Nightlife
Partying Helps Power A Dutch Nightclub
Sustainable Dance Club
If you felt that the atmosphere in the new, hip Club Watt was somehow electric, you would be right: Watt has a new type of dance floor that harvests the energy generated by jumps and gyrations and transforms it into electricity. It is one of a handful of energy-generating floors in the world, most still experimental.
With its human engineering, Watt partly powers itself: The better the music, the more people dance, the more electricity comes out of the floor. At Watt, which describes itself as the first sustainable dance club, that electricity is used to power the light show in and around the floor. “For this first club, we thought it was useful for people to see the results,” said Michel Smit, an adviser on the project. “But if the next owner wants to use the electricity to power his toaster, it can do that just as well.”
Watt is in large part the creation of the Sustainable Dance Club, a quirky company formed last year by a group of Dutch ecological inventors, engineers and investors now headed by Smit. More than a year in the making, Watt is a huge performance space with not just the sustainable dance floor, but also rainwater-fed toilets and low-waste bars. (Everything is recycled.) Its heat is harvested in part from the bands’ amplifiers and other musical equipment. “Our idea is that there’s enough energy in this world, you just have to use it the right way,” Smit said. “If you have a full dance club, there’s lots there, you just have to turn it into a usable product.”
Read rest of the article at iht.com
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