In a new YouTube video, Southern California inventor Brett Juilly describes how to generate electricity from children.  Specifically, he shows how playground equipment such as swings, merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters can be converted into generators that send electricity back into the power grid.

He is still working on getting electricity from a slide.

The video, titled "Alternative Energy from Children (and 17 other sources)", is posted with Juilly's other videos at youtube.com/BrettFromLA.  Among the "17 other sources" mentioned in the title are half a dozen ideas for converting health club equipment and aerobics class gear into power sources.

Juilly also describes several alternative-energy ideas that are less controversial but equally as innovative.  Freeway lane-divider bumps, he says, should use the weight of cars driving over them to power street lights.  He goes on to suggest installing the same electricity-generating bumps in multi-level parking garages.  He says that the plastic bumps may slow the cars driving over them, so spreading them across a downhill ramp, when drivers typically apply their brakes, will actually assist drivers and won't affect their gas mileage.

For homes in rainy areas, Juilly advises creating miniature water wheels to go under rain gutter downspouts.  "It doesn't have to be as effective or as powerful as a hydroelectric dam," he narrates over a photo of water rushing past turbines, "because you aren't powering thirty thousand houses, and you aren't transmitting the electricity a hundred miles.  You're transmitting it like 20 feet, into your house."

Other ideas packed into the 9-minute video include impact-activated generators in stairs and running tracks, turbines spun by gravity-lowered elevators, and solar panels on home electronic devices such as TVs and computers so that they can "generate electricity all day long while they're sitting in the sun".

At the end of the video, Juilly has one request of his viewers:  "If you're going to develop any of these ideas, I would love to be on your team."  Product development departments, consider this his job interview.