WIDN blog
Dancefloor Power poses huge potential
March 31, 2009
By David Wheeldon
I was talking to a friend of a friend on the weekend who told me about an interesting energy conservation idea that’s gaining popularity in interior design. The story went: “They’re designing a dance club in Germany where the floorboards sit above these special crystals which generate power when people dance over them. The amount of pressure on the dance floor is enough to power all the lighting and sound system.”
We all know how reliable “friend of a friend” stories can be, so I’ve had a look into this and while I didn’t find the German club in question, I did learn that such a club opened in London last year.
The nightclub, Surya, features Dancefloor Power which uses piezoelectricity - the ability of a specific material to generate electricity when it’s put under pressure. In this case springs sit beneath the floor and the impact of the dancers squashes crystal blocks that generate enough electricity to cover 60% of the club’s energy needs.
The possibilities of the technology are only limited by the imagination and it seems bound to become widespread as it is honed through various projects. A quick search on the web shows the range of application with scientists working toward clothes that can power your personal gadgets, through to the world’s largest such energy producing project which is being planned in Israel where a company wants to place generators under roads, railways and runways to harvest enough energy to mass-produce electricity.
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