Paris marathon to use tiles to harvest runners' energy

Paris Marathon organisers will lay energy-harvesting tiles across the course on Sunday to ensure not all the effort expended by the race's 40,000 runners goes waste.

The flexible tiles made from recycled truck tyres will span a portion of the Champs Elysees for about 25 metres (82 feet) of the 42.2-km course, according to Pavegen Systems Ltd, the UK maker of the tiles. Each footstep would generate as much as eight watts of kinetic energy, which would be fed back to batteries that could charge display screens and electronic signs along the route, the company said.

Schneider Electric SA, the race sponsor, aimed to eventually make the Paris Marathon an event that generated energy rather than consumed it, Aaron Davis, the company's chief marketing officer, said in Pavegen's statement. London-based Pavegen aimed for its tiles to help cut carbon emissions and boost energy efficiency in cities around the world in the future, it said.

"Imagine if your run or walk to work could help power the lights for your return journey home in the evening," Pavegen Chief Executive Officer Laurence Kemball-Cook, who invented the technology, said in the statement. It's "a viable new type of off-grid energy technology that people love to use and which can make a low-carbon contribution wherever there is high footfall, regardless of the weather".

Pavegen declined to say how much energy the tiles would produce because there was a competition for the public to guess. Schneider Electric would donate an extra euro 10,000 ($12,850) to charity if generation topped seven kilowatt hours. That's enough to run a light bulb for about five days, according to Pavegen.

A spokesman for Pavegen declined to say how much the tiles cost. He said that after cutting the cost in half over the past year, the goal was to get their cost down to about £50 ($76) per tile, equivalent to other high-specification flooring products.