AKON AND SHELL UNVEILS THE NEWEST CLEAN ENERGY TAPPED FROM PLAYING ON A FOOTBALL PITCH IN FCE AKOKA.
The first Player and power football pitch was launched in Africa last year December by Akon in conjunction with Shell Nigeria, and we were proud about as it is just in our neighborhood here in Federal College of Education, Akoka, in Lagos, Nigeria. That’s amazing right! Most of us got this exciting news then. For us environmentalist it was one of the best thing that ever happened as far as Nigeria and the quest for alternative power is concerned.
For those of you that never heard of it, well let me carry you along by explaining with several pictures.
The idea started with a UK Entrepreneur and inventor Laurence Kemball-Cook. He actualized his dream of tapping alternative source of clean energy in a very rare way by creating tiles.
Yes Tiles, what is so special about the tiles, you might ask… well I will dare not bore you with techie details but this pix showing the inside will suffice
So you see, this tile is special, he called it Pavegen Tile. Now what does it do? We walk on tiles right? So walking, jumping or doing any body movement on this tiles generate amount of electricity.
Now that’s just one person’s footwork on one Pavegen tile. Now imagine several Pavegen tiles walked on, ran on or jumped on for several hours in high foot-traffic areas, that is whole lot of power that can be used for street lighting, displays, speakers, alarms, signs, and advertising.
This amazing idea can be used in so many place you and I can think of: at the gym, at the pedestrian bridge, on the road, on playgrounds for children, at the football field, dancehall, nightclubs, I can go on and on.
Now that Idea is in over 30 countries, over 20 companies including Shell, Nike, CocaCola, Diageo, Hyundai, Ford, Lexus etc. have partnered with Pavegen. So we can say that this 29 year old British Engineer has struck gold.
The common goal of reducing and replacing the “dirty” form of energy such as fuel and coal with the clean energy brought the Pavegen Tile Inventor and Akon together on the platform of Shell to launch the first ever installed Power Generating-Football Pitch at FCE, and that is what you see from an aerial lit up at night at FCE, Akoka.
I must confess I love Akon and his music, so as an environmentalist I am so excited about this partnership. Akon did not fail to thrill Akokites present with his sonorous voice and energetic performance, inspiring the crowd to embrace new ideas and use clean energy with a new song titled Tell Me We Are OK. The video just dropped. Download the song free here. Check out the video
