Wooden Floors Laced With Silicon Generate Electricity From Footsteps (newscientist.com) 110
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes. [...] Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn't readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process "functionalization."
The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact. The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimeter-by-3.5-centimeter sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression -- an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep -- was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators. The findings have been published in the journal Matter.
The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact. The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimeter-by-3.5-centimeter sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression -- an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep -- was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators. The findings have been published in the journal Matter.
Si(gh) (Score:1)
Re:Si(gh) (Score:4, Funny)
Possibly lungs filled with silicosis, or mesothelioma...
Even worse, last night the upstairs clog dancers got so rowdy they tripped the breakers for the entire building! Management says they can't get someone out until after the holiday. Sheesh!
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Even worse, now you are losing money (by drawing from the grid) if you stop the kids from running around the house.... It's like a dad logical paradox....
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Oh dear lord. My wife will now feel like she can just touch the thermostat anytime since we have all this extra power, and feel justified to yell at me to stop yelling at the kids! What have we done?
Time to go pace the garage to help cool the beer.
Re: Si(gh) (Score:2)
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Well, he had Beth at least https://rickandmorty.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of of low-quality energy sources. The pressure or vibration you generate walking across a floor is pretty far down that scale. I remember reading about an effort on public sidewalks, where the tiles depressed slightly as people walked on them, in order to power LED streetlights.
The problem I see is: how much energy is it going to take, to create the devices that capture this low-quality energy? The production-energy costs are almost certainly going to far exceed the total amount of energy this system could ever generate in its lifetime.
Re:Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. Tiny amounts of energy at intermittent intervals. Cute, but not useful.
Another thing people don't mention when they come up with these methods of "harvesting" energy from human movement is that the energy does come from the humans. You will be putting a little bit of damping on the motion. If you're harvesting enough energy to be useful, yes, you will notice it-- it will be like the difference between walking on pavement and walking on sand. Or, if you harvest more energy, like walking through knee-deep water.
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Yeah. Tiny amounts of energy at intermittent intervals. Cute, but not useful.
Another thing people don't mention when they come up with these methods of "harvesting" energy from human movement is that the energy does come from the humans. You will be putting a little bit of damping on the motion. If you're harvesting enough energy to be useful, yes, you will notice it-- it will be like the difference between walking on pavement and walking on sand. Or, if you harvest more energy, like walking through knee-deep water.
So we get exercise benefit too? Awesome!
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Exactly. I can see this as an awesome dance floor. Advertise it as extra weight loss for a Jazzercise glass, or even just a common night club. Power the disco ball and lose weight! As seen on TV!
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:3)
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
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You do, but the more exercise you do, the more calories (energy) you need to survive and function.
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That's not a problem in most developed countries.
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
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So we get exercise benefit too? Awesome!
You could probably crank a handle for ten seconds on a Monday morning and generate more energy than this will generate in a week.
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
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That's still more than this floor will generate.
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But...but...but: 24.3 volts! No word on amperage.
Actually, the original article (in Cell) says, "...generate an open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 24.3 V and a short-circuit current (Isc) of 0.32 microA". Not clear how that translates into real wattage. Something like 60 microwatts if you ignore the fact that the voltage and amperage are measured under opposite conditions, and both would be lower (presumably much lower) if measured with some reasonable resistance. At any rate, presumably nowhere near enough
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Yeah. Tiny amounts of energy at intermittent intervals. Cute, but not useful.
Yeah, hard to imagine replacing stairwell lights with whatever is generated by this. My guess is that they are putting this out there as something interesting, possibly harvesting some energy from many people walking on level surfaces.
But the paper they published was strangely difficult to wade through, so I lost interest pretty quickly.
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People generally like their flooring to absorb a bit of energy. We put down carpets and install our hardwood over a soft underlay. I doubt impregnating the wood with silicon has anything like that effect though, so it's not even useful for that.
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Cute, but not useful.
Imagine walking along a floor. And the lights around you ignite through your footsteps. Extremely useful.
And the topic is not "silly walking", it is the technology.
Make some rods of that stuff, and place them in the wind. Free electricity.
The Japanese were ahead of the curve (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ok, GretaFan, go figure how much electricity this will generate. Something less than 60 microwatts per footstep, by my calculation (see post above). Not even close to enough that it lights lights.
As for using this to generate electricity in the wind, how? This takes a press-and-release motion. I guess you could get that by spinning your rod past a slot that let through the wind so the rod wobbles, but what's going to power the spinner? That same wind? Simpler to use the wind to power a generator or al
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Not even close to enough that it lights lights.
According to the article it is enough to light LED lights.
The rest I'm not interested in.
If you see made up fantasy problems, that is your thing. I'm not here to convince you that the technology makes sense. As: I actually do not care.
but what's going to power the spinner? Which spinner? It would have no spinner. You are pretty silly. It would work on the same spinner less principle as the floor.
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I can imagine an interesting use for this tech, but it is more of a luxury or convenience: Use it in hallways so when you walk down the hallway to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you have some low level light near your feet so you don't step on toys that your kids left laying around. Essentially a bunch of small red LEDs near the baseboards (red to not ruin your night vision).
Again, not a "must have" thing, but meh, the Pet Rock wasn't exactly a must have thing either. :)
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Also, generating electricity from food (which keeps people moving across the floors) grown using fossil fuels is even worse than just plainly generating electricity straight from fossil fuels.
Pretty sure that people are going to be walking (and eating) in any case? Why not harvest the waste energy?
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Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
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Also, generating electricity from food (which keeps people moving across the floors) grown using fossil fuels is even worse than just plainly generating electricity straight from fossil fuels.
Pretty sure that people are going to be walking (and eating) in any case? Why not harvest the waste energy?
It really isn't waste energy, other than normal muscle/skelatal inefficiencies in walking. It is actually an energy vampire. Something requiring a bit more effort for the animal the energy is being harvested from.
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Well, to be fair, you need to eat so would be doing that anyway, regardless of what is used to grow the food....
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In context, this is a silly waste of resources in a BS article, so I'm not about to defend the floor particularly.
However given the typical weight of people, I don't think they will *need* to consume more calories just because the floor is a little harder to walk on. They might use more energy, but for the typical person it means ever so slightly slower weight gain than they suddenly need more food, since people mostly take in more energy than they use. This is assuming the floor is harder to walk on, in *t
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But you need *more* food if a part of the potential energy that would otherwise contribute to your springy walk were drained this way,
There is no energy drained from you. Either the wood swings and friction converts that energy into "heat".
Or the sublement to that wood converts it to electricity.
For your body it is no difference at all. Why would it?
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For your body it is no difference at all. Why would it?
Because law of conservation of energy still holds.
There is no energy drained from you. Either the wood swings and friction converts that energy into "heat". Or the sublement to that wood converts it to electricity.
That is assuming that these two cases have identical biomechanical behavior. Considering that mechanical work is force over distance, this seems unlikely. People don't make moving floors that just generate heat. My floor is rather hard, for example.
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Because law of conservation of energy still holds. ...
Obviously. And what has the body dropping ona surface to do with that? Nothing
That is assuming that these two cases have identical biomechanical behavior.
Which way have, or do you walk different if you know the floor below creates electricity? You do not even feel the difference if you walk on stone, pavement, or wood. How would you if that wood can create a tiny amount of electricity?
My floor is rather hard, for example.
Yeah, the same like the floor t
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It's true that it doesn't necessarily induce an action that is difficult to walk on, however, it comes from *somewhere*.
So if a formerly rigid floor now has to allow a little flex, then technically the walker has to put a little more push into it to get the same push back they got before. So it takes more energy.
However, it could be something else, like energy that went into making loud sounds as the rigid floor is hit by your shoes now is a bit more muffled because the energy is going toward this mechanism
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however, it comes from *somewhere*.
So if a formerly rigid floor now has to allow a little flex
A wooden floor is not rigid, even if it looks like it on the first glance. The energy simply comes from the step on the surface, which normally would "only" create a fraction of heat, and now creates a fraction of heat and a fraction of electricity.
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Rigid isn't a boolean, it's a relative concept. A wood floor is *more* rigid than a rubber floor. I was presuming it was possible for the floor that was formerly a certain degree rigid is made less rigid with this modification, which may be the case. And I mentioned the possibility that it *could* come from other phenomenon in the third little paragraph, that there is waste energy that could be recovered, but it's not like they were 100% clear on whether it changes the nature of the floor in a way that ch
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or do you walk different if you know the floor below creates electricity?
It's not about "knowing", it's about the mechanical properties of the surface you're walking on.
You do not even feel the difference if you walk on stone, pavement, or wood. How would you if that wood can create a tiny amount of electricity?
Tiny amount? You wouldn't. "Enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs"? Now you would definitely notice *that*. Even a single 10W lightbulb would drain 10% of you basal metabolic output of ~100W, and that's assuming an impossible 100% conversion efficiency of the floor.
Yeah, the same like the floor they mention :P
In that case the floor they mention can't generate any useful energy from people walking on it. Powering LED bulbs with it i
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Well,
they talked about a LED.
And I assumed it is a 100mW LED.
You assume it is a 10W LED.
My LEDs here are 6W :P
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Like making the humans into batteries, like in The Matrix.
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There is a fine line between complexity and utility.
Solar Panels are a good source of energy, with either having a battery backup for night and cloudy days, or just hooked into the grid, to support the grid during the day, and pulling from the grid at night. (Or a combination of both, where your homes power is self generated, and you sell the excess) while they are still rather expensive to buy and get installed, being that they can power your home and perhaps an other too, is a good bargain.
Wind Turbines t
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
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If he means house plumbing, don't forget that you had to pump the water up from the ground in the first place, and you're only recovering a tiny part of that energy when the water runs back down to the sewer. And your plumbing is more likely to clog if the water in them is slowed down.
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Storage and transportation are both things that can be address by these sources as long as the demand is low enough. I agree in the typical home this makes zero sense. However you could say the same thing about the hand crank on my hand held radio / flashlight.
The reservoir capacitor it has should be shelf stable for a lot more years than a set of batteries would be. it also means I can use it as much as like in a power outage situation without worry about running out the battery I might need later if the
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
For me the benefit here is less energy efficiency, and more reliability. Lighting emergency exit lights with this could work extremely well.
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There is only one "low quality energy", and that is heat.
All other forms of energy are created equal.
The production-energy costs are almost certainly going to far exceed the total amount of energy this system could ever generate in its lifetime. /sarcasm
Exactly as it is with Solar Panels and Wind turbines, so why do you care?
Re: Energy from low-quality sources? (Score:2)
For the novelty and envirofeels.
Pretty much nonsense (Score:2)
Human movement does not generate enough energy to be worthwhile harvesting. The effort needed is just not justified by the results.
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The switch is wireless and intermittently sends a short EM pulse signal that is picked up by a receiver which controls the flow of electricity to the lights. The receiver will continuously use electricity to listen for the signal but the switch itself only needs electricity when it sends the pulse to turn the lights on or off.
And, batteries will still
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Any energy captured from motion will need to be stored for when the motion stops.
Only niche products that benefit directly from this form of integration seem possible. Flooring that lights up (dimly) when you walk on it in the dark is about all I've got. Other cases may present themselves.
Re: Pretty much nonsense (Score:2)
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You also need to take the effort to change the floor into account. Making and installing one such tile very likely costs a lot more energy than it creates over its whole lifetime.
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Show your work.
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Human movement does not generate enough energy to be worthwhile harvesting.
Incidental movement, probably not. But human movement built the pyramids.
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So? The Pyramids are not energy.
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how many gamer-bots walk around at all on any given day...
Re: Pretty much nonsense (Score:2)
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Bicycles typically do not harvest energy. And they do not do it with a high-effort change in floor tiles.
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Bicycles typically do not harvest energy.
They harvest energy from my muscles and turn it into motion. That's how mine works. If you mean "Does it turn into into electricity", well, it can do that too if you are using a dynamo to run your lights, although that's not the primary way it creates motion. It produces more electricity than that floor..
Wooden floors generate electricity (Score:1)
That's nothing. Wooden floors laced with THC generate happiness and DUIs.
Ohm's Law applies. (Score:4, Informative)
For this, they'd have to hire someone to pace back and forth to light the house. Energy in - waste = energy out.
These experiments are great for academic pursuits, but are the outcomes practical in the real world? All the articles I've seen in the last two decades that say "Hey! This thing can generate electricity!" always show someone producing whatever voltage, readable by a very high impedance voltmeter, but practicably nil current, or, it can power a load no more than a few milliamps, at best.
What -really- matters is not how much voltage you can generate, but how much current. The big secret to making it such that humans walking around can power a whole house, is to lower the current draw of the house to a few watts.
An olympic cyclist can generate a few hundred watts for a few minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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For this, they'd have to hire someone to pace back and forth to light the house.
My wife says I'd be the perfect person. I pace, I fidget, can't sit still.
I'm annoying as all hell, and no doubt. But if I could claim it was a for electrical production, all would be forgiven.
Re: Ohm's Law applies. (Score:2)
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If you were pacing at night and lighting the place up your wife might be even more annoyed.
Indeed! I often tell her I'm the most annoying person in the world.
That annoys her a lot! 8^)
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What -really- matters is not how much voltage you can generate, but how much current.
Good point. There always seems to be something slightly deceptive about these articles. I mean, if you want to generate on the order of a thousand times the 24.3 volts mentioned in the summary, you just rub a balloon through your hair and then touch it to a metal object.
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Nope. Just rubbing your hair briefly with a balloon. You produce a static shock. Those have a minimum of 3000 volts or so, but are often much higher. So on the order of a thousand times 24.3 volts is not unlikely. Maybe a bit less, but well up in the thousands of volts.
Signs of BS (Score:5, Interesting)
"Enough energy to drive LED lamps or calculator" very vague and even in the most optimistic interpretation, nearly useless. For one they mention 'energy' when surely the correct thing to measure in this context is power for a given force applied. If I need to jump up and down continuously on the floor for 6 hours to generate 0.5Wh, that's still *technically* providing enough energy to drive a 5W LED bulb for 6 minutes. For another those are weak examples. We've had calculators that can be powered by a small cheap solar cell for 40 years from ordinary indoor lighting. LED Lamp means 5W.
But they do mention one concrete number to try to look impressive, but it's voltage, which isn't particularly useful in this context. Sure, this floor can get you 24V, However my boring old carpet can create a voltage in the ballpark of 5,000 volts just by accident of rubbing against my socks in dry weather.
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You can drive a calculator from a one square centimeter solar cell...
Anyway, with 100% efficiency, a one millimeter move of the floor under my 80kg step would produce 0.8 Joules. With charging efficiency of some 70%, it's less than 100,000 steps to fully charge my mobile phone.
As for the efficiency, no word other than "efficient" in the article description.
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"You can drive a calculator from a one square centimeter solar cell..."
Indoors.
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If I need to jump up and down continuously on the floor for 6 hours to generate 0.5Wh, that's still *technically* providing enough energy to drive a 5W LED bulb for 6 minutes.
Oh it's way worse than that. The article shows around 0.32 uw (microwatts - Slashdot won't show the micro symbol it seems) per step, which is a pulse just a fraction of a second long. They were able to, over time, charge a capacitor enough to to make an LED glow. I'm really not sure what the point in all of this is. A tiny solar panel on a calculator generates more power than this from the ambient room light.
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Battery free smart switches use the force applied to the switch to generate enough energy to send a short radio transmission.
It's surprising what you can do with very small amounts of energy.
This floor could have applications with this like sensors or emergency lighting. How about a battery free wireless occupancy sensor?
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The point is to be awarded a government grant to investigate an idea that any experienced engineer would quickly dismiss as impractical and uneconomical.
This isn't exactly a scam (unlike the "free energy" frauds), but it has a lot in common with "Solar Freakin' Roadways!". It's the sort of idea that you present to a politician who can't do the math and doesn't understand the science, but is willing to write a check because it sounds "green".
Re: Signs of BS (Score:2)
Embedded electrodes (Score:2)
We need embedded electrodes to generate electricity directly from people's fat.
Let's see, 20 kg of fat yields 180,000 kcal of energy. That's about 200 kWh, about enough to run my house for a week.
So basically gooble boxes (Score:3)
So basically they invented Gooble Boxes https://youtu.be/F4OOw22hKR4?t... [youtu.be]
so many good ideas can be done with this (Score:2)
"...around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators..."
wow, I can't wait to finally be freed from those cumbersome AAAs in my calculator and other small elec devices, looking forward to plugging it into my floor and getting some real work done
might make a neat intruder alarm... each step a burglar takes makes a blinky LED, attracting unwanted attention to their criminal activities; my wooden floors alrea
Students who don't know anything about real world (Score:1)
Indiana Jones Treasure Cave Tech (Score:2)
The floor boards provide the power when the tomb robber (err, "archaeologist") trods upon them, which powers the Olmec photocell that detects him breaking the shaft of light, and the solenoid that releases the giant rock.
Hasn't this already been done?... (Score:2)
Oh right.
The "Gooble Boxes," in that episode of Rick and Morty.
researchers get paid more than this would save (Score:3)
Do these people have a grasp on reality? (Score:3)
How much walking would one person have to do to light one LED bulb? Do these people think homeowners walk around their place all the time when at home? Do they think people pace back and forth for minutes/hours at a time? Have they seen the size of the average American? Do those people look like they walk much at all?
I am of the firm belief researchers, and in many cases engineers and programmers, have no clue how people live, work or use products.
Re: Do these people have a grasp on reality? (Score:2)
Re: Do these people have a grasp on reality? (Score:2)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pz... [youtube.com]
Go Run! (Score:2)
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Re: Go Run! (Score:2)
I like it (Score:2)
So each time you want to load your basement-batteries you'll have to have a party.
They'll get government money to burn (Score:3)
Useful for special applications (Score:2)
And of course for people who want it for irrational reasons.
Not a real big market.
At Scale (Score:2)
I see a lot of comments here saying why it wouldn't work, and they're correct that the people in a house could not scale to the needs of the home.
However, there are spaces / places where this technology would scale - think a train station, airport, theater, sports arena, nightclub, etc.
That's where the question becomes interesting to explore, and does offer possible solutions to the needs of the space.
Compression? (Score:2)
This seems like basically a more efficient way to harvest charge generated by the triboelectric effect. Very cool. But how does compression come into play here?