Can we harvest the energy expended from footsteps and the vibrations from trains?
Architect Claire Price describes how this can be put into practice. Reading this, your body at rest is emitting about 100 watts into the environment. If you’re sitting in an open plan office, count the number of surrounding colleagues and you don’t need to be a maths genius to appreciate the possibilities of tapping into all that wasted energy. Instead it could provide a renewable energy source to power office lighting or laptops – and it may be possible to recharge your mobile phone by walking to the photocopier. Energy harvesting is an exciting field to explore, looking at ways to tap into the energy available from the workings of the human body or transport vibrations. There’s been a surge of interest over the past 10 years, driven by the search for battery-free techniques for powering wireless sensor networks, laptops and mobile phones. The concept was pioneered by the military sector, largely bankrolled by the DARPA in the United States (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
