Dutch Club to Recycle Dancers' Energy

Wind power is great. But what about all that energy you expend on the dance floor on Saturday night? A next-generation nightclub wants to use that energy to keep the strobes lit and the bass bumping.

Soon you can add a night out clubbing to your bag of green tricks. A new technology developed by the environmental innovation lab Enviu takes advantage of the vast amount of energy expended by revellers as they throw themselves around the dance floor. And its debut is right around the corner. On September 2, Iggy Pop will be performing at Club Watt in Rotterdam, Holland. And those on the dance floor will play their part in keeping the lights lit and the bass thumping.

"When you dance, you generate energy by the shaking of the ground," Stef van Dongen, director of environmental innovation lab Enviu, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "What we do, very simply, is to capture the movement of dancing people and transform it into energy."

The club will be among the first in the world to give back some of what dancers leave on the floor -- and it is part of a larger effort by Enviu subsidiary Sustainable Dance Club (SDC) to introduce environmental technology to an industry that has traditionally been a voracious consumer of electricity. Your average nightclub swallows up 150 times the amount of power normal households do. Club Watt plans to use 30 percent less.