MIT Students Have Prize-Winning Plan to Convert People 'Power' Into Electricity

(USA TODAY) -- Crowds of people the next renewable source of energy? OK, it's not likely to happen in the immediate future, but it's a feasible prospect, say two architecture students who have a prize-winning plan to turn human power into electricity.

OK, it's not likely to happen in the immediate future, but it's a feasible prospect, say two architecture students who have a prize-winning plan to turn human power into electricity.

"Almost everyone has felt a concrete floor quiver or walked down a staircase that vibrates each time their foot falls," says James Graham, 27, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "What they're feeling is the energy they're producing being absorbed by the structure. And it made us wonder: Where could we be gathering that energy from?"

In April, Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, also a graduate student at MIT, took home the top prize at an international sustainable-construction competition in China.

There, they presented an idea they call the Crowd Farm. It's a responsive sub-flooring system of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps, Graham says. If such a system were installed beneath a train station's lobby, for instance, the slippage of blocks against one another as crowds of people walked would generate electricity-producing power.

"We're simply taking small vibrations and converting them into energy," Graham says. "People all over the world are working on actual technologies like this to convert human power into energy."

USA Today, Nov. 1, 2007