Friday, April 16, 2010

Sweden uses body heat as new green energy source

This is cool:
It's 7:30 on a wintry morning in downtown Stockholm and a sea of Swedes are flooding Central Station to catch a train to work. The station is toasty thanks to the busy shops and restaurants and the body heat being generated by the 250,000 commuters who crowd Scandinavia's busiest travel hub each day. This heat used to be lost by the end of the morning rush hour. Now, however, engineers have figured out a way to harness it and transfer it to a newly refurbished office building down the block. Unbeknownst to them, these sweaty Swedes have become a green energy source: "They're cheap and renewable*," says Karl Sundholm, a project manager at Jernhusen, a Stockholm real estate company, and one of the creators of the system.
Awesome engineering aside, this is just one small example of the type of innovation needed to decarbonize the economy. I always liked the idea of powering commercial gyms with energy generated by ellipticals, ergometers, weight machines and stationary bikes. What other innovative ways can we think of to lower our emissions?

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*OTOH, this sounds suspiciously like another plan to generate power using human body heat.

1 comment:

  1. check it: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/22/green.gym.conservation/index.html?hpt=C1

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