Airports could soon be powered by harnessing the energy of footsteps
The average person will take 216 Million steps in their lifetime. The ambient kinetic energy created from these steps is almost entirely wasted, except for one notable exception. Mostly worn by children, light-up shoes have been around in one form or another since L.A. Gear made them famous in 1992. But could an evolution of the same technology that makes double-knotted sneakers frantically blink red somehow power the world's airports?
A company called PaveGen seems to think so, and is eager to prove it. Founder Laurence Kemball-Cook began the company in 2009 and set to work harnessing the plentiful energy of footfall. Six years later, his company has produced tiles that collect this energy, and they're now installed in more than 100 locations around the world, including London's Heathrow Airport.
Each tile collects footfall energy by compressing just an unnoticeable 5 mm when a person's weight makes contact with the tile. Copper coils, magnets and batteries below the tile then collect this energy, which can be converted into electricity. According to PaveGen, every footstep we take creates enough energy to power an LED lightbulb for 30 seconds.
PaveGen continues to move ahead with its high-tech tiles, recently embarking on another iteration of the footfall energy idea. Kemball-Cook now hopes to deploy an inversion of sorts of that same tech into the soles of our shoes, transforming our footsteps not into power sources for the world around us, but for our own personal technology. Imagine your walk to work powering your cellphone, or just tapping your foot to bring your laptop back to life when the cafe from which your working has no power outlets available.
The Heathrow Airport trial run of PaveGen's tiles is coming into its second year, and has thus far been used mostly as a novelty, lighting up interactive bulbs to grab passengers' attention. But the results have been promising, and we're hoping for a larger scale rollout in the future not just for Heathrow, but for airports everywhere.