In practice, these bricks could one day be used to partially power a building in the event of a power outage, for example.

For the moment, this is only a concept being studied in a laboratory, where a team of chemists has managed to demonstrate a brick that can supply energy to a small green LED.

To achieve this, they applied a conductive coating to the brick, which by infiltrating the porous structure of the brick, is able to channel all the energy it receives, like a sponge. Note that the iron oxide, which gives bricks their red colour, also contributes to the process.

The brick then becomes a supercapacitor, capable of storing energy and then releasing it when needed. Eventually, about 50 bricks could be used to supply emergency lighting for several hours, whether for a private home or a small public building.

One of the main advantages of this technology is that it involves a very cheap basic building material, red brick.

These bricks, connected to solar panels installed on the roof of the building, could support up to 10,000 charging cycles.

In fact, entire walls could become sources of energy to compensate for untimely power cuts, for example.

In a different approach, roof tiles can also play a role in storing energy to power a house.

This is one solution, called Solar Roof, already marketed by Tesla in the United States and expected soon in Europe. The idea here is to capture solar energy via the roof and then store it in batteries inside the building.