Soccer Legend Pele Attends First Player-Powered Football Game in Rio de Janeiro Slum
As in electrical power, not political power. This is pretty cool.
http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/09/29/soccer-legend-pele-attends-first-player-powered-football-game-rio-de-janeiro-slum/
You might get winded just observing a football player run up and down a field, but imagine the energy an entire soccer team exerts when they play a game. Thanks to some new technology, that energy is being used to power floodlights illuminating a field in Rio de Janeiro, and Pele, the soccer God, was there to watch the inaugural player-powered game happen.
The kinetic-directed energy was made possible due to a partnership with a London clean tech company called Pavegen, who partnered with Shell to create their most impressive installation thus far, utilizing more than 200 tiles in the favela of Morro da Mineira.
The tiles are utilized both day and night, and work along with solar panels to power the lights for up to 10 hours on a full battery. The same technology was utilized in an installation for the London 2012 Olympic Games at West Haw tube station, where over one million visitors walked up and down Olympic Park. Footsteps, using kinetic energy, were quite literally turned into a doorway for a clean energy future.
The West Haw tube station was the first commercial installation, but the soccer field in Rio de Janeiro completes the sustainability loop for a possible thousand different scenarios where fossil-fuel driven electricity is simply not feasible. Imagine replacing the birds nest of electrical wires in India, for example, with people-powered power. The ramifications are endless, and this is quite a metaphor for the world as we rise up against the petrochemical-domination that has ruled us.