A new method of harvesting energy from water evaporation could be comparable to that of wind and solar power and might one day have a big impact on solving our power problems.

according to new research published in Nature Communications, if evaporation energy was used on the existing lakes and reservoirs in the US, not including the Great Lakes, it could generate up to 325 gigawatts (or 2.85 million megawatt hours per year). That’s equivalent to approximately 70 percent of the total US electrical energy generation in 2015. And unlike solar or wind, energy from evaporation is less dependent on the weather.

Learn more about how the “evaporation engine” works to harvest energy from the surface of water @ The Verge.