Nik, I know it’s not the only solution, but if playing on a seesaw lights a building, that’s got to be better than not having the seesaw light the building… Even if you need to power your heaters etc in some other way.

I think Ben’s right, we just love to waste at the moment that a nice combo of reduction and innovation will have a massive impact.

And as far as NZ being nuclear friendly – I sometimes see polls and newspaper articles these days that start to say we’re coming around to the idea. I don’t think we’re coming THAT around tot he idea… But you never know.

I’m sure there are many man areas where we waste potential energy.

You may be interested in Playpumps – the don’t generate power, but instead children playing on roundabouts pump water, which in turn allows girls to get a better education:

http://www.playpumps.org

and villages to get clean, fresh water.

(IANAP – I am not a Physicist, but)

We can’t convert much of the kinetic energy generated through something like cycling or see-sawing into electricity. Too much gets lost as heat and sound / friction. Lighting is really low wattage – perhaps 100W per bulb. Heaters, on the other hand (or microwaves, or even electric jugs) are usually > 2000W. To power those (for just 10 minutes) you’d need 40 kids on 20 seesaws!

You can’t just hook a generator up to the grid and watch your meter wind backwards either – you need some crazy cabling and stuff, and you’d probably find that the energy loss in pumping it back into the grid meant you didn’t generate any electricity at all from see-sawing.

In short, good idea for developing country, maybe not so much for a developed country.

All the unused lights – and the heaters running in badly insulated rooms – under-utilised office spaces and empty busses / cars – if only we could reduce that waste and make better use of the power generation we already have.