Watt Dance Club: Energy on the Dance Floor

Watt is considered an eco-friendly club—the first to be opened by the Sustainable Dance Club. Watt works to keep its wastes to a minimum by decreasing paper use, conserving water with rainwater toilets and waterless urinals. and producing about fifty percent of their energy using renewable energy sources.
But Watt’s real draw is its dance floor.

The floor is piezoelectric, which means it absorbs the energy from the people dancing on it and converts it into electricity. The electricity is used to power an LED light show, allowing the dancers to see how much energy they are creating. The more people dancing, and the more lively the music, the higher the intensity of the light show that the floor produces. Each dancer has the potential to put out 2-20 watts of power. The floor is only estimated to generate about 10% of the club’s electricity, and it is not expected to pay for itself in energy savings. Its purpose seems to be more educational: it raises awareness about energy conservation and arouses public curiosity about the new technology. Parts of the floor are transportable for demonstration purposes, in the hopes that the technology might get enough attention to attract the funding it needs to develop into an efficient model.

Watt is the second club to feature a piezoelectric dance floor; the first to open was Surya in London, which opened in July. Surya also considers itself an eco-friendly dance club, although it has received public criticism for being more about spectacle and entertainment than environment and education. Other ecologically-minded clubs, such as Temple in San Francisco, have plans to install piezoelectric floors in the near future.

SOURCES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/world/europe/24rotterdam.html?pagewant...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2008310735_dancepowe...
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/piezo-electric-dance-clubs.php