This September a human-powered sustainable dance club, called Club Watt by its owners, opens its doors in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Club Watt proposes to power the club through human power. This ultra-green dance club is deadly serious about taking themselves off-grid.
They create their energy through a high-tech floor that captures the movements of the dancers above and produces electricity down below. Heavy duty coils and magnets provide the means of turning the moving floor into power. The electricity is than stored in heavy-duty batteries and used as needed to power the Clubs’s sound system, lights, etc. However, even with the high-tech floor, human power will only provide ~30% of the Club’s required energy. The shortfall will be made up with solar power and a wind turbine.
What the company’s press release does not explain is that the average human only generates about one kilowatt-hour (kWh) per day. At that rate, tapping into human energy to generate power proves to not be very efficient. In the US, one kWH costs about a Quarter. Obviously human energy will not be the US’s long-term solution for energy independence.
Human Power turns out be a great marketing tool for trendy companies that want to appear to look green, but in economic terms, it really does not make any sense.
If you think that this is shocking, read this.
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