Crowd Farms

I just read about a cool concept - a crowd farm. A crowd farm could take the energy of people in a crowd catching a train or enjoying a rock concert and turn mechanical energy produced by their movement into electricity. This could work by having blocks of floor that move against each other as people move over them.

Apparently Thomas Edison was way ahead of us on this one, with a turnstile in front of his house that pumped water into his holding tank. The possibilities are endless for creative use of mechanical energy generated by movement. Why not put bored or exercising people to work generating power?

After a quick Google search, I see that a gym in Hong Kong is already powering part of its lighting systems in this way, the Japanese are testing a similar application for use in a train station, and merry-go-rounds in South Africa help pump water to rural areas. When I first heard about the one laptop per child project, I recall that they were planning to have hand cranks and pull strings to generate electricity for the laptops, and that often the towns that do currently have a desktop would have a bike to power them.

I can see the future of gyms, playgrounds, and public transit stations just waiting for the right people to promote this. I wonder if Google has thought of integrating some of these ideas into their carbon-neutral plan...