National Steps Challenge

posted on 08:36 AM on Wednesday 15 November 2017

So there is apparently an initiative (the National Steps Challenge ) to get Singaporeans to be healthy and walk around more. The initiative gives people $5 if they can accumulate 750 healthpoints which translates to walking 10,000 steps daily for 19 days. So I tried to figure out how much energy is generated by a human step and got data from companies trying to use floor pads to harness energy. They estimated that we can get up to 7 watts per step. Using a more conservative estimate of 2W, the following is the calculations for the amount of energy generated. 19 days x 10,000 steps = 190, 000 steps 190,000 steps x 2 W = 380,000 W or 380 kW 380 kW / (60 x 60) = 0.1056 kWh Given that electricity in Singapore cost about S$0.203 per kW, the cost of the energy generated is as follows: 0.1056 kWh x S$0.203 = S$0.02 Wow, that is really quite a small amount. All that walking for 19 days and you generate about 2 cents worth of energy.