SPOA turns the energy floating in your home into reusable electricity
By harvesting the electromagnetic fields bleeding off standby devices, a Korean student design team proposes SPOA, a product that reframes the home as a power station.
There’s an energy to modern life that most of us never notice, living in the walls of kitchens, emanating from televisions left on standby, routers that never sleep, and microwaves with blinking clocks. We call it “phantom power”, or “vampire energy”, a spooky name for standby power. It accounts for somewhere between 5% to 10% of residential electricity globally, releasing roughly 44 million metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
A team of designers at the Samsung Design Membership academy – Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko, and Minhee Kim – decided to tackle this problem, reframing it in a project called SPOA. It is a conceptual circular energy system built around a simple question: what if we started collecting phantom energy instead of letting it escape?
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SPOA captures electromagnetic fields (EMF) captured by devices in standby mode and converts them into reusable power. The project goes beyond a simple efficiency fix into a paradigm shift, transforming the home from a site of consumption to what they call a “self-sustaining energy ecosystem.” The concept draws on rapidly advancing scientific research: ambient electromagnetic wave harvesting has been an area of interest for more than a decade, with scientists exploring how to capture these low-level frequencies.
The product takes this body of research and frames it into a design for the home. While each individual phantom device wastes very little power on its own, with an average of 63 devices per household, the cumulative effect is huge. SPOA proposes three small products which act as EMF receptors and then as reusable batteries. Cap is a mini-sized, portable version, Slim is designed to be attached to surfaces like the side of a refrigerator, and Stem is a tabletop version created with amplified wave detection.
What makes the project interesting is also its social framework, being explicitly concerned with identity and how we think of ourselves in relation to energy. SPOA is part of the world of energy prosumers, a concept that defines a hybrid between a consumer and a producer that has gained significant traction as decentralised energy systems become increasingly more popular, and necessary. While the most well-known prosumer product is the solar panel, SPOA imagines a more intimate, ambient version of the same transition.
In SPOA’s aesthetics, the designers linked the product to another curious concept: the mushroom. Anyone who has spent time in recent years following design discourse will recognise the reference as the mycelium analogy, the idea of a distributed, decentralised network of connections that quietly process waste into something useful. It has become one of the most resonant metaphors in sustainable design and circular economy, starting from Anna Tsing’s 2015 book “The Mushroom at the end of the world.”
It is worth noting that the project is a student design concept and, unfortunately, far from a commercially available product. The question of how much usable energy such a device could actually harvest is still unclear. Phantom power is a real and significant problem, but its root cause is device design, and critics of ambient harvesting approaches argue that they risk normalising inefficiency. Other solutions include the One Watt Initiative, which mandated that devices could consume no more than one watt in standby mode. This type of solution would be optimal to resolve the issue, but it would make products like SPOA unusable.
Strong design concepts are not required to solve every problem they touch, they are required to ask better questions for the industry. Reframing waste to resource is at the heart of what the circular economy is all about, a paradigm shift that both designers and consumers must make. SPOA imagines a different outcome for this wasted energy, and in doing so, imagines a different kind of home, and a different kind of person living in it.
