During the July 4th weekend I had ample opportunity to spend time with my family and poll them on things they think would be cool. I was mining for Ideas of the Day, and it paid off. In fact, I hit pay dirt on a whole series of energy efficiency ideas that I’ll introduce shortly.
One short riff came from something I had heard of last year; a dance floor at a Rotterdam night club that harnesses human power and turns it into electricity. Specifically, the energy produced through contact with the dance floor is captured via piezoelectronics and transformed into current that is used for lighting, etc.
Club Watt dance floor: photo from Rotterdam Journal
As we drove toward the beach I reflected on a recent Harvard Business School presentation I had attended about Emerging Global Megatrends (trends that will develop into $1+ billion markets). Urbanization is a big one, so I began considering how we could benefit from increasing traffic. Put 2+2 together and what do you get? Piezoelectric roads, of course.
And guess what? Not surprisingly, leading engineers are already working on this technology. You can read a concise article about such an experiment here.
Have you heard of any other ways on which we can use mechanical strain productively? Do you have ideas about how we can develop new uses for piezoelectric technology?
