Personally, I think it makes sense. Think pressure plates in MineCraft, or tiles that light up when you walk on them in literally ANY sci-fi movie. I'm surprised this hadn't been explored sooner. If this is unveiled in cities worldwide, then you can see millions of watts in power generation, and some serious financial gains not just for key players, but for the consumer through lower prices.
2 Name: King Dude !zXqFpoplY6 : 2012-06-02 16:55 ID:jJu+SadJ [Del]
Eh, it's a neat idea.
Also, I came up with the idea of a power source not too long ago where the transfer from Chemical Energy to Kinetic Energy increased Net gain gradually over time.
Ex. Chemical E. --> Electrical E. --> Kinetic E. --> Electrical E. --> Chemical E.
That's pretty cool, though as stated at the end of the article it really doesn't seem like it would ever generate more than a residual amount of energy. One has to wonder if the benefits outweigh the cost of installing thousands of these panels everywhere around public areas, and if there are net benefits, how many months or years until it pays off.
But I like where they're going with that train of thought. Maybe not to power large-scale things, but smaller things like mobile devices and batteries. There's a good pit of untapped potential in mechanical energy since it's not something people usually think about as significant.
The article says that the amount of energy generated by someone walking over entire lifetime is only significant enough to power the average household for three weeks. On the other hand, the amount of energy generated by someone walking over their lifetime is significant enough to power the average household for an entire three weeks.
Piezo crystals if I'm not mistaken. I wanted to do some experiments with the material, but me and my comrades never got that far into the planning procedure. We were thinking of coming up with a plan to integrate piezoelectric power to a city.
