Transcriber: Nadine Hennig Reviewer: Ivana Korom
Imagine, if your walk to work in the morning
would power the lights during your walk home in the evening.
I'm an industrial design engineer.
And I'm fascinated about the built environment,
and how to make our cities more sustainable.
So, I've got to ask you this afternoon, TEDxBerlin:
Could everyone please stand up from their seats, everyone,
the whole audience please stand up.
Right at the back there, please.
Now, when I count to three, I'd like everyone to make a little jump.
Just like that. Don't jump too high. Just a little jump. So, you are ready?
Okay, so one, two and three and jump.
Okay. Thanks so much. Take a seat now. Thank you.
Get your blood flowing a bit there.
From that small little hop you all made - that's enough energy
to fully charge three smartphones.
So it's showing the potential of -
Imagine if we all hopped all the time throughout my whole TEDxTalk.
Imagine what could be done.
I used to work for one of Europe's largest energy companies.
And I was looking at how to create a new form of power in our cities
that was a renewable source of energy.
Obviously, looking at solar and looking at winds,
everyone is very aware of the common issues with these forms.
So I thought, what about a power source that was literally under our feet?
That every step you will make - we could capture that.
And I thought: Think of all the millions of people in the world,
think of all the hundreds of cities,
and think about what could be created by it.
So, I created Pavegen.
Pavegen is a flexible paving slab that converts the kinetic energy
of your footsteps into electrical power.
It stores the energy from many people walking throughout the day,
throughout the night in our cities.
It's made out of recycled truck tires.
The majority of the components are made from recycled materials.
Now, I have a demonstration here with me today.
A Pavegen contains a battery, a timer and some wires.
So you can imagine trying to fly it from London on a plane
is not the easiest thing. (Laughter)
But I've got a demonstration here today.
As I stand on it, we can see, 5% of the energy
makes it light up in the center.
The rest of the energy is going into a light here.
Obviously, I am just making a few steps but imagine hundreds of people
walking in the built environment.
Now, I've got a demo I'm going to do of showing how we can store the power
of a few steps I'm making.
And it's going to go into this light fitment here.
So you can see that that light could be on all night
just from a few people walking.
(Applause) Thanks.
I see this as a way, it can be a new low carbon economy
for our cities powering the street lights, powering applications on the street
without needing connections to the grids.
So completely off-grid and kinetic.
Now, I'm going to talk about my journey.
We're really at an exciting stage today with Pavegen.
We've just installed it at the London Olympics -
at one of the busiest sites that feed people
to the Olympic park off the London undergrounds.
But it all started with a sketch.
The wooden Pavegen is the first one I've ever made,
and it didn't really work very well.
It showed the concept.
I did it at the Loughborough University in the UK.
I could see the potential.
I wanted to try and take it further, and understand more about it.
I took it to a school.
There is a lot of people there and they've got energy.
So, let's try it out.
So I put a Pavegen in the school and they found it interesting.
And then, they had a ride.
So there's still a Pavegen there behind all the people
trying to jump on it.
So then I said, I really need to get it installed in a school
a bit more permanently.
So I did an illegal installation in school.
I had no safety standards for the products.
I had no approval to put it in there.
I didn't really know what would happen.
This is the first ever trial that we did.
(Video)
Student: "I'm so impressed by it. I want to stand on it. Yeah."
Laurence Kemball-Cook: So I thought here, the student finds it quite fun.
Have I invented the "gamification" of energy saving? (Laughter)
Is that a good thing?
I'll go back to that point later.
But it showed, they find it really fun and engaging.
And I'm going to show you my favorite machine.
This is a rain machine that simulates
what it's like being outside for a Pavegen.
It's not very fun. You get vandalized.
People are always jumping on you.
You are going to get people vomitting on it.
It's really extreme environment and probably
one of the hardest environments to engineer a product for -
also, stiletto heels.
Now, what you'll see here is a 50-stone lady
in stiletto heels on the slab.
Now, I couldn't find a real one.
So, on the left we have a machine that simulated it, and that's all part
of the process of getting an idea for [unclear] to actually really work.
So we did our testing.
We've done our standards.
And then the school that I had illegally installed in came back and said:
"We'd actually like a real one now."
I now have 1,100 students
who have devoted their lives to destroying my technology.
They've done it since 2010, and they haven't succeeded yet.
So, as they walk down the corridor, the lights of the corridor
get powered from their steps.
I thought, that's really exciting that it works in that environment.
Where else can we use it?
But after doing this, we had a small newspaper in the UK
write a little bit about us.
Then, a few more newspapers and online publications wrote about us.
And then everyone started writing about us.
Then, after all this attention,
suddenly we had Will.I.am from the Black Eyed Peas.
He wanted to have a dance on it.
And even David Cameron wanted one in Downing Street.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the money at the time
but he assured me, he will soon. (Laughter)
And then we went on with awards.
Don't get me wrong. Awards are great.
You feel really good when you walk around holding them.
I'm not sure I look very good with them but the thing about awards is
it doesn't really matter.
It's all about getting a real product.
Getting back to reality and getting a product that actually works.
Where else can we use this? What else can we do?
So I said, well, where else in the world people dance harder than here in Berlin?
The answer is, best of all, in the Isle of Wight.
It's a festival with 70,000 people.
I said, well, let's put it there and let's see what happens.
I have a short video to show you of what happened to us at Bestival.
(Video)
(Music)
[You are powered with Pavegen]
LKC: So we had over a thousand mobile phones
were charged in one weekend only.
And I believe, one of the biggest polluters are fossil fuels.
Did you know, the average person at a festival uses
half a liter of diesel per day?
So imagine 70,000 people there for four days.
It totals up to a lot of energy.
My belief for this is to take it to a stage where the whole festival
could be powered entirely by the very people dancing,
walking and running around it.
Then I thought, could we take this to a city?
So I had the opportunity to take it to Bulgaria, Spain and Greece.
I took it to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria,
and this is what happened.
(Video)
(Music)
LKC: What you just saw there was the minister of energy
for the Bulgarian government doing hopscotch down my walkway.
We had over 200,000 people walk on it over two weeks and it powered
the street lights in the area.
I'd looked at schools because they were the easiest thing to do first.
I had taken it to a few cities in very small settings.
And I thought, well, what about transport?
All the millions of people moving through every major transport hub
every day has a lot of potential.
In 2009, I spoke to some people who were involved in the rail networks,
and I showed them this and said, "That would be cool."
Power the lights in a station from Pavegen.
So I have to say throughout the Olympics Games,
we've had one of the most transformative types of installations
of this technology.
I've got a short video to show you about what's happened
in the past few weeks in London.
(Video)
(Music)
LKC: So, in the next two weeks as the Paralympics finish,
we'll hit our millionth footstep on a Pavegen.
With the energy, we're powering the lights along the walkway where we are.
Now, this is a small scale installation but it's proven that it can work
in really busy transport hubs.
Another thing we thought about was what else can you do with this,
and I looked towards things like Smart Cities
being a really exciting area.
So we created a Pavegen that turns into its own data center,
so it can send that information wirelessly and you can use it.
So throughout the Olympics, you can see how many slabs each Pavegen has got.
You can name them.
And then you can go and see a live feed.
You can see how many people walked on it throughout the month, every day.
And we can understand some more, and the application there is endless.
I mean, the idea of gamification for this, it could go on and on and on.
And we've just really first started to create a way where you can get
the countability online for what happens on the floor.
And eventually, the streets will talk to each other
and everywhere would be networked up together.
I've got a short video to show you next that we've created a few weeks ago
of a way that we can demonstrate this.
And we've got another demo that's going to happen live over Pavegen.
(Video) LKC: Okay, we have the Pavegen Twitter test.
Come through here. We're in the Pavegen lab right now.
Gilmore here has built a circuit that's going to convert the energy
from a Pavegen into a signal that's going to send a live tweet
from Hussein jumping on a slab.
So, Hussein, are you ready? Hussein: Yeah.
LKC: Ready to go? Okay. Ready? One, two, three.
Okay. Come forward, come forward.
So, we're all hooked up here. We've got Jeff McDaddy. Ready?
The tweet has just come in. Let's have a look at it.
Jeff McDaddy says, 'What up, TED? Sent from a very cold and grey London
from a Pavegen.'
Good work, guys. Great stuff. We've sent a tweet. Yeah.
LKC: So, today, I brought a special guest with me.
It's my friend, the ducky.
The duck is going to send out, hopefully, a wireless signal
from a Pavegen.
So I'm just going to disconnect us and plug us into it here.
And then we're joined by my very glamorous assistant David
who's going to come to stage now.
And the duck is plugged in now.
What we're going to do: When I stand on this,
it's going to send a Tweet.
Okay. So, stepped on it. It has got an iPad up here.
It's going to pick it up now because everyone here...
there's quite a few iPads and laptops around.
There's a bit of a delay on it.
What should happen is the tweet should come out.
It should be refreshed and we should get a message
coming out from the Pavegen.
Any second now, it's going to come.
Oh, we've got it. Here we go. Here you can see...
Can you read it out to me, David?
[unclear]
So, it worked. Good, old technology.
(Applause)
So I ask you all: see if you can find that tweet.
That was a human powered tweet test.
It is a really exciting time but a really crucial time.
It comes down to the community, to you, to really help
to spread the word and make a difference
on kind of real transformative disruptive technologies such as this.
My aim is that this could be a technology that could be built
into all of our cities.
They could play portion of the energy makeup along with
things like the smart grids and how it all comes together.
My dream is that when all of you walk to work over the next few years,
every step you take will be on a Pavegen.
Thank you very much. (Applause)