Pavegen - A solution for the hills of a 'Green City'?

You may have read or heard us mention a company called Pavegen systems earlier on in this blog or on our twitter or Facebook page. Pavegen produce innovative technology which harness' the kinetic energy of people walking and converts it into electrical energy. It has already been used in events such as the London Olympics 2012 and the Schneider Electric Paris Marathon 2013. The diagram below is from their website and gives a brief explanation of 

We would like to harness this technology on the hills of Bristol. Cyclists who we have spoken have said these hills are one of the biggest off puts of biking in Bristol, so we wanted to investigate how we tackle this. This is where the pulley system comes in! It is all very well going down the hills on a bike but this system aids cyclists who want to go up by letting them attach to a cable system that pulls them and the bike upwards. 

'So how do we power this pulley system?' I here you say, well back to Pavegen technology. Bristol is 'Green City 2015' so an immediate task of our team was to investigate an innovative solution to creating electricity which we can harness on these hills for our cable concept. We want to develop a system similar to that of Pavegens however instead of footfall we want to utilise the kinetic energy of cars and cyclists going down the hill and convert this into electrical energy to power the cable system.