
Topics:
Low Power
Themes:
Energy Efficient Embedded Systems
Wednesday 23-09-2026 14:10
at
The Things Forum Two
Panel
The Battery-Free Building — How Indoor Harvesting Reshaped Sensor Design
Daanish Sadique
Moderator:
Leonard Lee
Buildings get smarter every year — HVAC, occupancy, air quality, energy tracking. Every one of those sensors used to need a battery, a technician visit, and a replacement schedule that quietly ate into deployment ROI.
That model is breaking. Indoor light harvesting has moved from research demo to shipping technology, and a generation of European sensor makers has built product lines around it.
This panel unpacks what battery-free indoor IoT actually looks like today — the product design decisions, the BOM math, the installation and maintenance realities, and the honest limits of where harvesting still can't compete. Three vantage points: the harvesting source vendor, a commercial building sensor maker with a decade of battery-free deployments, and an indoor air quality specialist shipping harvested-power sensors at scale.