Crazy ideas for green electricity generation

The energy crisis looms as we all know.

I had a daft idea a while ago, but who knows one day it may not be so daft.

Basically, all the time our workplaces and public spaces are seeing the production of energy that is "wasted":

1. Overhead lighting is ubiquitous and falls on surfaces that do not do anything useful with it
2. People are walking around (exerting pressure on the floor) and this is doing nothing
3. There is a lot of noise generally, especially in large retail spaces
4. People heat the spaces they are in with their exhalation

For (1) and (2) I wonder if you’d ever be able to make a rugged "smart" floor tile that generates power from light that falls on it (similar to PV but able to be walked on) and from the pressure of peoples’ footsteps on it.

For (3) and (4) perhaps this new method of converting heat and sound into electricity will be possible.

A common thread between them all is the use of piezoelectric devices or similar methods of producing current from pressure.

It’s probably a silly idea and the efficiency would be so low as to be useless, but I don’t know… there’s a lot of heat generated by people, a lot of excess heat in some places (i.e. air conditioning could be obsoleted – a massive win), and across the world there are billions of people walking over man-made surfaces in buildings.

People are already studying the acoustic effects of the force of footsteps on floors I presume for gait-recognition as a kind of security/biometrics thing. Oh, it seems someone else has already had a variation of this idea but with ideas for magnets in shoes as well as some other pressure-related generation – magnets soundscompletely unlikely, you’d need to get both the building and the pedestrians to play ball. Getting just one half on board would be tricky enough.

The other crazy or rather more depressing energy generation of the future I can imagine is effectively the enslavement/exploitation of people in developing nations to generate power for us. It’s not too hard to imagine a company setting up somewhere offering slave-labour pay rates to people to turn cranks or walk treadmills 12 hours per day, to feed the developing countries’ over-inflated energy demands.

I’m sure people would say that something like this would be more equitable than investing in huge amounts of solar PV cells in equatorial countries, as it would boost the economies of the countries by providing income for people who are previously unable to find work. Ugh.

Update: Duh, why haven’t we hooked up all those treadmills in gyms to at least help power the lights and equipment in the gyms? Fat power!

What I want Apple to make…

There’s rumour of a new type of device coming from Apple in the not too distant future.

What I want them to make is a wall-mountable flat 20" or so multi-touch "dumb terminal". You’d be able to hang this thing on your wall without seeming like a total nerd, and be able to display your iCal calendar (in nicer form, like a paper wall calendar), flick through your iPhoto photos, choose music to play etc.

A "Media terminal" perhaps. There’s such a gap in the market for this kind of thing. Ideally you want one of those fancy displays that takes no power when the display is not changing (and doesn’t suffer screen-burn) so that you can literally leave a photo up there all the time, preferably without backlight. Touch it and the backlight kicks in and a simple menu appears.