Pavegen | Fully Charged
hi welcome to
fully
charged
my name is Roberto Elena andfully
charged
is a weekly series about the future of energy and transport and electric vehicles now we managed to make all these episodes because of the support of an amazing thing called patreon if you look below this video there's a link to patreon have a look at that see if you want to help support us because it really does make this this serious possible but the reason we're so passionate about making it is because of the
amazing amount of technical innovation of development of things like electric cars of hybrid cars of renewable energy of energy storage loads of areas that we're looking at not just cars all sorts of different things and this week's episode is very specifically about a very unusual way of generating electricity basically I'm just walking along the street so Lawrence thank you very much for letting me stand on your amazing bit of
pavegen
it's just really exciting becauseI've seen pictures of this but this is first time I've actually seen it in real life I mean were you literally walking along a street thinking oh I'm generating kinetic energy I could do something like that or where did it come from I'm an industrial designer and I was lucky enough to a university have some time working which one of the biggest energy companies in Europe and they said to me Lauren can you make us a street light harbour solar energy and powered by wind so I spent
a year working his company they funded staff they've built stuff and after a year building streetlights it didn't work right so I actually got fired I sold and so there's me is a going back to lucky University you know doing industrial design I was really upset with his idea of failure hanging my head on the ground and I kept thinking about look we need to find an energy source in cities and then I went walk walk through Victoria Station in London I remember I read that day on the
BBC website there's 35,000 people an hour passing through then walking around and there's a lot of people here I said that's a design viable here when went away back to laughs were built my first prototype he had spent 14 hours in the labs hacking sewing together bits of loot at bits of duct tape and I kind of showed you can get some energy from the footstep and I guess we've been pushing the boundaries since in terms of trying to make it really the highest yield we can I think
what we've done is we've taken foam it's really really hard and we had a little breakthrough that allowed us to kind of build a whole company around this I did yeah I think the first thing we did is we found a way that no one else has done before to get really high yield for a footstep so when you walk it's a small amount of energy you're governed by the laws of physics but we can actually take energy for one two three four seconds from a single footstep which means that
rather than having to really quickly grab the energy we've got a prolonged power output for my electromagnetic generators so we build them ourselves we developed on marcelles and so when you when you tread on these because you can't feel a very small amount of movement under your feet is that is there literally a physics is there a physical thing that goes in and out that yes it will what's in it so we built about 700 prototype right four out of the days from big big old like 20
kilowatt generators that would never really match for it to now we have a really small generator inside it's the kinetically field so it's really really durable and essentially the your downward way is converted rotation on that's part of our pattern and the rotational force is goes into a flywheel that flywheel will hold and almost all the power in the the kinetic of it the energy of it spinning and the inertia story and then well around that we have a series of magnets and copper
coils right and that's we get the positive EMF that gives us the power that comes out you know 100 100 volts AC we create from the product that's fascinating so is actually there is actually a spinning thing then under the underneath this that's what yes there's any device that it's completely sealed right an interesting thing is if you look at other technologies let's say like a piss in the car engine this piston will move billions of times it's life cycle when you
look at putting it in here we're doing a fraction of its life cycle so that's a really small amount of fatigue it's get experienced over 20 years so we've actually found a mechanical moving thing that can be really durable so that then is that's telling us we're on these ones yeah so I have to move more than that I have to do that yeah the more you jump oh yeah you can stay car for example yeah mobile phone will use around 10 watt to charge right so in that kind of
spectrum or a 30 watt light fitting is like a LED tree light those 30 joules wood pallets tree light for one second right I see so we've actually powered a street light for quite a few seconds ago yeah so you can do yes nothing that is yet so that people jump up ten seconds of a led bright street light right on our bouncy foam that stuff so yeah a train station of thousand of people yeah right there yeah it's starting to make a bit more sense it's a bit embarrassing man my time to do
that but this is what you expect people if when they come to our station please come through and like it people do like eccentricity jumping jumping oh I so it's the entire floor of Victoria Station with this yeah it's the power of the crowd and the great thing about we describe there is that when lots of people are moving this fly will keep spinning oh it keeps going and you keep that and out because there's a certain starting inertia needed to make the revival stop spinning once
the things spin you're continuously be getting that power up which means it's like a power you know their power station it goes on you know when the 9:54 from Darby was the you've got a 10-minute power right it has come on people walk on it therefore it's on the ground therefore it gets abused therefore it's rough and is it going to be so expensive to install and so ridiculous that it the amount of electricity it generates in its life is less than it costs to put in it so
those sort of arguments them yeah I'm presume you've thought about that area quite yeah I mean I think we look at the area of energy it's highly controversial lots of people have opinions and and it's great because we need to in a way battle out and to make the best ideas win I guess our view is that we can make this product from really really low cost we can make it you know as low cost as like kind of medium cost flooring so it can be almost like utility products that's one
and then two it's like when we start engineering the problem we need to make sure that this thing would actually have a potential to last a long time right so for example piezoelectric crystals you know the same thing you'd have when you spark your oven they look great and there's a million projects out of that but the durability is really questionable in a month so there's like certain spec that means it won't reach that we know from our research and all the due diligence we
did really that it has a potential to be really low cost really really durable to give you a decent power up but we're not going to power the world and we're not going to take away every solar panel but you know part of our energy mix the future especially in cities and I came out of being an engineer in 50 of looking at it's actually really hard to generate power in open spaces and we are one of those alternatives so I think it's an energy mix the future it's going to be low
cost but it's a challenge that's why no one else has done it before yeah so I think we would kind of took away all that stuff and just said look you've got to have a floor anyway yeah you're going to be replacing the whole of Orchestra in the next few years well let's just drop this dish yeah and maybe it'll cost five percent more than the current flooring is in there but you're going to get a power source and you're sealing a data and that's another thing of
what we're moving into monetizing right now is a data from people moving so yeah so can there be there can be sensors built into this that can tell you how many people have walked across it is that like an entrance to a store or something like that is that well yes and most basic level every single generator will have a wireless chip in it will be broadcasting it will have also Bluetooth connectivity so it actually knows who you are when you walk over the floor right and you might have a Big
Brother pretty interesting about it is let's imagine a retail store now the energy from people walking in and out is kind of light to the window now the next thing is every time I walk in and it's let's say it's a sports shop and I Lawrence you've made 52 steps today well thank you and it's part of the app and I can actually get money off my projects the program generally take generating energy and giving scientists all right or we actually rewarding people for a digital
currency and actually allowing people to donate the energy Dave made in that store to maybe helping people create new forms of energy in India or and it really gets that deep social interaction of people to get an involved in energy I think one of the things we found is that you can't really engage in renewables like solar panel you know you don't ever see those yeah you can't hug the wind turbine could you be minced me I heard functional I'm a bit weird you tried but then asking
this this is a way to really engage people you know and so you've got you can off-grid energy thing and you also got we're changing people's lives within and I never ever expected it to happen in terms of like people using it but you know we see kids jumping on there old people jumping and loving it and there's a really amazing feeling from being part of energy here yes putting this instead of concrete slabs is not catastrophic ly more expensive and it has enormous back-end
benefit yeah I guess if you're looking at the pros and cons of putting solar installation in you've got a gal named Ruth you've got to reinforce the roof build a structure or about which angle it is that she when you're putting a floor and you got to put it forward anyway and a bit developers saying look I've got 100,000 to cover all my flaws and it can you guys do the floor and then suddenly the same people that would install the floor anyway putting in a pave gym floor they
get all the added benefit from there yeah the chance of triangles will be really robust I've got an example here so this allows us to have cars driving over it so it's a glass reinforced polymer that allows us to kind of have massively high strength might have to yeah what was keeping it as lightweight as possible that's an example of the triangle that you can easily easily top out as well right you can just wear you can you can take that off and replace it and also the other thing I
know that people will say is oh my bicycle will get stuck in the gap they won't I'm just saying that because there's so much to know yeah you're riding a bike with wheels back narrow well I do have on my key ring is a small it's at your child's finger model that you have to test or installation on it so for the Peconic kids get their finger in a theory a gap small enough they're like a sound like a six-month-old baby can put a finger in it so we have to check all of
our stuff make sure it's compliant british standard and then it also locks into place of the key so we have a custom key right so it's Harley and then you have to unlock each each unit which makes it really really safe to put it in cities I think like cities are going to get hard and hard to live in you know London's growing by 3 train carriages every single week your people are going to be living in really dense environment you know and if you can actually help people to go hot on
that don't go to the train station right now who's really busy go to the one 100 meters extra walk suddenly as I can see I'm going to great well thank you for information my life's been made slightly better right and so we really think it can be a way of enhancing people's lives rather than it's everyone worried about stealing data on people actually it was a really passive way to improve cities yeah is this your latest version of it here because I've seen various
examples of all these squares here that I've seen those ones in the field yeah so I started off I was in my bedroom I was an engineer I built like the first five different prototypes which rectangular one but then what we did is as we developed as a company we bought on great engineers and we really realized actually a rectangles are very good because you you miss footsteps in the corner it doesn't really do anything it can't it has to move a very small amount we realized we made it
triangular the triangular form means that every single millimetre of the floor gives you energy and it works like a master one step can actually activate multiple generators as you walk on it and it makes you really modular yeah I think it looks a lot better as well you're fitting with like modern environment so we've just developed it and it's going to shoot me for years figuring out what it does it means we kind of threw away everything we learnt about the old one and had all our
problems from it and then just started again wrong and it's we actually found we're creating 200 times more power for mr. Vyse than the old wire because we've really balanced out the generator with with the kind of load and what though is there a generator every sort of point of all the track where all the triangles meet is that where it yeah I've got an example here it's a completely sealed unit and then within it we're using the movement here at stereo travel and then
within this device this is where we have a fly wall that's embedded within it that will spin with a series of magnetic magnets and coils Wow got it so it's kind of alarmingly simple erm it's almost like a kit of Victorian kids spinning top when you put everything yeah yeah very crude as that kind of notion threat then as you push down is there a thread that then one of the things that in our first there is a patent is that we've got one of most efficient ways of converting
downward movement interpret a trial and that's key because otherwise if you're trying to generate power from like ten miller meant directly into a magnet there's not much travel yeah so by going to rotational it gives you much much higher capacity and so that the trick is how to get and downwards rotation of this it's in really clever the chemical engineering alongside the kind of whole electrical system which is you know the hardest thing I found was if you make the energy as
one thing as he's smoothing it and making it into a useful source was actually really difficult because you know when you rectifier from AC to DC power you suddenly lose loads and so we spent a huge amount of time energy to actually make it the electronic infrastructure really simple and so you could you feel now if you have the funding then you could scale up yeah the important thing for us is that when we make the product that we we basically don't have to all the parts we make so I
don't have to wait for some Japanese semiconductor going to give me some component we own the whole supply chain which is good but it also means I'm a vertically integrated dust really enter prize and you're being guy who I've never really had a job when straight into being C over company I've got you know operations nine countries for T star and suddenly having to figure out a lot and right that's a big chance but we will make the production so we can have millions of
our tiles Institute in every city in the world right that's what we will do you know and it's all it is for us is just a match of timing when to do at the right time we don't want to mess necessary take this part into the millions of units of production ya know we're doing it debugging right now it's in Washington DC it's minus 15 degrees we're getting it abused every day the inauguration so thousands of people going over it and when ants march might have seen more oh
yeah so I wind up real famine yeah yeah no no for suburban we don't come argues as there are more people on their own but let's not get political time but if it again that we're learning a lot from that side so we're learning that suddenly the different kind of vandalism will happen at different times different temperatures what that will mean suppose there's a lot of innovation that's going on a real time before we ramp up production right so where else other than
Washington have you have you got stuff installed well so we've always been really bold and our approach to growing the idea and we've got it in all four corners of the world we've got it in our Brazil in a socket in the favela and Rio de Janeiro where we use 200 tiles alongside a small solar array that stores the energy from people playing soccer and football and they store the energy and batteries and it powers the sublight Wow and so we got death threats work in that community is
on the hardest environments you can imagine think a-ha tourism but we did it in collaboration with shell but it was an amazing way to really get a technology out there secondly we took at the Heathrow Airport so in terminal 3 we now have 10,000 people a day walking over the tiles and that's been there for two years now and it's powering the light from the corridor I think that like going to these kind of crazy environments if you like and really testing it allows us to learn firsthand
really really quickly it's in Nigeria again in soccer pictures in in factories in Korea not North Korea South Korea right and and really just an even in Federation Square in Australia right in the heart of Red Square we've actually got one of our oldest arrays where it's powers and life stairs so we've really pushed hard to get a global arguably challenge and maybe we shouldn't have gone big so early but it give us a massive mount debut in there and we are really bold taste
the world you know I have to put at least a million tiles at every major city otherwise I'm not meant to get a planet right pretty simple million tiles with city pretty much yeah it's 9999 not be expected I thank you very much thanks very good to talk to you thank you you
