High rise energy production

Although this blog has visited a vast number of topics, I think I've finally got it nailed (only took 15 blogs)!

In western society, electricity is a resource we rely on, take for granted, and exploit. We also have had the desire to exploit our land. Our exploitation can be renewable, as I discussed here and here, and our measurement of our consumption can be greatly misunderstood (depending, of course, on which of the 23 energy metrics you use...).

So let's combine some of these! What happens if you combine renewable energy production with our exploitation of land?

A recent paper produced by a Chinese-lead team of researchers have done just that. Xie (et al., 2015) looked at harvesting energy from tall buildings using a piezoelectric device. Now a quick Google search will tell you that a piezoelectric device is something you would not necessarily associate with buildings, as it uses changes in temperature, acceleration, force, etc., and turns them into an electrical charge (it's what you tend to find in push-button lighters, which produces an electrical spark to ignite a fuel). Buildings change temperature throughout the day, but they should do little in the way of accelerate or change force...

The pressure from your thumb creates the pressure required
for the Piezoelectric element to generate a spark of electricity (Source)

Here comes the smart part: these devices are used as a mass dampener, so can reduce the initial shock of vibration impacts, such as earthquakes as well as providing electricity generation during earthquakes. Having inner city electrical generation locations during and after earthquakes can provide emergency electricity to the local region. Xie and his team found that the piezoelectric device they modelled could potentially generate a maximum of 432MW of electricity during an earthquake.

Now if you're like me, you have no idea what 432MW of electric looks like. The intelligent folks over at quora (a site similar to yahoo answers, but used for asking more intelligent questions) gave a rough estimate that it would take 1000MW per year to supply a city of 1 million people. So 432MW could go a long distance! Regardless of how inefficient, inaccurate or poor  Xie's simulation of the piezoelectric mass dampener is, this provides a clean and quick means of producing electricity, as well as being integrated with a necessary earthquake dampers to prevent the building from collapsing. 

Although not the most sustainable method of electrical generation (as it relies on a natural disaster), it could be the way forward for earthquake risk regions of the world!