Photo via Stabarinde’s

Kids who’ve had too much candy aren’t the only ones with a lot of “energy”. We’re pretty much walking batteries and it’s time to make ourselves useful. Poptech recently blogged about a gym that (finally!) turns your calories wattage and we wrote about sustainable clubs a while back which uses floors to harness the bump ‘n grind. Well Tokyo is looking for more mass and taking it to the street, or subway rather.

The company East Japan Railway Company (JR East) recently started installing and testing piezoelectric elements in floors at Tokyo Station in an attempt to harness human energy as people walk through turn styles.

Being installed at seven ticket gates in the Yaesu Kita exit and seven steps of a staircase inside the gate at  the Yaesu Kita, JR East expects a generating capacity of total 1,400kW/sec per day. (for sake of scale, your laptop takes 85 watts). Tests will continue till Feb 09, and this time, the generated power will be used to display the generating capacity, but, in the future, it will be used to run the automatic ticket gates and electronic display systems, according to the company. Time to buy some energy bars.

via Ladies Lotto