Crowd power could be used to make electricity

Crowd power could be used to make electricity
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
31/07/2007
Telegraph UK

The energy of human movement could one day be harvested from commuters in a train station, dancers in a night club or shoppers in a mall. Crowd movement could be used to generate power

The so-called "Crowd Farm", as envisaged by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), would turn the mechanical energy of people walking, dancing or jumping into electricity.

A flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath, for example, a railway station concourse.

The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into an electric current.

According to James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk of MIT, a single human step can only power two 60W light bulbs for one flickering second.

But get a crowd in motion, multiply that single step by 28,527 steps, for example, and the result is enough energy to power a moving train for one second.

The dynamo-floor principle can also be applied to capturing energy at places like rock concerts.

"Greater movement of people could make the music louder," suggests Jurcyzk.

The students have already shown a simple prototype, displayed at the Venice Biennale and in a train station in Turin, Italy, where a stool exploited the passive act of sitting to generate power.

The weight of the body on the seat causes a flywheel to spin, which powers a dynamo that, in turn, lights four LEDs.

The Crowd Farm, an award winning idea, is composed of standard parts that are easily replicated but it is expensive to produce at this stage.

"Only through experimentation - which can be expensive - do technologies become practical," Graham says.

The students were inspired in part by an "ingenious little device" by Thomas Edison.

"When visitors came to his house, they passed through a turnstile that pumped water into his holding tank," says Graham.