Holland Puts a New Spin on Old Technology to Combat Climate Change
A cafe in the Dutch town of Zeist has installed a revolving door which generates electricity as you pass through.
Well, it would seem that this forward thinking country is ahead of the game once again. A new restaurant situated at the train station in the town of Zeist has been working with the design company Rau in order to reduce their carbon footprint. They’ve come up with an innovative idea in the form of a power generation system fuelled by their own customers - They have installed a generator in their revolving door which converts the energy of people passing through into electricity. Each time you pass through the door you generate enough power to make a cup of coffee. The owners estimate that the door will generate approximately 4600 KWH per year. They are also investing in other ways to reduce their energy requirements such as a special low energy cooling system, a sun collector, and of course the obligatory Dutch windmill.
As a low lying country, the Netherlands is potentially one of the countries to be most affected by sea level rise. As usual they are leading the way in developing ingenious means to reduce their need for fossil fuels. Imagine how much power we could produce if every revolving door or turnstile was equipped with this kind of energy capture technology? One small cafe in Holland may not produce much of an impact on its own, but just think how much power could be generated by such a system in a busy subway station in London or New York?
Image credit: Frank Za’atar at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
And, they invented clogs too..
Wow, dude that is pretty cool aint it.
jess
http://www.privacy.de.tc
Ok, check my math here:
The owners estimate that the door will generate approximately 4600 KWH per year.
Let’s say they’re open 14 hours a day (say, 7am-9pm) for 360 days a year. That’s about 5000 hours.
Now, divide 4600 kilowatt hours per year by 5000 hours - that gives 920 watts.
920 watts - or 1.2 horsepower - from opening to closing, all year. I know Dutch people are (a) generally healthy and (b) like cafes, but somehow I doubt those figures.
That’s 920 watts - per hour. Not 920 watts continuously.
It would be easy to generate that.
I call bullshit on this - there is no way one person generates the energy to heat a cup of coffee.
Energy needed = mass * temp raise * specific heat capacity = ~0.25kg * ~70C * 4.187 kJ/kgK = ~73kj
If it takes you a generous 10s to walk though the door you would need to be producing 73kj/10secs = 7.3kWatts!!!
According to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10090637
the maximum a normal person can produce is ~500W so they are way off.
[...] Holland Puts a New Spin on Old Technology to Combat Climate Change : EcoWorldly. [...]
No spin, just window dressing. Besides that the windpark is small and there is really nothing to be proud of.
http://www.stichtingmilieunet.nl/andersbekekenblog/?p=4235
And here more about the human powered door
http://www.stichtingmilieunet.nl/andersbekekenblog/?p=5610
I think someone should tell London: think of all those revolving doors and they have have their climate change bill to worry about now. On that scale it must be able to make some difference, and anything is better than nothing really! Although maybe if they turned off that gleaming, money wasting, carbon using mass of canary wharf and office building spread throughout the city - ever - it may help!
i really think this will be a better solution:
http://www.stichtingmilieunet.nl/andersbekekenblog/?p=5863
Congratulations UK.
Damon, you have no idea what you’re talking about, and you’re only making yourself look like an idiot. A Watt is already a unit of measurement over time. 1 Watt = 1 Joule per Second.
“920 watts per hour” is effectively a nonsense concept in the way you’ve used it. (it’s a useful measurement, but only for discussing a difference in wattage over time).
Put it this way, if this article was about running really fast, you would have essentially just said:
“That’s 50 kph - per hour. Not 50kph continuously.
It would be easy to run that fast.”
….. 50kph/h is not a measure of velocity, it’s a measure of acceleration. You can’t ‘run’ at 50kph/h, and you can’t generate power at 920watts/hour. You might as well measure weight in square feet.