Initiative
Laurence Kemball-Cook

Can you imagine a world where every step you took produced renewable energy? Pavegen’s CEO already has. Laurence Kemball-Cook invented a kinetic-powered, energy-generating flooring tile that’s already been used in Heathrow Airport and Brazilian football pitches. So what’s next?

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Can you imagine a world where every step you took produced renewable energy? Pavegen’s CEO already has. Laurence Kemball-Cook invented a kinetic-powered, energy-generating flooring tile that’s already been used in Heathrow Airport and Brazilian football pitches. So what’s next? pavegen 'In technology, you should never say no and should always push the boundaries'

There are a lot of things you could be thinking about when walking through Victoria Station in London (if you’re English, it’s probably the temperature, your dinner or the proximity of your fellow commuters.) But for then 22-year-old Laurence Kemball-Cook, it was working out how to harness energy from the footstep and use it in a tangible way.

The proverbial wheels were set in motion at a graduate show at Loughborough University, where Kemball-Cook had studied. Even though he had no plans to start a company around his idea, flooring that had the potential to turn kinetic into electrical energy received an unprecedented amount of media attention (“I had about 200 phone calls a day of people trying to buy, invest and distribute the product.”)

After this recognition of the idea’s potential, Kemball-Cook, armed with £200, spent two years in a flat in south London developing the technology on his own. Two seed funding rounds later and the CEO and founder of Pavegen had the means to create a prototype and batch produce his floor tiling installations. Fast forward to today, the 28 year-old is a finalist in the RBS Innovation Gateway, and has taken home the 2degrees Award for the Energy and Carbon Management Long Term Payback. “Winning the 2degrees award was a huge industry accolade which really changed the way we were seen in the industry… they took us more seriously,” he said. I visited the company’s office in King’s Cross to learn more – and yes, have a little go on the tiles myself. laurence Pavegen founder and CEO, Laurence Kemball-Cook. You’ve been referred to in the media as “shifting the perceptions of renewable energy” – what do you think about that? We give a community-based approach to energy-saving. It’s the first time that people can engage and take part in it. If you look at a big brand that reduces its refrigerator’s energy consumption by 30%, no-one actually knows about that. What we can offer is a solution that will not only save money on their bills but also it needs their stakeholders, clients, internal staff to all take part in it too. Are there any similar technologies on the market? No-ones got anything that’s really comparable to what we’re doing in terms of cost and functionality. But we’ve always got to keep innovating and doing things differently to stay ahead of competition as well. It’s really important to keep doing things differently. What has been your proudest achievement to date, since you founded the company? The biggest moment for us was probably our largest installation which we just did in Brazil: a local football pitch in Morro da Mineira,. We installed 200 products in the ground, working alongside solar panels to power the lights in the football pitch for up to 10 hours on a full battery, creating the world’s first ever people-powered football pitch. It needed a large, multi-disciplinary team to deliver it in a very complex environment. I’m working with a brand partner Shell on that project. Do you think its ethical working with Shell? Whether you like it or not, Shell are one of the biggest companies in the world. But we’re disrupting the very way they’re perceived by the public and the very way they do business, so I think we’re helping Shell to shift their focus from traditionally what has been fossil fuel company to opening up the story for renewables again and to really look at new energy mixes. I’m glad I’m part of the journey with Shell. You could boycott them, but it’s pointless - you might as well help the way they’re seen because you can’t stop them doing what they’re doing. They could be a renewable energy company in 10 years time. Who else would you like to be working with? Big retailers are exciting - people who’ve got a real desire to have campaigns and projects that can make a real difference to their stakeholders as well as the way they look at energy. People who want to be innovative and different from the crowd. Also multinational brands who are interested in rollouts because we’re interested in large scale deployment at the moment as opposed to smaller scale projects. The tiles have been installed at the 2013 Paris Marathon and London 2012 Olympics – where else might we find them? We recently delivered projects in the Airport sector – for example, Heathrow Airport. There are now over 50 tiles installed in Terminal 3. We’ve also just completed a project with Nordstrom, a big retailer in the US. That’s been very exciting. We’re about to cover public space that’s right next to the White House in Washington DC. We’re also continuing to work with large transport groups globally about redefining the way energy is addressed in transport space. night The Morro da Mineira football pitch at night. Image: Shell 'We’ve always got to keep innovating and doing things differently to stay ahead of competition' Is Pavegen an accessible investment for all, or for some? If you look at some scenarios like if you compare us to the cost of flooring on a train station, we only cost 20% more per square meter compared to traditional flooring. So it’s not out of reach for everyone to use, we do everything from very small schools that have very limited budgets through multi-national, multi-billion pound companies that have very large budgets. It varies. What’s your grand vision? Our overall vision is to make our product the same cost as normal flooring. As soon as it gets to that price, it becomes standard for all flooring and can give you energy and data on how people move from it. That will allow us not just to do 100 or 200 but thousands of units in sites around the world is what’s exciting to us. You’ve done four TED talks. What are the main messages you want to get across? Ultimately if youlook at the big picture, no-ones really heard of Pavegen. We’re still tiny. Spreading the word is important. I’m an enterprise and innovation fellow at Loughborough, so I’ve got a big passion towards entrepreneurship and encouraging other people to do the same thing as me. I like to encourage the notion of ‘know no boundaries’ and ‘keep going till you get the job done’ or entrepreneurship is also a bit like jumping off a cliff and learning how to swim on the way down. I like to teach people that that’s alright, to do something you’re scared of and don’t know anything about and that’s a big part of it. A platform like TED is a really key platform to keep the narrative carrying on as well as many other platforms I use. You were so young. Were you daunted when you first started? When I was 23 and I first started the business, I got invited to talk in Munich alongside the lead engineer from NASA and the head of technology for Nokia. I’ve never been so scared in my life getting up on stage with such amazing people. I think that took all the fear out of me, if I can do that at 23 when I was just figuring out the company and what we were trying to do, everything else I just approach with I just go and have fun and enjoy myself. pitch Dreams for the future? As an entrepreneur, I like inventing and building stuff. I’ve already worked with other companies on the side and continue to think of new ideas. I just want to create companies. Once we’re at a stage with this one I’ll be starting a new one - in a similar area maybe? Who knows? There are some interesting areas that people aren’t necessarily looking at, like sanitation. I think the whole smart cities phenomenon hasn’t really been rolled up yet on a big scale. I think technologies that will allow it to do that could be really exciting too. What other technologies/ideas in sustainability capture your interest? This is the era of disruptive business models making a real impact on the sustainable industry model. You’re looking at companies that are generating power. The generation start-ups that purely focus on the generation of power have decreased massively recently. It is just so difficult to scale a business like that. We’ve all seen NEST and their smart learning thermostat and how their business model can be directly related to selling that data to the energy utility companies. There are other smaller ones, which are like a little wireless widget you can leave in your house and control your air conditioning unit wirelessly without any massive fixed costs. I like demand side technologies as well that are software based because you can see massive efficiencies. Yet to be seen what the future will hold in terms of big companies that will grow out of it. In technology, you should never say no and should always push the boundaries until you have an answer on whether it will work or not. What’s next? I leave on Saturday to keynote at a large energy government summit in Melbourne. We’ve got a big market in Australia so it’s important for us to get out there.