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.
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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
@Anna,
No, that is not what i mean. We need more awareness. That is never enough. Lots of work to do in the world. So we shouldn’t stop writing about good examples.
What i mean is that revolving doors are not the solution. But i agree: all little things to save energy will help on our way to a sustainable society.
See these energy saving tips:
http://www.stichtingmilieunet.nl/energysavingtips.php
Well apparently there are many more bicycles than people in Amsterdam…..
@M - yeah they all have several bikes each. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The ‘obligatory Dutch windmill’ was never meant to gain energy, but to keep the Dutch from getting wet feet ..
I thought that it required energy in order to pump water. Therefore the Dutch use windmills to gain energy and keep their feet dry.
It’s “The Netherlands”, not ‘Holland’. Small but significant difference.
Well what a good debate, if nothing else it has got people to do a bit of mathematics! The good thing is to give consideration to anything at all that will save or produce energy ecologically. It does not have to be a lot each small bit adds up to a bigger bit (I think thats mathematically correct!)
Ryan, I think you’re the one not getting it here. Ben’s calculation is correct (even if 2.5 dl is a rather large cup of coffee)
The energy it takes to make a cup of coffe, per Ben’s math, is 73kJ.
Ben then showed that if you want to generate that amount of energy by walking through a door, assuming generously as he did that it takes 10 seconds, then your power (energy per unit of time) would have to be 7.3kW. Which is unreasonable.
These numbers cannot be correct.
Regardless of all the calculations, this idea is firmly copyrighted by Andre Franquin, when he had his cartoon hero Gaston Lagaffe (or Guust Flater in Dutch) invent a machine that, when someone would push open the door to his office, would do a variety of things, amongst which feed his fish, get the juice from an orange, grind some coffee. Needless to say, the effort to open the door was very high…:-)
BTW, the company that built the door is Boon Edam. http://www.boonedam.us.