Folk, if you haven’t heard, Japan has found a way to turn footsteps into electricity. This marvel of modern engineering has become an internet sensation just in time for THON 2026, which just so happens to be an event full of walking.
The United States might be a tad behind Japan in the footsteps-to-electricity game, but if THON 2026 took place in the land of the rising sun, we may have a new clean source of power on our hands. See ya fossil fuels! (Note: I don’t think we should do this by any means — it’s only a few steps away from the matrix)
I did the math so you don’t have to, but I’ll explain a bit of the calculations because I’m not an expert on THON or power generation, plus I’m sleep deprived. So, if mistakes were made, leave me alone.
People On The Floor
There are around 707 dancers this year, but not only dancers are on the floor. Each dancer is allowed eight guests, giving us a total of 5,656 guests visiting the floor throughout THON. There’s also the massive amount of volunteer staff, around 15,000 total. I’ve made a (very uneducated) guess that around a quarter of them are on the floor at any given time, giving us 3,750 volunteers on the floor.
The guests only stay on the floor for a short period of time, which I’m estimating to be a half an hour. That’s not counting people who waited in the digital line, but I have no idea how I’d figure that mess out.
Steps
I’ve estimated an average of 3 steps/second. With that number, we have (for one person) 180 steps/minute, 10,800 steps/hour, and 5,400 steps for a half an hour (for the guests).
That gives some massive total step counts for all 46 hours of THON. For dancers, we have 351,237,600 steps, guests with 30,542,400 steps, and the volunteers with a whopping 1,863,000,000 steps. All of those big numbers rounds out to 2,244,780,000 steps for everyone on the floor over the entire 46 hour event. I’m getting tired thinking about it, and I’m sitting down.
Power Generated
All those steps are guaranteed to generate a hell of a lot of power. From a quick google search, a piezoelectric panel — the device that makes this all possible — generates around 0.0604 W (watts) for ten footsteps, or 0.00604 W for one.
Multiplying that by our step count, we get: 13,558 kW (kilowatts) of power!
Making Comparisons
That number isn’t very impressive without some references. Who knows what a kilowatt does, anyway? I looked up for the definition but unfortunately it just made me ask a few more questions. To make it easier, here are some things we could power with all those kilowatts.
An incandescent lightbulb is around 60 W (watts, or 0.06 kW), so THON’s output could power a single one for 230,000 hours, or 25 years (if it didn’t burn out by then, which it would). An LED lightbulb, which consumes a lot less energy (10 W), could run for 155 years.
An iPhone needs at least a 20 W charger, and takes around two and a half hours. So, with THON’s power output you could charge twenty-seven thousand phones.
How does this compare to other forms of power generation? Well, a single wind turbine produces 10,000 kW of power, so we’ve got that beat. THON would generate about 10% of the output of a nuclear reactor, a number that makes me question the accuracy of my math. Pretty cool though.
Conclusion
Well, if there were an award for making electricity from footsteps, I guess Japan would get it this year. But hey, if they share their footstep electric technology with us, THON alone would power quite a bit, For The Kids.
AloJapan.com