As we go about our daily lives and walk to work, walk to school, walk to the subway, walk to the restaurant, there’s a lot of kinetic energy that could be potentially harnessed for the greater good, which is what a company by the name of Pavegen has been doing. What they’ve done is that they’ve created a high-tech floor product that can harness kinetic energy which in turn could be used to help keep your lights on.
So far the rollout of Pavegen has been pretty small which is why the company has decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube in hopes that the money they raise and increase the scale of their efforts. So how does this work, you ask? Basically Pavegen helps to generate energy through a combination of electromagnetic induction and flywheel energy storage technology.
It has been estimated that every footstep can generate up to 7 watts. The company originally launched in 2009 and to date they have managed to install their pavements in countries such as Brazil where it is used in a non-standard sized football pitch to power the floodlights. It has also been installed at the Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia, and also at London’s Heathrow airport.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Pavegen’s CEO Laurence Kemball-Cook says, “If we put around 20 meters of Pavegen on Oxford Street in London we would generate more than enough power that’s needed for all the street lighting along that stretch. So A 20 meter array could kick out in the region of 1,500 watts. And we have systems that can do megawatts, so we’re getting into that space of what solar can do.”
If this sounds like something you’d love to help fund in order to get it going on a larger scale, head over to Pavegen’s Crowdcube page for the details.
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