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Pavegen To Tap Pedestrians For Power In the UK
An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago Laurence Kembell-Cook unveiled Pavegen floor tiles, which capture kinetic energy from footsteps and convert it to electricity. Now after two years of product testing and picking up a slew of awards across the U.K., Pavegen has received its first commercial order — to light up the new Westfield Stratford City Shopping Centre."
Energy doesn't appear out of nowhere for free.
Walking on these floor tiles requires more energy than regular floors.
So are they going to start paying brits for all the extra food that they need to eat in order to power these things?
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
These should be in all heavy footfall places
I was curious how much energy these things produce:
It produces 2.1 watts for how long? 1 second? 100ms? I guess it could make some LEDs flash.
Also:
Wow. Will his prize be in the form of a giant cartoon-style weight with "10,000 lbs" written on it? Perhaps they'll drop it on his house.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
"Pavegen To Tap Pedestrians For Power In the UK" I've seen this movie trilogy. It didn't end well. No, seriously, it REALLY didn't end well
There have been very few interesting inventions in the UK since the '80s, and when they are the authorities / marketroids / everyone are so keen to say "LOOK BRITAIN ISN'T DEAD YET!" that every so often there's a hilarious amount of hubbub surrounding nothing.
Thatcher taught the current 30-somethings that there is no personal gain in actually producing anything (and it's still communist to do anything other than for personal gain): if you want to get rich, become a middleman. So that's where most of the intelligence has gone.
Upscaling, this is the real reason why we have the financial crisis[tm] in much of Europe: we have neither the production nor sufficient means of production any more. Germany was careful to maintain its own, thus retaining a now dominant economy - they've taken over Europe in a far more rational and subtle way than earlier last century. The rest of us, taught by the worst, have been spending the last couple of decades moving numbers around, signifying nothing.
WOW, that's more than four tons! But of what?
so the shopping centre can say "look at what we're doing for the environment"... completely ignoring the energy and pollution costs of making these tiles... we have one of those energy recovery plates in the entrance drive to Sainsbury's in Gloucester... they claim the energy from the cars goes into powering the checkouts.. pure greenwash to make the customers feel slightly happier about the fact they've driven to the store... and effectively they're stealing the energy from the customers as the cars are slowed by the plate... they'd have far more effect on the environment by making it harder to drive to the store and easier to use public transport and bicycles etc. to do the shopping with... PS. the one in Gloucester is positioned in a bad place where people are actually accelerating OUT of a corner into a straight... to be friendly to the customers, it should have been positioned just before a bend to reduce the braking needed
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Trucks are heavier than Oprah and friends.
...you've just got to love the US-centric journalist or sub-editor who doesn't know what the UK's currency is.
Maybe it's time to employ some people who have a little more worldly experience than the dolts they have there right now?
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So they want to make eco friendly power. What do they do, make the floor tile light up when you step on it to show there appreciation for the effort.
OMG. Talk about wasting power.
Not pointless if installed on down ramps of car parks. Where is save the car owners brakes.
It would tax a cars fuel on flat ground or ramps uphill. Going downhill your using brakes not fuel.
The energy that can be captured from a few steps most likely won't even reach manufactoring costs in its lifetime.
It's only green if the food you eat is cheaper than oil.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Glad to see you appreciate people for more than just their contribution or lack thereof to social welfare programmes.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
It's like walking on grass/dirt/some other flexible surface instead of straight concrete.
You're doing people's joints a favor.
Some quick back of the envelope calculations: FTFA, each tile generates "2.1 W" per step. If we assume a typical step time of 500ms based a pace of 120 steps per minute this could be interpreted as about 1.05J captured per step.
The casing is made from stainless steel which required about 53 MJ/kg for production in 2004. If we assume a tile casing mass of 2kg that is 106 MJ required for the steel production alone.
The shopping centre may be open around 10 hours a day with perhaps 20 seconds between each step averaged over a typical day. This is 1800 steps per day at 1.05J per step giving a total of 1890 J captured per day. Assuming 100% efficiency and a never-closing shopping centre, this gives an energy breakeven for the steel alone of around 56000 days or 153 years.
I know that other factors are in play such as the potential to raise awareness of environmental issues but this is ridiculous. I noticed that the award that the guy is in the running for is sponsored by Shell and part of me suspects that they know that these things are crap but want to be seen to promote something like this which appeals to the public and appears "green".
Unstable sidewalks to go with unstable, convex shoes to shape your butt and break your ankles! I assume these sidewalks will be right in front of hospitals and orthopaedic offices.
If weight of human is about 80kg and flex is 5mm, then about 80*10*0.005 = 4J could be generated per step. I guess system is not very efficient, so let's assume 2J. That gives 4W per person if he makes 2 steps per second.
Also, if step width is about 0.5m, then equivalent angle is about 0.005/0.5 = 0.01 rad = 0.5 degrees. That is difficulty the person experiences is as walking uphill with 0.5 deg inclination, or raising 1 meter per 100m of road. I guess it doesn't make much difference.
Yes, the average slashdotter can do the calculations in his head and deduce that this will not produce useful quantities of energy, but that does not make it a bad idea.
This guy will get millions in venture capital while you guys are still slaving away at the bottom of the R&D department of some big corporation.
And should the "green" venture capital ever run out, I'm sure he can re-brand this as a military application (power for smart landmines perhaps?) and get another billion from the ministry of defence.
I've seen this done many times before.
You have a huge flaw in your math here:
"This is 1800 steps per day at 1.05J per step giving a total of 1890 J captured per day."
Wrong. Depending on what your point of measure is (you don't say really), it is either 1800 steps per day PER FILE, or 1800 steps per day PER PATRON.
Either of these would multiple the daily output by at least thousands of times.
"If you take a walk I'll tax your feet".
Prophetic words indeed
That is soooo true. It's not free energy. Walking on those tiles will be like walking on soft ground, their feet will get tired. They better install more benches for people to sit on in the mall, they're going to need them.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
And that's not to the idea of the tiles, which seems to me to be great and laudable, it's a "wow" to the nit-picky posts that seem to have proliferated about "oh, they're stealing my energy from walking, who will pay for the extra effort" and such like..
Seriously people! The body is designed to absorb shock from walking (all that cartilage in the joints and such like). Hey, to improve on that, shoes were designed to help absorb impact, and let the joints last even longer. Anyone ever thought of asking Nike etc. to pay your food bills for the extra energy that's lost from the soles of their trainers/sneakers?
5mm is a fair old deflection, but I very much doubt that this is a plan 'free fall' level; I'm anticipating quite a 'spongy' feel to it. Like treading on moss, or loosely compacted earth.
Rather than slate, or go all evangelical about it, I'm marking it firmly in the "very interesting tech" drawer, and I'll be making a point of visiting that mall to try out out for myself, then make my mind up..
From wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Stratford_City
The centre opened on 13 September 2011.
From Pavegen article:
With nearly 30 million shoppers a year, the Westfield Stratford City Shopping Centre has plenty of foot traffic.
Somebody is doing far reaching predictions here and presenting them as facts.
Cool if you used them on airline and bus walkways. No need to wire to batteries. Simply have leds and caps in the tiles.
A positive aspect about obesity! The UK fatties will now be lauded as heroes because their ample proportions will enable them to generate more leckie than the average skinny person.
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5 mm flex is not even remotely comparable to world peace, chuck norris, or boreal toads. a flexible floor IS comparable to walking in sand.
5mm flex is to world peace as boreal toads are to chuck norris