In sum – what to know
Massive growth – ambient IoT device shipments will reach 1.1 billion by 2030, powered by various energy harvesting methods like light, RF signals, and mechanical vibrations.
Diverse harvesting – 57% of ambient IoT devices will use PV cells, while others will leverage RF, vibration, or heat energy, enabling battery-free and hybrid models.
Ecosystem alliances – as well as a rush of activity, the Ambient IoT Alliance, formed by the likes of Qualcomm and Intel, is to scale energy harvesting for IoT devices.
Shipments of ambient IoT devices, harvesting energy from the surrounding environment, will reach 1.1 billion units in 2030, reckons analyst house ABI Research. The firm has a new research study that predicts that around 57 percent of ambient IoT devices in the period (about 576 million) will utilize photovoltaic (PV) cells to harvest light energy; another 36 percent will capture and convert energy from ambient radio frequency (RF) signals. Four percent and three percent of ambient IoT devices will use piezoelectric and thermoelectric energy harvesting, respectively, to convert energy from mechanical stresses and vibrations and from heat (temperature differences).
Often, energy harvesting systems will be used in combination in small electronic devices, sensors, and low-power applications, typically in service of IoT applications; they will be deployed in battery-free and hybrid IoT models. ABI Research highlights the work of various firms to develop new power generator designs. These are listed, in order, as: Wiliot, Exeger, Energous, Epishine, Powercast, EnOcean, and Ossia. It also notes the work e-peas and Nexperia on Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs) to develop chips that can store harvested energy on the device in the most efficient way possible. They are variously “unlocking new applications across the IoT landscape”, it said.
Certainly, the ambient IoT movement is getting a head of steam, finally. In February, leading industry companies including Infineon, Intel, PepsiCo, and Qualcomm joined together to form the Ambient IoT Alliance (AIoTA) to develop and scale energy-harvesting in battery-less IoT sensor devices. The group is focused on ambient IoT in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G devices, specifically. The other founders are Atmosic and VusionGroup, as well as Israeli supply-chain Wiliot – distinguished among the group to get a reference in the ABI Research review. “We’ll ask how the economy ever ran offline,” the company asked in these pages back in 2023.
Wiliot said in October it had secured a major contract with the Royal Mail in the UK to supply 850,000 ambient IoT tags to track wheeled containers, or roll cages, through its distribution centres. The tags, described as “tiny computers that look like stickers”, use low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) to issue real-time location data, as well as temperature and humidity monitoring, about the whereabouts and conditions of the containers in transit. The new alliance wants an “open, harmonised, and aligned multi-standard ecosystem”, and other companies that produce or utilise IoT tags, devices, middleware, applications, and cloud services to join up.
There is ongoing work to include ambient IoT as a 3GPP work item in development of the 5G standard in releases 19 and 20 (5G Advanced). The IEEE (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth SIG have their own work items, alongside. Similar work is being done by the LoRaWAN and Sigfox communities. ABI Research said a couple of years back that energy harvesting IoT solutions was starting to gain some commercial traction, but that printed electronics, in the form of circuit boards and batteries, will remain a work-in-progress for some time yet. That time has come. “An ecosystem of energy-harvesting component manufacturers has emerged, driving growth,” the firm writes.
Indeed, as RCR Wireless wrote at the start of 2025, when the industry was still interested in annual finger-in-the-air predictions: Here’s an early bet, straight out of the gate – 2025 will see the rise (at last!) of so-called ‘smart labels’, potentially printable battery-less IoT silicon-and-SIM stickers that can be attached to low-value packages, even to envelopes, to track their journey and status in the supply-chain. Of course, smart labels do not necessarily prescribe ambient IoT systems, but their development runs in close parallel. Especially because the stat that tends to get quoted is that 78 million batteries from battery-powered IoT devices will get dumped every day – by 2025.
Well, that date has come and gone, and innovations like disposable smart labels only raise the rubbish heap and force the issue. This is IoT’s dirty secret, as we have written – that the tech movement that was supposed to save the planet is destroying the planet. In the end, the only way to resolve this crisis and absolve the industry’s shame is to jettison the battery, altogether; not just to make it live longer, or to fix it to a biodegradable substrate, but to get-rid, completely. There are good signs; four examples are listed here. The likes of E-peas, Nowi, and Sequans all claim progress in the field – by harnessing photovoltaic, vibration, thermo-electric, and radio energy, variously.
France-based Dracula Technologies, developing ambient LoRaWAN units, has a new production facility with capacity to produce “150 million square centimetres” of organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices per year.
For its part, ABI Research dates a “niche ecosystem of startup PMIC vendors… focused exclusively on energy harvesting for ambient IoT” to 2014, sometime. “The trend is towards enabling ‘energy-agnostic’ power management, where PMICs can manage energy captured from any harvested input, whether that be PV, RF, piezoelectric, or thermoelectric harvesting. OEMs can select which inputs are needed based on the nature of the ambient energy inputs in proximity to the device,” remarked Jonathan Budd, industry analyst at ABI Research.
He explained: “Innovation has been led by the designers of power generators, focusing on optimizing techniques to convert ambient energy into usable energy. And by the designers of PMICs, working to develop chips that can store harvested energy on the device in the most efficient way possible. The specialized ecosystems for solar cells and solar modules, piezoelectric harvesters, thermoelectric generators (TEGs), and RF harvesters are enabling energy conversion from low light sources, low temperature gradients, as well as power-at-a-distance via radio signals.”
“For customers managing large networks of battery-powered IoT devices, where batteries need to be frequently replaced, the potential for long-term autonomous operation is enticing. It is up to generator and PMIC suppliers, connectivity standards bodies, as well as the newly formed Ambient IoT Alliance, to demonstrate the total costs of ownership (TCOs) savings that can be achieved through investment in harvesting equipment.”
