Athletes who give ‘power’ kicks

Rio de Janeiro / DPA

The Morro da Mineira favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro holds a striking number of turquoise houses: you can see them from afar, like boxes piled up on the hill, all of them turquoise. The story goes that a well-known drug lord hid in this poor neighbourhood near the Sambadrome, in central Rio.
Police got a tip-off about him hiding in a turquoise house, and when locals beholden to him heard about an imminent police raid, they rushed to paint countless homes in what became camouflage paint.
Nowadays, however, Morro da Mineira is causing a stir in the Olympic city for a different reason. Those who drive up the winding streets and reach the neighbourhood towards the end of the day will find a wonder among the stray dogs and piled up rubbish.
Like a UFO that has fallen from the sky, surrounded by small houses that have been built one on top of the other, there is a brightly lit green football pitch with artificial turf. It has a set of stone stands, and six floodlight posts. That far, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
But below the green surface, there are 200 kinetic tiles that can generate up to seven watts of energy when players run on them. In a city where a lot of money has been spent to build new stadiums by August, this is a simple solution to a power shortage that is widespread in poor neighbourhoods.
Every step on the panels is automatically turned into electric power. It generates electricity that is saved in a device by the side of the football pitch. “If we don’t play, the light goes off at some point,” says Jackson Pecanha, the local groundsman.
The power that is saved will usually keep the light on for about two hours. People can use the pitch every night, and the power outages that used to prevent them from playing are a thing of the past.
Even when children do somersaults, that generates power. Every evening, from 8 pm onwards, the pitch is full of people and at some point players forget that they are a running power plant. So as back-up, there are solar panels on the roof of the stands.
Every Sunday there is a football tournament. Nenel Silva, 38, is the leader of the Tirol team. Silva coordinates games, and especially tournaments. In the evenings, he gets his team together for spontanous football games via WhatsApp.
“We were the first, now there is another pitch like this in Nigeria,” he says. “It is revolutionary. Our pitch is now very famous, everyone wants to play here.” Brazilian football legend Pele attended the opening ceremony in 2014, and players note that the system has been working well since then.
An oil company financed this initiative, the energy of the future. No one comments on the cost, but it seems likely that if this power-generation technology were cost-effective, there would be more such projects.
The British firm Pavegen, whose founder Laurence Kemball-Cook came up with the idea for the tiles, hopes to revolutionize power supply. “As soon as the technology matches the price of standard tiles, we can make a significant contribution to energy generation,” company spokeswoman Sanaa Siddiqui said in London.
“There is huge potential for kinetic energy in urban environments, where millions of steps are taken every week.” Pavegen has implemented about 100 projects, which include the additional football pitch in Lagos and also a project at London’s Heathrow airport, where the energy needed to light part of one terminal is generated by passengers’ steps.
If this technology is successful, it will also be able to deliver a huge amount of data: how many people move through a given spot in a given period of time. Combining leisure facilities and power generation equipment in the ground, as in the Rio project, could be a model for the future.
Another example is a 70-metre stretch of bikeway for leisure cyclists in the Dutch town of Krommenie which is surfaced with glass-protected solar panels. Per year, those panels produce enough energy to supply electricity for three households.