Governor Ted Strickland came by the storefront office of Tremont Electric this week to tout the tiny start-up’s achievements.
Except—he didn’t quite know what he was promoting. So, before the press event got started, Strickland got a quick primer from the company’s founder, Aaron Lemieux.
STRICKLAND: You’ve got a gadget that when you move around it generates electricity, is that right?
LEMIEUX: That’s right, sir.
STRICKLAND: Is it something like the Sterling engine?
As he’s talking, Strickland shakes a 9 inch rod connected with a wire to a bright red iPod. Inside a magnet moves back and forth through a coil, creating electricity.
LEMIEUX: This is a personal energy generator.
STRICKLAND: So when I do this, I’m generating electricity.
LEMIEUX: Exactly.
The Governor looked impressed with Lemieux’s product. It’s called the Personal Energy Generator—or PEG for short—and it looks kind of like a green and silver baton. It weighs nine ounces and you can stick it on your belt or in a purse or backpack. Connect its cord to your gadget and watch it charge while you stroll.
Aaron Lemieux took me for a walk so I could see a prototype in action.
REPORTER: And you’re here with an iPod Nano. How much do these things need to charge?
LEMIEUX: Nanos have a relatively low requirement so they’re generally about 200 miliamps of power at 5V.
For those of us who aren’t electrical engineers, that translates to about 1 watt of power. I see the charge indicator come on the iPod as we walk. Apparently, we’re generating quite a lot of power.
LEMIEUX: I weigh about 180 lbs. I’m about 6 feet tall. As I walk along, I expend about 100 watts of power just to get from point A to point B. Our mobile electronic devices, like my iPhone, only require 2.5 watts of power to fully recharge itself. So, in the end, all we have to do is harvest 2.5 percent of your human walking energy, without you knowing it, and put it in your mobile electronic device.
Or, in the case of that iPod Nano, just one percent of his walking energy is needed.
The idea of capturing our kinetic energy is not new. One Canadian firm has a device that is like a knee brace, but it’s heavy and expensive. Seiko sells a watch that runs on human motion. And there are those flashlights that are powered by shaking. Lemieux estimates his device is about 100X more powerful than the similarly-sized flashlights. Or, perhaps more remarkably, he says an hour of walking produces as much power as plugging most any hand held gadget in a wall for an hour.
For now, the PEG’s size and price—roughly $150 bucks—make it accessible, but it’s definitely a product for green gadget aficionados .
LEMIEUX: Initially, we’re seeing this as a niche product that’s going to be wanted by students, outdoorspeople, commuters, people who have the multifunction devices like Blackberries and iPhones.
Lemieux is hoping to sell about 75,000 PEGs next year, giving his tiny start-up a piece of the $107 million market for so-called energy harvesting devices. That includes products like small solar chargers. Lemieux calls his technology Npower, and has plans for it both big and small. He wants to implant it in pacemakers and on large buoys in Lake Erie to harvest wave energy. But his immediate focus is getting the PEG manufactured and ready for sale.
Sara Bradford is a power systems consultant with Texas-based market research firm Frost and Sullivan. She says this is one of the first energy harvesting products to go from theory to store shelves.
BRADFORD: As a category, it’s a breakthrough that we’re now starting to see commercial products like NPower hit the market and being able to be sold to the mass market.
Bradford expects the market for these kinds of devices to grow 5 times bigger by the year 2020. That’s still a niche, but a much bigger one. Analysts say this kind of renewable energy charging will really go mainstream when it can be cheaply built into devices we already have.
In the meantime, though, Lemieux is just trying to get his first generation PEG into customer hands. He’s committed to making the gadgets entirely in Ohio—with many of its suppliers in the Cleveland area, but getting all those companies together and the product into the factories has been a bit slower than expected. He’s a few months behind schedule, now crossing his fingers that it’ll be ready for the holiday buying season.
And, as Lemieux told me as we walked, the PEG is not for everyone.
REPORTER: What would you say to someone who’s a bit sedentary? Is this not the product for them?
LEMIEUX: Quite possibly, it’s not a very good product for them. But then again, if people use a pedometer, and actually log the steps that they take, people find they do a lot more walking than they anticipate.
And, Lemieux says, the weight loss is free.