Energy comes from dancing!

last weekend i organised an anti-xmas-stress party (check the poster out: i made it! and am so proud of it!) with some people from the Weltladen, the fair trade store here in Heidelberg, and the dj there told me about a brand new club in the Netherlands where they are trying to use sustainable technologies, like that they produce electricity from the energy of the people dancing... how cool is that?? i was super excited, as i am always whenever i hear about energy that is conserved and reused in a clever way, and not only dissipated! so i started looking for info about the whole business, and i found out a lot of stuff...

the club is called Watt, it opened 3 months ago in Rotterdam and it's the first sustainable dance club ever. first, there is a special dance floor which makes use of the piezoelectric effect: some elements, crystals like quartz, if deformed or compressed are able to develop a potential difference, which can be plugged into a circuit and directly transformed into electric energy! which means that the more the people dance in the club, ie. the better the party is, the more energy is produced, and you can directly see it in the light show of the club itself! it clearly has a tiny energetic efficiency, but still it raises awareness about energetic issues, plus the club is sustainable in so many other aspects, from the refillable cups to the spectacular toilet where the flush water comes directly from the rain collected on the roof... for more info check out the website of the company (Sustainable Dance Club) or - if you trust me! - this article i recently wrote (in Italian...)

and now i want to go there and have a look, dance it out, produce some positive energy - and maybe take it along with me, i feel i need some...

Image credits: Mike Nolte & Giulia Melloni