Laurence Kemball-Cook founded Pavegen with a simple but ambitious aim: to create affordable off-grid electricity in cities. The idea arrived while he was working at energy company E.ON. “I was looking at new forms of street lighting powered by solar and wind,” he says. “But in dense urban environments neither of those technologies work well. Wind needs to be in the sea or high up, and solar struggles when you’re surrounded by tall buildings.”
Cities, though, have something else in abundance: moving people. As an industrial designer with a fascination with sustainability, he spent five years building prototypes in his bedroom of a system that would harness the kinetic energy of footfall and turn into power. As with all good inventors, people told him he was crazy; but his breakthrough moment came when he realised a flywheel technology would work.
“One step can spin the flywheel for up to 10 seconds, which is good for batteries because it gives continuous power.” Multiply that by thousands of footsteps, and the output becomes something significant. After a trial at the London 2012 Olympics, where a temporary walkway was fitted with its tiles to power lighting, Pavegen now has installations in 250 sites in five countries.
