For 1,500 miles, the backpack bounced up and down. Up and down.
It was 1996, and Aaron LeMieux had just finished a particularly tough but successful semester at the University of Toledo. He wanted to reward himself with this ultra-hike along the Appalachian Trail.
LeMieux had attached his pack around his waist in an effort to take some of the weight off his shoulders.
As the bag tugged at his skin, he developed saddle sores. Then he got to thinking. (“When you backpack 1,500 miles, you have a lot of time to think,” he says.) He had to regularly stop in town to pick up batteries, and yet the bag rubbing up and down his back was just wasted, uncaptured energy.
There had to be a better way. LeMieux finished his degree in mechanical engineering and landed a job with A.E. Ehrke & Co. in Solon. Having grown up in Westlake, he was thrilled. He didn’t really want to leave Northeast Ohio.
By the time he was 26, he was offered the chance to work as a consultant with Omega Induction Services. “Nobody gives a 26-year-old a healthy business,” he says. “But I was able to turn it around.”
But the idea of harnessing that kinetic energy from his hike, a half-decade ago at this point, was still stuck in his head. He’d been working on models and finally came up with what he thought was a pretty novel design.
“I asked my wife if I could empty out our savings account, give it to a patent attorney and see if we could sell this thing.”
As the founder of Tremont Electric LLC, LeMieux has two competitors in the human energy arena, and he’d laugh if he knew that someone referred to the other products like that.
One is the size of a backpack. It weighs 80 pounds, and it produces about the same amount of power that comes from a standard wall outlet. It was developed by the University of Pennsylvania.
The other is fairly small and attaches to your knee. It’s a pretty slick design, but it’s still 3.5 pounds and expensive to produce.
Last year, there was talk of developing a bra that captures the up-and-down motion of bobbing breasts. Only the most well-endowed women would be able to charge a phone with one, though. Scientists estimate you’d need a D-cup to get enough bounce.
LeMieux pulls out his Personal Energy Generator — the PEG — and you can see he’s watching for a reaction. It is a puny 9 ounces, about the size of one of those plastic travel toothbrush holders. As you pick it up and move your hand up and down to simulate walking, it feels like a pedometer. But despite its size, it is just as powerful as the 80-pound backpack. And despite its power output, it is a fraction of the cost of the device that attaches to your knee.
This is not hypothetical. This is $149.99 (plus tax), see-if-you-can-find-a-butter-knife-to-get-the-package-open-so-you-can-show-your-buddies-at-the-office-that-you-are-part-of-the-future-before-them real.
To get to this point, LeMieux grew the company slowly, carefully picking the right individuals for the team. One of his first hires was a sustainability expert. He says there are two reasons for that: To be sustainable is to be efficient, and a startup can greatly benefit from being efficient. Also, a green company should set an example with green business practices.
And now it’s come together. Attached to his PEG is an iPod. LeMieux has had a working model of his PEG for two years, and that iPod has been powered exclusively by the PEG. As he bobs it up and down gently, the upper right corner of the iPod screen displays the charging icon.
Ken Starcher has been excited about alternative energy for decades, but he’s also a realist. He’s the director of the Alternative Energy Institute, which has been studying renewable energy since 1977 at ground zero of the U.S. oil industry: Texas.
The big disadvantage of alternative energy so far has been the cost, he says. Most people support alternative energy sources in theory, but they ultimately vote with their dollars, and most people won’t pay much of a premium for energy just because it’s green.
However, alternative energy is gaining ground. A new wind farm is competitive — maybe even cheaper — at producing energy, compared to a new coal plant; but already-built coal plants are still cheaper.
He says the market LeMieux is going after is even easier to woo.
Starcher pulls out a calculator and asks me to read to him from the side of a battery. I’ll spare the step-by-step, but we determine the AA battery that was in my tape recorder cost about $1 and gives me 2.25 watt hours; that’s approximately 44.4 cents per watt hour. If I plugged the recorder in the wall, I would pay about 0.01 cents per watt hour.
But I don’t, because I need to lug it around with me. For that, I’m willing to pay a premium. A big one.
“You’re paying 5,000 times more than what you would if you plugged into the wall. You’re paying for portability. You’re paying for convenience.”
Starcher says because the PEG is portable energy, the threshold it has to meet in order to be considered affordable is very attainable. But it also has inconveniences: “The disadvantage: If your battery’s dead, you have to go do jumping jacks or go for a walk.”
LeMieux says it is difficult to calculate a price per watt hour, since it depends on how often you use the PEG, and you would ultimately need to use it until it breaks in order to come up with that number. He’s quite confident he beats the price of batteries, though, and thinks it can approach the price of a wall outlet.
It’s a Wednesday, and LeMieux says he hasn’t slept since Monday morning. He’s been up all night building more prototypes. Several potential investors and U.S. government officials want to see the PEG in action, and LeMieux needs more units.
His rental car (LeMieux doesn’t own one — he’s walking the environmental walk by living a car-free lifestyle) had 68 miles when he picked it up downtown. Now it has 2,692.
A lot of startups, LeMieux says, dream of military contracts. Their business strategy is to land that big one. But he says he didn’t want to fall into that trap, to put all his hopes on one client. So he followed the model of the Camelbak, a giant backpack/water bottle often used by avid outdoorsman and athletes.
Camelbak targeted consumers first, and the military came to them.
LeMieux says he figured if he came up with a good product, the military would find him, and they did. Before his product even went on sale.
The meeting went well, he thinks. After all, they did call him. Landing that contract would ensure some big revenue.
It’s hard not to get excited at the potential for the science behind this product.
It is scalable. It could be shrunk down and installed inside the human body to power a pacemaker. It can be blown up and bobbed on the lake to generate electricity.
In fact, this summer, LeMieux will be testing a Vespa-sized model on Lake Erie, which just so happens to have lots of small waves. It’s the perfect environment for his model. You can’t ask for anything more than a large, shallow lake. He believes he will be able to generate electricity at a cost of 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour — the same price as wholesale coal.
LeMieux says he started Tremont Electric LLC in Cleveland because he grew up here and believes in the city. Now that he’s realizing the potential of his invention, if he were to relocate his company, he’d look for a city with a strong medical field and a shallow lake. “Which means Cleveland would have been at the top of my list anyway,” he says.