The world is like an Oliver Twist when it comes to its insatiable demand for energy; it always wants some more. The scientists and engineers are not resting on their oars in their desire to fill this much-needed gap. But in this quest, every once in a while we run into the bizarre idea for alternative energy. Without further ado, here are some lists I got as I scoured the net.
Image Credits: Pixabay
The Body Heat
Who knows that that stuffy room, bus or over-booked eatery during festivities could be such a good thing.
So if by chance you find yourself sweating in a Stockholm's busiest railway station in the Scandinavian country of Sweden, you should be happy as it was not in vain.
Stockholm’s Central Station which has up to 200,000 commuters go through it daily is a beehive of human travelling to and fro.
The heat generated by these massive crowd usually dissipate as waste, not until a real estate company in Stockholm, Jernhusen thought of ways to capture and make it useful.
First, they capture the body heat from commuters using the ventilation system and send it to an underground water tank which it warms up.
The warm water is pumped up 13 floors where it is combined with the primary heating system.
The firm expects to lower cost of the heating system by 20% in the coming years.
How much did it cost to get this system running, you may ask. It costs roughly $30,000 to buy and install the pipes and pumps.
And since their "source" of energy is always running through the station without regards to their excellent work, I'd say it is a cool deal :)
Party People
Who knows that busting a move on the dancefloor could be both good for the dancer and also help save our planet. So next time you see a drunk fella with a stained white T-shirt with a black inscription.
I PARTY AS MY PART TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT
may not necessarily be out of place as the party freak may just be right.
A startup firm in Rotterdam in the Netherlands started a sustainable dance floor business known as Energy Floors. The energy floor produces electricity as people dance on top of it.
How they pulled it off: The floor is made from materials that flex slightly when someone steps on it. Underneath the floor is an electromechanical module that transforms the slight up and down flex of the floor module into rotational movement that drives a generator. The video here shows how it works.
The dimension of each tile (module) is 75X75X20 cm and produces about 35-watt output which ensures that each person generates between 5-20 watts.
Interested in this cool tech? You can contact them through their email for more details.
More Vibrations
Remember the piezoelectric effect? The ability of an object to produce electricity due to response to mechanical stress.
In 2008, a Japanese startup, Soundpower working in conjunction with Shibuya Ward government in Tokyo, Japan, produced and installed piezoelectric mats which produce current whenever someone steps on it.
The power produced lights up the holiday's display and LED boards.
A 135 pounds (61kg) person stepping on it will produce 0.1watt for 1 second. This, when produced in large scale, will provide large quantities of electricity as the Shibuya train station has an estimated 2.4 million commuters daily.
Urine and Feces
If only the owner of this sign knows that pee can produce electricity, he may have some respect for those lost souls peeing on his electric fence :)
Researchers at the Herriot Watt University of Engineering and Physical Science in Edinburgh capital of Scotland, are working on the first fuel cells that will be powered by urine.
The urine is rich in urea, and urea fuel cells are similar to the hydrogen fuels which instead of hydrogen uses urea.
The technology converts urea (in urine) into nitrogen, water and most importantly electricity.
It is estimated the human population worldwide produces about 10 billion litres of urine daily. This is one energy source we will not run out from anytime soon.
Such development is bound to piss off some other energy producers.
But we still have more news which will make them feel crappy since it's about crap.
No one could have thought there is more to a dog poo than inside a landfill. A San Francisco garbage company in 2006 started a pilot program of handing out bio-degradable bags to dog owners to park their dog waste.
In San Francisco Bay Area, there is an estimated 6500 tons of dog poo produced annually.
The dog poo is placed inside a digester where the microorganism action produces methane.
Methane is a good fuel as it produces less carbon dioxide in combustion compared to the fossil fuel for each unit of heat produced.
While the San Francisco people are running on dog poo, GENeco made a human "poo- powered" car in Bristol. They created the bio-gas (methane) from the human poo.
Chocolate
Now here's a sweet one, the cholate factory is here with some of that much-needed energy.
The plan is simple, feed the harmless form of the bacteria E. coli, some chocolate waste and leftovers.
The bacteria is a sugar-loving freak, so getting it to slop away on that chocolate-factory waste is no big deal.
The E.coli bacteria is left in a 5-litre reactor that has diluted nougat and caramel mixture.
The bacteria created hydrogen and organic acid after consuming the sugary waste
Professor Lynne Macaskie of the University of Birmingham’s School of Biosciences led the research team. “Hydrogen offers huge potential as a carbon-free energy carrier,” she comments. “Although only at its initial stages, we’ve demonstrated a hydrogen-producing, waste-reducing technology that, for example, might be scaled-up in 5-10 years’ time for industrial electricity generation and waste treatment processes.”
University of Bermingham.
Willy Wonka, who could have powered his Great Glass Elevator with hydrogen he made in his chocolate factory will be very proud of this.
REFERENCES
- Body Heat: Sweden's New Green Energy Source
- Sustainable Floor
- POWER GENERATING FLOOR IN TRAIN STATIONS LIGHT UP HOLIDAY DISPLAYS
- Making electricity from urine
- GENeco Case study:Bio-Bus
- Sweet Success for Pioneering Hydrogen Energy Project
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As a former chemical engineer - I would suggest that each idea needs to have a system-based design and cost benefits analysis.
Many products and ideas suffer from the lack of a cradle-to-grave design and cost benefit analysis. in the name of quick successes and implementation, many products and systems / solutions have taken short-cuts - mostly by lobbying political leaders and governments - a good example is the "global warming" crowd - no one has given any solutions or problems a cradle-to-grave design, and cost-benefit analysis.
Some well know examples:
We have seen the consequences of nuclear energy which was sold to the public as the cheapest alternative energy source - until the now infamous disasters, the latest being Japan's Fukushima and previously Chernobyl ...
There remains unresolved problems and costs of disposing or securing nuclear wastes.
We tend to let the superficial "solutions" convince us of the easy and obvious solutions and totally ignore the long-term impacts.
For any new idea, it is critical that the long-term impact is carefully considered and analyzed and start small scale and see the real-world implementation issues.
Solar and wind energy has issues with:
I can go on and on ...
So, interesting to read and ponder, but the professional engineers are not wasting time on these ideas although there are a few examples here and there and they might have special reasons and motivation and on a small scale - amusing at best to those who are in the profession / industry.
Some of the ideas, especially the piezoelectric electric form of generation could work in crowded platforms like stadiums, and other public places. The idea of a shortcut is something people do, which I would like to say is more of like a hobby than a real groundbreaking innovation. Thank you for your insightful reply.
In my chemical engineering education and profession, we were taught and trained to look at the big picture to evaluate the feasibility of an idea.
The first case study was the perpetual machine where we discover that if we do not figure in the losses in a system, we can keep a clock running indefinitely without rewinding (or a battery for electronic timers).
The same can be applied to food -> body heat -> hot water or steam -> electricity -> heat & light -> grow food -> back to food ...
However, anytime energy is transformed or transported, there is a loss factor. Lets say it is 70% efficient for all process: wind -> kinetic -> heat and electric -> storage -> transmission -> transformer -> storage -> transmission -> appliances ... 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.7 = ? (a very small number) ...
Now, if you add in human time and labor and business costs ...
The compounding efficiency problem is a signficant one, I agree. Especially true when looking at systems such as in the 'Hydrogen Economy'. Part of the reason I believe so heavily in Nuclear/Solar/Batteries is the efficiency of energy transmission via electrons. Glad to meet a fellow ChemE
Thank you for your comments. Welcome and glad to meet ya too.
That loss factor will always be there since none of the system is 100% efficienct. The perpetual motion machine is the only machine that is said to be 100% efficient. One of the reason it never works in real life.
The topic made me to read the whole post as I was curious to know those alternatives and thinking whether they can be researched on for further studies. I read all through and I wasnt disappointed. Those alternatives mentioned are all what I'm getting to know for the first time and I'm satisfied to have learnt from this post.
I don't know that human urine could be used as an alternative to energy. What we consider waste can actually be renewed.
Well-done!!
Bio-gas is the least exploited form of alternative energy. Thank you.
Chocolate? Really? Mo foh....The quest for energy - renewable esp can't stop. We are always in need...
Mehn, this is a crazy list. I can't imagine what the researchers really thought...Knowledge tho..Wide and getting wider
Weldone sire
Thank you.
Very educative post, people in countries like ours should see this
Thank you.
Hahaha @greenrun you we nuh kee me.
Its interesting to know that as humans we could give out a lot of value with little or no effort.
Body heat, party riding and even pissing.
I had fun reading this one and learning here
Thanks
I had as much fun writing it. Thank you :)
Guy I suggest you remove the party part before many Nigerian guys who party have eaten deep into their careers end up ending their careers partying thinking they're helping the environment, lol. Nice one bro
Not a bad idea of generating electricity. It is the most likely to succeed in the list. So dancing can help us with our energy needs. It's a win win for us.
Chocolate was the height!.
Chai!
Look at all the every we have been wasting in this country. Our engineers in this country has to step up and the government had better start investing in other forms of energy. We are far behind in this energy race o for the most populated African country.
The engineers ain't all siting at home with hands in between their laps. They do work, maybe not so groundbreaking work, but still work all the same.
Yea they are not sitting in one place.. The problem is the fact that our government has refused to invest in technology.. It baffles and it is annoying. Well few now invest in top notch buildings but technology has a lot to play in this nation. Engineers can't fund all these projects all by themselves. They need investors who believe in tech.
Taking my time to read this post was worth with. The source of energy being discussed are justun unusual. In fact, I'm reading about majority of them for the first time. I was imagining if those alternatives were duly recognised and adopted, there won't be air and noise pollution emanating from the use generating set as rightly said by @ttopswag.
This is educating as I've added a new thing to my knowledge reading your post this evening.
Well-done sir
Thank you for the kind words.
Really amazing...I am quite familiar with that of Urine and faeces (Otherwise termed Geothermal energy) I presumed.
The rest are just jejune to me and really amazing
Some consideration though before utilizing fully will be it's durability and commercial supply
I think the urine one could come handy, just place a big bath in all publicly urine-assaulted environment and get your tankful of urine :)
Lol!!!
Sounds funny but truly a life saver amidst the dangers of climate change following continuous utilization of non-renewable energy
i need get buhari to read this... This will at least make Nigeria less of a noise makers.. Generators will now get to rest with the ear bursting noise.
You can go solo without the government's assistance :)
Wao what an interesting discovery.... Glad to hear that human body heat can be profitable harnessed in such a big way
Thanks
Wow... Energy generation at its peak but those energy generated can it be use in powering heavy duty machine?
How long (years) can this generated energy serve a company?
Most of them are still in developmental stage.
Fantastic.
At the moment, a researcher in my University is exploring the promising potential of urine in the production of biogas from lignocellulostic material like sawdust.
That name of the material that you just mentioned is enough to scare people off science for life :)
Seriously, we need all the alternative to the fossil fuel.
lol!!
Of course, we need alternative energy to help reduce harmful effects of fossil on our environment.
Keep up the nice work Sir - may the force be with you!!
@luxx, that I can agree with. Thank you.
Nice post...on here
those are some very unusual stuff hahah :D
The energy/power density of sources is often linked to the ROI, so that may influence what energy source you choose. If a cheaper option is available, there will likely be no adoption of the new technology unless there is significant (10xish) performance improvement. Thanks for posting!
I agree with you on this, the economic of it reigns supreme.