Pavegen: The Company that can't make energy out of crowds tries to make money out of them

Re: 7 watts, or even somewhat less...

Interestingly, I've come across a test-of-concept video showing essentially that.

It's an outdoor version of these tiles that provide lighting to dark places as the user walks over them.

Here it is:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Marvellous Mackay reference, thank you. He's not perfect, nor is the book, better suggestions welcome, but for now it's the best there is as a starting point based on facts, numbers, and scientific logic.

And for those who've forgotten how to use a search engine: the book is freely downloadable via

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Re: Even if...

Or to encourage everyone to subsist on a diet of baked beans and walk around with a "gas" bag over their bums.

The first 100% renewable food supply:

1. Eat beans.

2. Fart into bag

3. Collect bags and burn gas to power bean processing factory, farming equipment and even provide fuel for the lorries which deliver.

It's amazing that no-one has though of this before. Please crowd fund me for 20 million pounds so I can live the high life, oops sorry, start the investment process to take this project to the world.

Re: Even if...

"Even if you converted every footpath in the country, the unpleasant experience of walking on a spongy (or constantly clicking) surface would have us all walking in the road."

Actually, that's probably the only good point these things have. There's a reason so many shoes have some sort of air cushion these days, and anyone who does any running knows how much nicer it is to run on dirt (dry and fairly hard, not knee deep mud obviously) or (short) grass than concrete. Having a surface with a very slight give to it rather than the usual concrete and tarmac would be much better for everyone's knees, as long as it's not so much as to actually feel spongy.

Re: North Korea use case..

Treadmills were widely used in English prisons during the 19th century. Mainly for punishment, but in some cases they were used to supplement windmills.

Re: North Korea use case..

> get those in prison camps to walk a lot

It's been done. An on-topic quote with respect to the power output of the human body follows:

Sir William Cubitt, a noted 19th-century civil engineer, offered a solution. He designed a treadmill for English prisons. Its aim was to generate power for mills. It looked like a very wide paddle wheel. Workers held on to a bar and climbed the paddle blades. It was like walking upstairs for hours on end. They had to keep lifting their legs. Gravity gave them no choice.

A typical treadmill shift lasted eight hours. Workers spent 40 percent of that time resting. That's a lot worse than it sounds. It meant raising the lower half of their bodies 11,000 feet per day. And yet, hard as it was, 200 men and women could hardly match the output of one water wheel.

19th-century America tried treadmills, but they didn't catch on. For a while Charleston slave-owners could rent one to punish runaway slaves. But labor was too precious to waste that way in an expanding land. We preferred to let prisoners do ugly jobs that had some purpose -- picking cotton, or breaking rock.

Cubitt's treadmill may have originally had a productive purpose. But a pound of coal could soon do the work of five men working all day on a treadmill. And labor-wasting was a serious crime in its own right, in the mind of 19th-century America.

Source

PS Chris made the same point while I was cuttin' an' pastin'

Re: North Korea use case..

Well I live and learn - human ingenuity never ceases..

Re: who was first?

A quick Google show dozens of ideas for the same thing, they actually have working flooring to generate electricity in a Tokyo station at the turnstile area. I am sure the first I ever heard of the idea was in the seventies in a New Scientist article. There was also an installation at Stanford University in a student canteen or something.

Re: What a complete and utter pile of crap

You forget something. Interest rates are at a historical low. Investors are desperately seeking for places they can sink their money into.

Re: Wasn't there something similar for car parks a few years back?

> using the motion of vehicles along a road surface, and a moving plate in the road, to generate electricity.

The problem with that is that the vehicle would seem to be going slightly uphill, or like driving through molasses. Thus they would use more fuel than the generation of energy would warrant. The only point of it being that the car owner pays for the additional fuel use and the road owner gets the energy.

Same with walking: the pedestrian needs to buy more 'fuel' (food) after waling 'uphill'.

Re: Sure, I'll contribute

http://www.desertec.org/concept/

Not sure if they plan on making the solar cells with "local sand", though

Re: ... and for aeroplanes?

Things like wing flex at least have the virtue of collecting energy from a motion you already have to apply a damping force to.

Re: Feed in tariff

Well, feed-in tariffs -- as a way to encourage investment in renewable generation technology -- are still way less open to fraud than up-front grants for equipment that never gets installed. You have to get your solar panels, wind turbine, hydroelectric generator or CHP plant actually up and running and officially certified, before you get to see any government money, and each person gets less of it than the person before. But that's OK because the capital cost of the equipment is decreasing with economies of scale, and the wholesale price of energy (which you get paid on top of the FiT) is increasing as fossil fuels run out.

However, generating electricity from flooring is never going to work. For one thing, walking on it will be a bit like walking through mud, requiring more effort to take each step .....