Pavegen is turning footsteps into electricity–yet another reason to get in those 10,000 steps per day. The King’s Cross, London-based company’s technology converts footsteps into electricity, making it possible to power services in high-footfall locations, as well as provide real-time data for analytics. And Pavegen is now crowdfunding on CrowdCube, after previously hosting a Kickstarter campaign.
So far, the company has raised £260,940 of its £750,000 target, from 19 investors. With 40 days remaining in the campaign, the equity offered is 4.48%, share type A (£25,000), B, and EIS pending tax relief. The largest investment as of this writing is £75,000.
Here’s how the technology actually works, according to Pavegen’s CEO and founder, Laurence Kemball-Cook, speaking to TechCrunch:
Storing energy within the inertia of a flywheel is a highly efficient way to take maximum power out of things…So we’re really maximizing the amount [of energy] we can get. And we’re getting up to 7 watts per footstep… We’ve combined several engineering principles in a way that’s never been done before. That allows us to capture all the energy from a footstep and then to maintain momentum in a flywheel through the duration of the footsteps.
Kemball-Cook added,
The way we look at it is we’re a deployable power source that doesn’t need batteries. It’s not like an iBeacon where you’ve got to put batteries in every two years and hope that people remember to put them in and all that. We can be a data hub that’s self-powered, with a computer in it, that can just be put in the ground and forgotten about and it can run all your services off it. And that’s what we’re really excited about…We can actually tell a retailer in real-time that everyone walking in is going left… and how people are moving in different places.
So far, Pavegen’s technology has been installed in over 100 projects in more than 30 countries, in train stations, shopping centres, airports and public spaces, according to the company’s website. The company was founded in 2009, and its now 25-strong team headquartered in London has generated cumulative of > £2.5m for Pavegen. “With a global distribution network in place & internationally granted patents, the next step is scale,” notes the CrowdCube campaign.
One example of the capability of Pavegen’s technology, according to Kemball-Cook in TechCrunch:
If we put around 20 meters of Pavegen on Oxford Street in London we would generate more than enough power that’s needed for all the street lighting along that stretch. So A 20 meter array could kick out in the region of 1,500 watts. And we have systems that can do megawatts, so we’re getting into that space of what solar can do.
In the near term, Kemball-Cook sees retail as a big market for Pavegen, he told TechCrunch, due to the additional data on customers that it offers.
Stephen Hawking, renowned theoretical physical physicist, praised the technology, saying,
This technology has the potential to radically change the way we source power in the future.
Kemball-Cook’s talk at TEDxRio, is worth checking out:
Pavegen CEO TEDxRio Talk from Pavegen Systems Ltd. on Vimeo.
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