Could You Make a Human-Powered Metro?

Photo:Rhett Allain. The Metro in Washington, DC — not Paris.

Of course it’s not fully powered by humans, but here is a video that says a Paris Metro station used people passing through turnstiles to create clean energy.

Paris Has Generated Clean Energy From Métro Passengers

Here are the details (from the video).

• There were six turnstiles that were converted to generate energy when people passed through them in the Miromesnil Metro station. These were put in place by IBERDROLA.
• Apparently, this just ran for 2 days with 27,000 passengers (that seems like quite a large number).
• The video claims that each human generated 0.2 watts of energy. This is clearly not true — watts are a unit of power, not energy.
• The Metro serves 1.5 billion passengers per year that would create 136 megawatts per year (looks like another energy-power problem).

There’s clearly some fun physics here — so let’s get to it.

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