Remember the Matrix movie and the way humans became grown heat-producing plants to provide for their machine lords? The word “harvesting” gives me the crawls, but luckily harvesting in this world is for our own benefit and energy dependence. Interesting ideas so far are the energy harvesting from gym users or vibrations from trains and human steps. Kinetic energy is everywhere, it is just a matter of how to harness the damn thing and convert it to useful energy. 
However there are some nice opportunities where kinetic energy presents itself in more organised ways and can be collected more easily. Case in point is Fluxxlab’s revolving door harvester. It can be an all new installation or a conversion to an existing door. Unsuspecting humans rotate the spindle, that then rotates a magnetic wheel, that in turn creates current flow in stationary wire coils. Simple and effective.It is very difficult for energy harvesting to become a large energy contributor. The revolving door concept is an elegant and admirable effort and I would love to see the wide commercialisation for this and similar ideas. As however practical and financial parameters play a dominant role, I will return on the harvesting issue with more comments and thoughts.
Link: Electronrun
