Renewable energy harvesting is an innovative research area which has attracted a great deal of efforts to find a substitute for fossil sources. This work presents processing and characterization of thermoelectric device (one leg of the nanogenerator) made of aluminum-doped zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods on the glass substrate. The effect of aluminum-doping on the Seebeck coefficient as an important figure-of-merit for thermoelectric performance has been extensively studied. The electrical characterization was performed to examine the quality of the nanorods' contacts. For 1% Al-doped ZnO nanorods on the silicon substrate, open circuit voltage of 0.28 mV and S.C. current of 3.5 mu A were obtained. In these measurements, a constant temperature difference of 1 K between the top and bottom side of the nanorods was implemented. The Seebeck coefficient was found to be increased proportionally with the doping concentration. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.