Energy Floors : making renewable energy visible and interactive
Energy Floors develops, sells and rents innovative floor systems that generate energy. A smart and interactive solution that makes sustainability visible. Everyone who steps on them realize that they are making an impact. The installations produce energy, and, most importantly, they make it visible ! Through on-site interaction, Energy Floors provides feedback on the generated energy, thus raising awareness on clean energy production. We met Michel Smit, CEO to know more about this innovative solution.
1. Could you describe your solution ?
Coming from the entertainment sector, we started our business with an idea: how can we turn the movements and dancing of people into energy ? This is how we developed “The Dancer”, a floor powered by kinetic energy. This temporary installation can be used for parties, festivals and other public events. The Dancer is our main product: we have 60 projects/year with this type of temporary installation.
Michel Smit
Since two years, we have developed two other types of smart energy floors, which allow us to be integrated in pavements and high footfall areas like city areas, schools, airports, railway stations, shopping malls and office entrances, to power local devices. We have two types of permanent installations : The Gamer, designed to be implemented in schoolyards, and the Walker, for pedestrians in public spaces. As kinetic tiles are not adapted to outdoor installations, we use solar energy for those two products. What is interesting is that usually, solar panels are hidden on rooftops. With our installations, it becomes more visible and tangible for the users.
The Walker, an Energy Floor designed for pedestrians
2. Why use one of your Energy Floors ?
It is a great tool to raise awareness as it makes the user understand that energy is everywhere. This solution makes energy production tangible.
The floors are interactive, you can make partners on the dancefloor and create lightning. The Gamer is also a great way for children to play outdoors as it has integrated games ! Gamification helps us raise awareness of users on renewable energy as we conceived them around sustainability topics (ex: turning off the light or switch off by stepping on a spot). There are also calculating games, and educational games.There is even a challenge between schools at the moment.
The Gamer, designed for schoolyards and parks
With Energy Floors, the floor becomes sustainable and smart, collecting data in real-time on the amount of people and their movements. For example with “The Walker” a city can have a feedback on the number of people who passed on their energy floors, and in which direction they where going : a useful tool for city management.
3. How much energy can your solution produce ?
Each of our modules are composed of walkable solar panels each 60x60 cm, with a top layer of sturdy anti-slip glass and can produce upto 35Wattpeak. All in all, it corresponds to 70% of energy efficiency of a regular solar panel, and the Energy floors can be connected to the local grid, or to a battery system.
Installations can range from 9 tiles to 100 tiles, so it is really possible to scale up installations.
4 . Who are your clients ?
We work with local governments, landscape architects, or tech companies like Engie to sell the Walker. For the Gamer, our solutions for playgrounds, we directly sell our system to primary schools. In 2019, we’ve had 30 installations schools in Netherlands. It is a very good start, since we were only introduced to the Dutch market last year !
We also have installations in Russia, Malta and in Germany. In 2020, we plan to initiate our international roll-out. We’ve already had requests from the USA and the Emirates. France and Germany our also countries where we plan to develop.
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