So the latest thing is that students on certain exercise machines at the university gym are generating energy:
The gym at Oregon State University offer elliptical machines for college students to work out on, and the motion they create helps to generate heat energy in the same process.
Oregon State University (OSU) is located in Corvallis, Oregon and has been offering this capturing of energy to any college student wanting to add to the power gathering.
… The hardware used to capture this energy is installed on 22 of the elliptical machines and can save the college about 3,500 kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough power to help support a small energy efficient house.
The hardware is set up so that more machines can be fixed to the power grid in the future and adds to the harvesting of other people’s energy workout. OSU is now known as the college that is turning other people’s workouts into usable energy…
Take it a step further. In hard economic times, offer
students Green Galley Scholarships, in which the
university covers their tuition in exchange for, say,
twenty hours a week on the elliptical.
February 21st, 2009 at 12:39PM
’tis a pleasant thought, but…
–a person in really good shape can produce maybe 1/10 horsepower on a sustained basis…that’s about 70 watts. So if we put the galley slaves to work for 12 hours a day, each will produce electricty worth about 10 cents per day, for a scholarship value of about $3/month (assuming we don’t give them weekends off)
The great GE scientist Charles Steimetz was once asked for help by a young PR man who was desperate to get good press coverage of a new steam turbine that GE had sold and was looking for an angle to use in his press release. Steinmetz pulled out his slide rule and calculated that this one turbine would generate more power than the entire slave population of the U.S. at the time of the Civil War.
February 21st, 2009 at 2:49PM
Between transmission loses and maintenance costs I have to wonder if any any of this generates any usable energy.
February 21st, 2009 at 8:41PM
Red Stater…also have to consider the energy used in making these little generators in the first place..it would be interesting for someone to calculate how long it takes to recoup this.
But, of course, this doesn’t matter if the objective is not to save energy but to be *seen as saving energy*, which I think is pretty common for projects of this type. The home geothermal industry has a marketing problem, in that their systems are actually pretty good at saving energy but don’t have any visible components, so are useless for bragging rights…