s, all of which raise the cost of shipping a battery into the EU.

Medical devices and certain wet appliances, such as electric toothbrushes, are exempt from the consumer-removability requirement, needing removal only by professionals, and the European Commission opened a consultation in April this year on adding further exempt categories. Indirectly, the rule raises the design and compliance cost of putting a serviceable battery in a product, which strengthens the case for not putting a battery in at all, where harvesting can carry the load.

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The sustainability argument has soft spots that vendors tend to skip. A harvesting system replaces a battery with a transducer, a power-management chip, and a supercapacitor or hybrid capacitor, all of which carry their own manufacturing footprint and, in the case of lithium-ion capacitors, draw on some of the same lithium supply chain the regulation is trying to manage.

The headline disposal figures remain 2021 projections, and the one-trillion-device count underpinning them has not been independently confirmed at that scale. Harvesting also does not fit every device. Anything with a screen, a radio that transmits continuously, or a meaningful actuator draws far more than ambient sources supply, which keeps the technology confined to low-duty-cycle sensing rather than the broad consumer electronics the battery rules target. The technology has a real and growing place in IoT, earned mostly by the cost of battery replacement rather than by the environmental case that gets it headlines.

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