Can We Harvest Neutrino Energy? Neutrinovoltaic Claims Explained

December 20, 2025

Neutrino® Energy Group is selling a seductive idea: electricity pulled from the background hum of the universe. Their “neutrinovoltaic” materials don’t try to trap neutrinos the way a solar cell traps photons; instead, they claim that invisible radiation can nudge ultra-thin graphene–silicon layers into atomic-scale motion—and that this constant jitter can be rectified into a steady stream of electric current.

The Neutrinovoltaic Pitch

Neutrino® Energy Group is led by founder Holger Thorsten Schubart, a mathematician by training, who has built the organization around a conversion story rather than a fuel story. Neutrinovoltaics are presented as a solid-state material stack that produces persistent electrical output because its internal structure can turn microscopic motion into directional electron flow. If that sounds like “energy from nothing,” the company reframes it as “energy from everything”—a device that drinks from whatever background physics is always present.

A recurring emphasis is that they aren’t “catching” neutrinos like a particle detector. Instead, they describe neutrinos (and other invisible influences) as passing through while the graphene lattice responds by vibrating—more like wind passing through a windmill than light being absorbed by a solar cell. The windmill doesn’t trap the wind; it turns because the wind exists. In their telling, the graphene “turns” at the atomic scale.

The second move is definitional. In their public-facing explanations, “neutrino energy” is frequently treated as shorthand for a broader invisible background—natural and artificial radiation, stray electromagnetic fields, and other environmental inputs—rather than a narrow claim about harvesting neutrino particles specifically. That broad umbrella keeps the narrative intuitive, but it also makes the “input” harder to isolate scientifically.

Technically, their story is a multilayer graphene–silicon nanostructure deposited on a metal substrate, with semiconductor-style junction behavior that biases charge motion in one direction. The conversion claim is that lattice-scale vibrations—whatever their ultimate cause—can be rectified into usable DC output by the right combination of materials, layering, and electrical design. The big question is whether that output is real, scalable, and consistent under controls that eliminate easier explanations.

“The question is, where’s the energy coming from? What is the source of the energy? It’s is not coming from the graphene, that’s just a material, and the brownian motion is just an effect. So the question is, where is the energy coming from? It is coming from the full invisible spectrum of radiation.” — Holger Thorsten Schubart

Origin Story: The Underground Test

Every frontier technology has a founding myth, and for Neutrino® Energy Group it’s an underground experiment. In the origin narrative, early tests were performed in a setting described as deep or shielded enough that ordinary surface radiation would be heavily reduced. In that environment, the company frames the moment of insight as: if the signal persists underground, perhaps the source is something that penetrates everything.

The leap in that story is intuitive and dramatic: deep underground, “only neutrinos get through,” therefore neutrinos must be the source. It’s a compelling hook because it borrows the logic of neutrino physics itself—neutrino observatories are often underground precisely because rock filters out noisy backgrounds. If the goal is to argue for a new kind of power, “it still works underground” sounds like a smoking gun.

But it’s also exactly where scientists and engineers start asking for the boring details. Underground does not mean “only neutrinos.” It means “different mix of inputs”: less sunlight, less temperature fluctuation, altered humidity, reduced some radio and particle backgrounds, increased others (like certain natural radioactivity in rock), and plenty of opportunities for subtle electrical artifacts. An underground setting can be cleaner—or it can be a new kind of messy.

That’s why this origin story is more valuable as a framing device than as proof. It introduces the central tension in one scene: the company’s interpretation (“penetrating particles are doing the work”) versus the methodological caution (“the environment changed; what exactly changed, and which variable drives the output?”). The underground test can be the beginning of the story—but it can’t be the end of the argument.

Graphene Motion and the Thibado Parallel

A more mainstream doorway into the topic is graphene itself. Graphene is not a frozen, perfectly flat sheet; it ripples and fluctuates, and those fluctuations can be described in ordinary condensed-matter language—phonons, thermal agitation, out-of-plane motion. Neutrino® Energy Group leans on that visual because it makes the mechanism feel tangible: atoms move, and motion can be converted.

This is where Paul Thibado’s graphene energy harvester often enters the conversation. It comes up because it also explores converting graphene lattice vibrations into electrical output, and it’s generally explained in more conventional terms: thermal fluctuations coupled to circuit-level rectification. That doesn’t prove a “neutrino generator,” but it does normalize the idea that nanoscale motion and nonlinear electronics can produce measurable electrical behavior.

The fork in the road is the claimed driver. Thibado-style explanations tend to live or die on device physics, circuit topology, measurement rigor, and thermodynamic accounting—especially at very small power levels. Neutrino® Energy’s framing keeps the lattice vibration but shifts the “fuel” upstream to an external, persistent background: neutrinos plus a broader invisible spectrum of radiation and fields.

Schubart also uses a simple contrast with conventional solar to underscore why the company believes its approach could be integrated differently than a typical photovoltaic panel:

“When it comes to the photovoltaics, you only can work in two dimensions because the photovoltaic cell needs the light. The neutrinovoltaic cell is weaker, but we can work in 3 dimensions. We are not talking about energy production, we this energy conversion – coming from a combination of physics and materials science.” — Holger Thorsten Schubart

For storytelling, the clean way to present the relationship is as overlap plus divergence. Overlap: both narratives rely on graphene motion and rectification. Divergence: one frames the cause as conventional fluctuations and circuitry; the other frames the sustaining input as a multi-source ambient background with neutrinos included. That difference doesn’t settle who is right—but it tells you what must be measured to move from analogy to validation.

What the Neutrino Energy Patent Actually Says

If you want the most “engineering-shaped” version of Neutrino® Energy Group’s idea, it’s found in their patent trail. In WO2016142056A1, the invention is framed as a metal foil—often discussed as aluminum or an aluminum alloy—whose surface is modified so it can convert what the text calls “invisible solar energy” into direct current. The document explicitly ties that invisible background to neutrino radiation in its explanatory framing, which is the closest thing the company has to a formal statement of mechanism beyond interviews and demos.

Structurally, the patent describes a film made of metal or metal alloy with a coating that includes graphene and silicon—not as a single layer, but as a nanocoating that can be built up. It reads like an attempt to define a manufacturable “generator skin”: thin enough to be applied like industrial foil, but engineered as a functional stack of interfaces rather than a passive coating. The broader implication is obvious and fits the company’s rhetoric: if you can coat large areas or laminate layers, you can treat the material like a power-producing building block.

The manufacturing sections reinforce that intent. The patent sketches multiple routes: layered deposition (including silicon and graphene applied in sequence), powder-mixing approaches (graphene and silicon pulverized and applied to the foil), and adhesive-based stacking methods to build up repeated layers. It also mentions optional additives and dopants—suggesting the invention is not one “magic” recipe but a family of recipes—consistent with how real materials tech often evolves through iterative tweaking and optimization.

What’s most revealing is the patent’s own metaphor for how the conversion is supposed to work. It argues, in essence, that ordinary matter is “wide-meshed,” allowing neutrinos to pass through, while a tightly packed, nanostructured lattice might force more interactions—described almost like a mechanical pendulum chain that passes impulses from one molecule to the next until a usable current emerges. Whether or not you buy that picture, it slots neatly into the broader story: the patent is where the company tries to translate a cosmic claim into a device architecture—yet it also highlights the central tension of the whole field, because a patent describes what’s claimed and how it might be made, not what independent measurement has proven.

What Neutrino Physics Supports—and What It Doesn’t

Mainstream physics does support key premises in the Neutrino® Energy story. Neutrinos are real, they are abundant, and they do interact with matter through well-defined channels. Over the last decade, experimental neutrino physics has also tightened measurements of subtle interaction modes that were once purely theoretical, which makes it tempting to say: “If interactions exist, why not harvest them?”

The catch is scale. Neutrino interactions are famously weak, which is why neutrino detection is an engineering triumph even when it’s “just” counting a handful of events. Even “small” modern neutrino detectors are small relative to earlier behemoths—not small in the everyday-device sense—and they typically rely on intense neutrino sources, deep shielding, and painstaking noise rejection.

That weak coupling is the core mismatch with everyday power claims. A technology that attributes meaningful watt-to-kilowatt output primarily to ambient neutrinos is implicitly claiming either (a) an interaction pathway far stronger than standard expectations, or (b) that neutrinos are not the dominant driver at all. In mainstream terms, “neutrino energy” is not forbidden—but it is generally treated as impractical for power generation with compact materials.

This is why the company’s broadened language matters so much. If the claim becomes “multiple invisible sources contribute”—thermal jitter, electromagnetic fields, micro-vibrations, cosmic secondaries—then the story no longer depends on neutrinos carrying the load. It becomes an ambient-energy conversion claim. That might be easier to defend experimentally, but it also shifts “neutrino power” from physics headline to branding headline.

Demonstrations, Devices, and the Scaling Problem

Public demonstrations make the idea feel immediate: coated strips, stacked layers, rising voltage, small devices coming to life. Those moments matter because they communicate a core proposition—something is being converted, not merely discharged. The company’s narrative often anticipates objections, emphasizing tests meant to rule out stored charge, “memory” effects, or hidden batteries.

But voltage is not power, and demos are not validation. A device can show an intriguing voltage while delivering negligible sustained power into a defined load, or while quietly harvesting energy from environmental RF, temperature gradients, or contact potentials. When a claim is “continuous electricity,” the decisive measurement is steady power into a known load over time, under controlled conditions, with full environmental monitoring.

Scaling is where scrutiny becomes unavoidable. Small energy-harvesting effects are common in physics and engineering; turning them into reliable watts and kilowatts is not a rhetorical exercise. It requires consistent performance specs, clear accounting, and independence from easy-to-miss confounders. If public narratives imply dramatically different power densities for similar-looking materials, readers naturally conclude that either the messaging is ahead of the metrology—or the technology is.

Schubart’s preferred framing, though, is not to get trapped in arguments about which invisible contributor “counts” the most. His emphasis is more pragmatic—and more commercial—than that.

“It works – and the point is not what asking what percentage of power is from neutrino flux, but simply that it works. You know, it’s like your smartphone, people will use it and not ask why it works. People understand we need solutions for the future, and I think it’s really the best time now with this concept to come to market.” — Holger Thorsten Schubart

This is also where product visions (power cubes, embedded building materials, mobility concepts) carry both promise and risk. Promise: the world is hungry for continuous, decentralized power. Risk: the more transformative the promise, the more the story must rest on standardized, repeatable measurements rather than on compelling demonstrations. The moment a technology claims to be infrastructure-grade, it inherits infrastructure-level proof expectations.

Where Could This Technology Go Next?

If neutrinovoltaics—or any graphene-vibration conversion concept—turns out to be real and repeatable, its future probably won’t be decided by one dramatic physics argument. It will be decided the way most solid-state technologies are decided: by materials selection, device architecture, and manufacturing discipline. Graphene may be the first chapter, not the last. Other 2D materials offer capabilities graphene doesn’t—built-in polarization, tunable bandgaps, stronger junction behavior, and in some cases piezoelectric or ferroelectric responses that naturally favor “one-way” charge separation. If the real game is rectifying microscopic motion and environmental fluctuations into DC, then a better rectifier material—or a better engineered interface—could matter more than the identity of the background input.

That’s where stacked 2D heterostructures become the obvious next frontier. Graphene combined with insulating boron nitride layers, semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides, or other atomically thin films can create cleaner barriers, stronger asymmetries, and more controllable electron transport than a single material can. In practical terms, that’s how “mystery conversion” becomes a device: not by claiming a bigger invisible driver, but by building a stack that reliably forces charge to move in one direction while suppressing leakage and noise. If neutrinovoltaics ever matures into a standardized component, it will likely look less like a single magical sheet and more like a carefully engineered, repeatable layer-cake of interfaces.

Layering also raises the most tantalizing promise: scaling. In principle, repeating an effective unit cell can increase voltage and current the way batteries and solar modules do. But in practice, stacks hit the unglamorous realities of solid-state engineering—screening, parasitic losses, internal resistance, leakage paths, and saturation effects where inner layers stop “seeing” the same driving influence as outer layers. So the best near-term trajectory may not be “infinite layers equals infinite power,” but finding the sweet spot where additional layers still add real watts into a defined load without being eaten by losses.

And that leads to a more grounded vision of where this could go even before the grand claims are settled. If a multi-layer 2D stack can deliver small but steady output reliably, it could first win in domains where milliwatts matter—remote sensors, embedded monitoring, trickle charging of buffers, or low-power electronics that benefit from continuous background harvesting. If it can’t scale cleanly, it may still become a niche power source that complements batteries rather than replaces grids. But if it can scale, then the long-term destination is obvious: standardized modules, predictable performance specs, and the kind of boring reliability that turns a controversial idea into just another line item in an engineering catalog.

If It Works, What Is It Really Harvesting?

Here’s the uncomfortable possibility that can make the neutrino debate feel secondary: the device may work in some form even if the neutrino explanation is wrong or overstated. Graphene vibrates; the world is full of fields and fluctuations; and it’s plausible that a clever structure can rectify a tiny portion of that ambient activity into electricity. In that scenario, the “neutrino” label isn’t the engine—it’s the banner.

If the output is real, one candidate driver is straightforward: thermal energy and micro-gradients. Everyday environments are not perfectly uniform; even small temperature differences across materials, junctions, or surfaces can generate voltages and currents. Another candidate is RF and electromagnetic scavenging: modern life is saturated with radiofrequency energy, switching power supplies, and electromagnetic noise that can be rectified—especially by nonlinear junctions—into DC under the right conditions.

A third candidate is mechanical micro-vibration harvesting. Buildings hum, vehicles vibrate, air systems resonate, and even human motion introduces small mechanical energy inputs. A material stack that behaves like a nanoscale rectifier could, in principle, convert a diffuse combination of mechanical and electromagnetic noise into a steady trickle. That would fit the company’s own multi-input “invisible spectrum” framing better than a pure neutrino narrative.

The most charitable synthesis is that “neutrino energy” is partly a name for a technology that doesn’t fit neatly into one explanatory box yet—an ambient multi-input harvester that still lacks clean attribution. That’s not inherently dishonest; it’s how some technologies evolve in public before consensus explanations catch up. But it does shift the evaluation standard: less “Is it neutrinos?” and more “What conditions make it work, how much power does it truly deliver, and is the performance stable enough to justify the product claims?” Mechanism disputes can last decades; product reality can’t.

Conclusion: Can We Harvest Neutrino Energy?

As a literal question—“Can compact devices harvest meaningful power from ambient neutrinos?”—mainstream physics remains skeptical. Neutrino interactions are real, but they are so weak that practical power extraction at the scales being implied would require evidence of either unexpectedly strong coupling or a radically new interaction pathway. That’s a high bar, and it’s why most physicists treat “neutrino power” as implausible until demonstrated under strict controls.

As a broader question—“Can advanced materials harvest useful energy from ambient backgrounds?”—the answer is more open. Many ambient energy sources exist, and clever materials and circuits can extract small amounts from them. If neutrinovoltaic structures turn out to be unusually effective at converting multi-source background noise into steady output, that could still be valuable—even if neutrinos are a minor term or merely a metaphor.

As a communications question—“Is ‘neutrino’ physics or branding?”—the most honest answer may be: it functions as both. The label is memorable and suggests inexhaustible abundance, while the technical language often reads like multi-input conversion. That ambiguity can help tell a bold story, but it also invites the kind of scrutiny that bold stories inevitably earn.

So the punchline is practical. If independent tests show sustained power into defined loads under harsh controls—RF shielding, vibration isolation, thermal accounting—Neutrino® Energy Group will have earned attention, regardless of whether the final explanation lands quickly or takes decades to settle. If those tests don’t validate the output claims, the story collapses into a familiar category: a seductive idea that sounded like the future until measurement caught up.