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Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

> If installed in floors, it could produce clean energy when people walk on it.

This is a bit far fetched as it does not mention any power density figure. Being compressed likely squeezes out micro watts. Off by at least 6 orders of magnitude.

What's interesting is that these materials can be used as sensors, building small voltages/sending small currents when deformed.

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Generating electricity from people stepping on the floor is actually already a thing with current technology - https://www.pavegen.com/

Oh no is it just solar roadways again

They have a solar product too, but their main approach is this:

> The weight from each step across Pavegen tiles creates a small vertical movement of 5mm-10mm compressing an electromagnetic generator and creating a rotary motion to produce 2-4 joules of off-grid, clean energy.

https://www.pavegen.com/what-can-pavegen-power

The solar tiles make me concerned but I suppose I don’t immediately see an issue with the pressure tiles. I hope they turn out useful. Really just down to the life expectancy of the tiles.

I would love to walk over one of those, my guess is you would feel more tired after, similar to walking on sand

For sure, any energy taken out of the system is coming out of your pockets. How much it taxes each individual is the question, and who profits from that energy extraction. But if we're talking a couple joules I don't really see how this is worth it. Comes across as more environmental individualism propaganda

It is already common for flooring material to yield when stepped on, for ergonomic reasons. Normally that energy all becomes heat. In principle at least, you could capture some of it as electricity without causing pedestrians to exert extra effort.

Seems useless though. Every dollar spent on this sort of fancy flooring, which is doubtlessly more expensive than carpet and/or foam rubber mats, is a dollar that isn't being spent on solar panels.

I suspect the real selling point isn't genuine sustainability.

Their page opens with:

> Generate energy, boost engagement, and discover rich data insights

It's probably more about data collection with greenwashing on the side.

Didn't thought that. But yeah, I'm sure foot traffic would rise in if you have that outside your shop, specially for a toy store. Tiles that light up when you step on them, or that light up and you have to step on them.

2-4 joules is basically nothing. There is no chance something like this pays back the energy used to make it within its usable lifetime. It may have some use in niches where you need to power some low-power electronics away from the grid, but those also don't tend to be areas with a lot of foot traffic.

Coldplay use them on their concert tours:

https://energy-floors.com/coldplay/

I wondered how the math works out in reality.

https://energy-floors.com/products/kinetic-dancefloor/ implies one tile is rated at up to 20 W output. The 44 tiles Coldplay has would then be up to ~800 W (some of them seem less accessible). I guess I don't know enough to figure out how much it saves compared to the emissions of lugging it around, but I'm kind of skeptical it actually "boosts sustainability".

AFAIK They even had schools designed to limit the students bypassing these generators. Something about having the role of a child being to generate a miniscule amount of electricity seemed very dystopian to me.

It's a scam with investor's current understanding of technology.

> if installed in floors, your employees could be tracked, exposing less efficient team.

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