Power of the people

Talk about people power: Check out this post on Mental Floss. A snip:

What’s better than green power? People power, say some forward-thinking engineers. Daily movements like footsteps generate pressure as we walk, and though that vibratory energy may be fairly low-wattage (about eight, to be exact), when you take the aggregate energy expenditure of, say, 30,000 people moving through a crowded train station, that’s a significant amount of power.

While it goes on to talk about how one firm has designed just such a harvester, and that its "energy-harvesting “Pacesetter” staircase will appear in South London tube stations sometime in 2007," can you imagine a self-powering convention center or hotel? This could be amazing if it actually works as well as it sounds on paper. Wow.