Using the power of crowd-sourcing, an British company has developed paving slabs made of recycled rubber, which when stepped on, convert the kinetic energy into usable electricity. Enough to power an LED light for 30 seconds. The technology is called Pavegen Tiles.
From the pavegen website, www.pavegen.com
20 of these tiles will be used in a new London shopping mall for their outdoor lights, and the company hopes to be able to power at least half of them for the year.
The pavegen system was recently used at a large outdoor venue where it received enough energy to charge 10 000 cell phones over the festival, just form people stepping on the device.
When you step on one of these devices, they depress 5mm and a small led light is lit up in order to give the user a sense of feedback for their action. The small light only uses 5% of the energy that’s collected from the step.
Currently the steps are expensive to produce, but their inventor, Laurence Kemball-Cook a 25 year old engineering graduate, believes their prices will drop significantly once they are in mass production.
The most pressing question is how much do these tiles cost to build at the moment. Since no information has been published about the prices one can assume it’s anything but cheap. There would be ways to implement this type of technology for maximum efficiency, say by putting them where people naturally funnel such as at a bus stop. Or at subway stations in front of the ticket toll booths you swipe your card through. In places like that you’d always have energy being created and each tile could get tens of thousands of applications every single day. Think of the potential!
