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Pedal Power Measured in Oil
Posted by Phil Hart on April 1, 2009 - 9:45am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
I was part of a team 'Greenfleet and Friends' that pedalled four bicycles for an hour to help generate electricity to power the 'Earth Hour' concert in Melbourne. This is a great event to raise awareness of how much energy we use (waste), but thinking about the energy we generated on the bikes in terms of its petrol/gasoline equivalence is pretty confronting.
Using Bikes to Power Melbourne’s Earth Hour Concert
The Melbourne Earth Hour Concert is Australia’s signature Earth Hour event for 2009! This concert is unique in Australian history because it will be people powered by the Future Spark Team Challenge.
To power this amazing concert, we are holding the City Switch Future Spark Team Challenge! The power will be achieved by YOU riding bikes on a trailer that are hooked up to custom made electricity generators. So basically by pedalling on some bikes you will create clean energy which will be used to power the concert.
Every team entered gets 4 bikes for one hour. Your team gets to pedal to generate as much electricity as possible. Each team can have between 4 and 10 people so you can change if you get tired. Teams can see exactly how much power they have contributed on the screen monitors and your team will appear on the honour roll and leaders board.
By pedalling four bicycles for an hour on Friday 27th March, my team of Greenfleet and Friends generated 463Wh (Watt-hours), contributing towards the 50,000Wh needed to power the Earth Hour concert held in Melbourne on Saturday 28th March. Greenfleet's performance was well above average, but not quite in the same league as several teams that generated over 600Wh.
You can see all the team stats on the Future Spark website: power.futurespark.com.au
Now considering that a litre of petrol stores 10kWh (10,000 Wh) of energy, one hour spent pedalling four bicycles generates about as much energy as is stored in just three tablespoons of petrol (gasoline)! Looking at it another way, each bike was generating energy at the rate of about one small drip of oil per minute.
Those fairly confronting statistics should teach us two important lessons:
- Crude oil and refined products like petrol/gasoline are incredibly energy rich fuels. We should place a much greater value on them, and not just because of the CO2 emissions they generate.
- Cycling is a supremely efficient means of transport. Reducing oil and energy use means adapting to a range of much smaller and lighter vehicles, whether they are electric vehicles or human powered, or a bit of both.
Well over a hundred teams spent a week pedalling over a dozen bikes to generate 50kWh (kilo Watt-hours) for the Earth Hour concert. Five litres (~1.3 gallons) of fossil fuel stores the same amount of energy, an amount most people would burn in their cars almost every day without thinking about it.
[See comment from Engineer Poet: Because an engine is only around 30% efficient, it would actually require about 3 * 5 = 15 litres (4 gallons) to yield 50kWh in terms of work output, as opposed to the 50kWh of stored chemical energy in the five litres.]
So next time you're filling up your car, take a moment to think about the fantastic amount of energy you just put in your tank, because that is why good alternatives to oil are hard to find.
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Not exactly, as you are confusing chemical inputs with work outputs. A liter of petroleum fuel cannot be converted to work at anything close to 100% efficiency; the useful work obtained from a liter of your typical gasoline yields on the order of 2.7 kWh at the engine crankshaft, perhaps 3.6-4 kWH from a liter of fuel in a medium-speed diesel engine.
This does not come close to offsetting the orders of magnitude difference in energy consumed between bicycles and typical cars, but it is significant when calculating energy requirements for e.g. wind power to supply electric vehicles.
Thanks EP. I had glossed over that point for this post, but it is an important point to make.. and yet another reason why electric bicycles/small electric vehicles are a good way to go because the energy conversion is more efficient.
So just to restate the final conclusions more accurately.. they would have actually needed 15 litres or 4 gallons of diesel in a generator to power the concert, or hundreds of cyclists pedalling dozens of bikes for a week!
At least with powering the concert there are other alternatives to generate fixed electricity for such small amounts. Then again there are alternatives to holding an energy dependent concert. In Albury we had an accoustic concert for Earth Hour and the pedal power was spent getting us there and back home. The really good tucker from the community wood fired oven, provided by the Eat Local Food(ELF) group was all the energy input we needed! Our little gathering could have been duplicated in parks and playgrounds across the city or country, with minimal energy impacts.
I hope the pedalling exercise in Melbourne convinced the participants of just how much work is done for them by fossil fuels and just how much they waste on hedonistic indulgences like feel good concerts. A big thumping brass band, pipes and drums or a full orchestra in a properly designed and built amphitheatre, scaled to the size of local communities, may be a better use of human energy in the future of entertainment and won't require anyone to bust their guts pedalling to make it possible.
Your point is well taken, but I object to the shaming of "hedonistic indulgences like feel good concerts.." .. You just described some concerts that would feel great, AND be responsible with their energy use, and their good foods.. all of which would ALSO 'feel good'. Let's put some more topping on John Calvin's grave, already. I can still hear him muttering down there.
It's very smart to do things that 'feel good'.. we just have to learn how to differentiate between addictions, which only make us think they feel good, which are just mediocre painkillers for all the stuff that we feel bad about.. and things that actually do and should feel good, because our bodies are getting what they need. Food, Exercise, Love in all forms. (Grossed out yet? Tough.) There's no shortage of that 'feel bad' stuff which gets to go along unchallenged, because the Malthusians, the Calvinists and the Machiavellians in all of us keep pounding this idea that the stuff that feels bad is the only thing that's real. It's a very old lie, and it keeps jumping back out of the grave, because we keep summoning it.
As far as the concert goes, I would like to know how they spent your hard-earned 50kwh, and maybe design a future show like this with a Supply/Demand challenge.. so that somehow, those who are flipping the flipping switches are tasked (Maybe from set to set, or between competing stages) with consuming as little power as possible and still 'do the job' .. maybe using better acoustics, and acoustic bands, maybe changing some of the assumptions about what kind of volume and stacks of speakers are actually 'Required'.. Lighting, of course.. The music biz is definitely spoiled with energy.. and a good place to make a show of the work we need to do.
It's also the place where artists can work the message so it works with and gets through to its audience. It doesn't have to be moribund and 'weak', it doesn't have to lie and be hypocritical with a 'do as I say, not as I do' undercurrent. It better have a good beat.
I second that. Here in Jamaica, it's a sound system crazy country. Lots of systems that require an 18 foot truck or larger with 15kW or more of amplification. Over the last couple of decades fancy lighting has also become compulsory for premium events, even those with djs only. Bigger promoters have got into the habit of renting a trailer mounted generator (50kVA or more) to provide power for events since a problem with the public power supply or inadequate infrastructure at the location could result in significant losses on an expensive venture. Back when I was a teenager good music, lots of liquid refreshment and good company was all that was required for a great party.
I am involved in the business as a sound system provider and I have developed a reputation for covering events with less, a lot less. People are often amazed at how little equipment I can use to do an event and still cover it adequately. A lot of operators are now copying this and providing downsized systems as many clients now require this. There are still significant numbers of people who truck in loads of huge wooden spaekers and crank them up so they can be heard miles away only to have the police shut them down for being a noise nuisance, go figure! The paradigm of the Mega concert with huge stacks of speakers sized so they can thump the chests of people at the opposite end of the show-ground does not seem to me to be one that will be sustainable post peak. A lot of energy is wasted making it way too loud at the front so that people at the back have a "good listening experience".
Of course there are new technologies that are reducing power requirements for concerts. Massively efficient amplifiers are now available as are high intensity LED lights that can replace incandescents in certain cases. I think the recent Presidential Inauguration is good example of how to provide sound for huge crowds, with lots of speakers distributed throughout the area. Still, how many events are planned with reducing power consumption in mind? My guess is that it's going to be a whole lot more as we hit the downslope.
Alan from the islands
The ASPO-guy in me says, you guys are right, it's a good demonstration of the incredible energy density of fossil fuels, and we'd better start thinking of alternatives to night-time concerts with tons of amplifiers and speakers (anyone remember the Grateful Dead's "wall of sound"? and their 700w Phase Linear amps?) that people drive sometimes hundreds of miles to see. To a commuter cyclist and energy thrifter it all looks just plain dumb and self-indulgent.
On the other hand, gotta say I do love a good rock n roll night in a dim smoky (or not) bar, there's a lot of good local talent AND these guys don't require a whole lot of power in that little pub.
The techno-weenie in me says: amplifier efficiencies have come a LONG way in 30 years and they have Class D switching amps now that put out the same power to speakers while drawing far less power from the mains; they simply dissipate much less wasted heat. Similarly, horn-type speakers like Klipsch makes are extraordinarily efficient compared to acoustic suspension (very inefficient) or ported (somewhat inefficient) designs. You could rock a stadium with a few hundred watts (RMS output).
Dick Lawrence
In 1991, I went to a Midnight Oil concert in Melbournes Rod Laver Arena and walked out highly disillusioned with the hypocrisy of it all. The energy used to blast the noise, run all the lights and sell all the merchandise and cheap greasy food was a huge indulgence by a crowd of middle class, high end consumers who saw no contradiction in the message that the band was pushing and the method of delivery. Fast Forward 20 years and the same crowd are using more energy than ever before, living in bigger houses with more gadgets and driving bigger cars to more places than ever before. But they'll tell you they care about the environment, after all they do have all of Midnight Oils old records!
It's understandable.. we're soaking in it.
There are so many ways we are inundated in this oily setup. There's only so much you can scrape off at a time, and much of that clean spot gets oozed over again. There is some hypocrisy in it, but there is also just a paradox, as well.
Look at that last 20 years. Pure denial, robustly enforced by an overeager business mentality that believed this was moral, right and good.
Electric bicycles are almost as efficient as petroleum-based ones. Yes, electric power can be transferred VERY effeciently to work, but production, transmission and storage or said power take the toll. In term of sheer efficiency electric bicycle is slightly more effecient then regular motor bike and it's not even clear if small electic vehicle has advantage over small potrol-powered vehicle...
You need to back this one up. Where are you getting these comparisons?
After the efficiency is compared fairly, it's also impossible to avoid the question of the notorious emissions and leaks/spills (and noise pollution) coming from Legions of 2-cycle engines. The comparison also needs to consider the 'fleet' overall, since there are some high-performing little gas burners, but just scores of dirty, badly maintained scooters, dirtbikes, etc..
Bob
Interesting claim. Got proof?
Actually, I have a ton of statistics about electric bikes, because I have ridden one every day and carefully monitored power usage. On a typical day I use 20 watt hours per mile, if I am pedaling lightly (much less than that if I pedal more). For my 17 mile trip, that amounts to ~340 watt hours of power. At 20 wh/mile, the equivalence is to about 1,900 miles per gallon (~1100 km/liter if I'm doing the math right). Just for perspective, Justin Lemire Elmore cycled across canada over 4,000 miles on ~100 KwH.
Even accounting for dramatic efficiency losses in transmission and charging, I suspect that a petrol motor still won't reach these efficiencies. Even if transmission and charging amounted to 90% loss, that's still 190 miles per gallon.
And I like to charge my e-bike battery with solar, which increases the efficiency dramatically.
I have lots more of this kind of geeky stuff on my website, e.g. https://www.cycle9.com/blog/c9blog.php?id=6919001179472611402
Engineer-Poet,
I don't like your comparison either.
If one wants to talk "chemical inputs," wouldn't one have to talk about the calorie content of the food consumed?
Wouldn't the human body serve the same role in this example as an internal combustion engine?
One has to wonder how efficent of an "engine" the human body is.
Depends on body weight; cycling one hour burns about 700 kcal, or 2930 kJ. The 4-person bicycling team produced 463 W-hr, or 416.7 kJ per person; this means a person-engine electricity generator is about 14% efficient.
From my inner Malthusian-Calvinsit-Machiavellian: how much gas did they burn getting there?
Considering a 48% efficiency diesel engine, the 416.7 kJ of work done by each person, can be done
by about 24.5 ml of diesel fuel (about 0.82844 floz, or 1/154.5 US gallon)
hmmm. So to generate one KWH required 7 KWH from food. Now, the average US meal requires 9 Kcal's of FF energy for every Kcal produced at the table, so...
One bike generated KWH required 63 FF KWH's. The .132 KWH each person generated required 8.3 KWH's from FF's. So, bicycling at, say, 25 MPH requires about .33 KWH per mile, which is about as good as the average EV (and higher than some, like the Chevy Volt).
So, human-powered bicycles use the same power as EV's.
They used zero calories. Yup, you read that right. Human beings need daily exercise to remain healthy. Those people were just getting some normal exercise, which they would either get otherwise or be in poorer health. So any calories they burned were actually for exercise, and didn't count at all for energy production, which was free.
Drives me nuts when people forget that humans need exercise.
Wow -- they got 463 W-hr work for nothing. Guess that makes them a perpetual motion machine, the first ever. I suggest you patent it quickly.
yeah they did burn calories, when you use more calories than you need, you lose weight, when you eat more calories than you use you gain weight. It's not magic... While yes they probably needed the exercise that doesn't mean the energy to exercise comes out fairy dust...
You need to increase the gain on your humor sensor.
I am starting a health club that equipped with electric generating exercise bikes that plug into the electrical network. For a minimum fee, people can join the club to loose weight -- while they're working hard on pumping the pedals -- I am getting paid by the utility company.
Think DOE or DARPA will fund that? or some small business grant?
The amount you would spend on equipment to capture the power would not come close to any form of break-even.
For $500-$600 you can buy a solar panel that is electrically 'worth' a humans output of labor. That panel is FAR cheaper than any slave you could buy, let alone take care of.
I like it. If I were in charge of the relevant section at DARPA, I'd ask you to form a consortium of your private company, an A-list university, and a top group in a military research lab to put together a proposal for a prototype. You would get about $3 million to do the job.
3 million dollar is just a "rounding error" in the latest bailout scheme.
I wasn't trying to be funny i was just trying to make a point...
Blair didn't get it either. Let me give you an example. I'm told I should get a half-hour of strenuous exercise three or more days per week. Today I did a half-hour Concept II rowing machine workout and burned 513 calories in that half-hour. So I got my exercise in (valuable), but otherwise wasted 513 calories blowing air around the room (Concept IIs work on a flywheel and blower).
Tomorrow I decide to get my workout on a bike that generates electricity instead of wasting that energy on heat and blown air. Let's say I burn the same 513 calories. So I've gotten my workout in, burned the calories for my workout, but instead of the side effect of air being pointlessly blown around, I produced some electricity.
How many calories did I expend to produce the electricity? None. I expended 513 calories getting my workout in for the day. If I hadn't spun the generator? I would have burned the calories moving air, because I need the exercise anyway.
Blair didn't get it either.
That you are wrong, no - I understand that.
Your position is akin to "everyone dies - so its not a problem if I just kill this guy over here. Hey, I'm just doing what will happen anyway."
How many calories did I expend to produce the electricity? None.
No, you did. And here you admit it.
I expended 513 calories getting my workout in for the day.
They used zero calories. Yup, you read that right.
Wrong. Calories were used.
Drives me nuts when people forget that humans need exercise.
To the point of posting a false claim?
I can see you're a little slow on the uptake, so let's try again, shall we?
Let's say they would normally burn 250 calories exercising on a Tuesday. On this particular Tuesday, they decided to do their exercise generating electricity instead of their regular exercise.
So they burn their usual 250 calories getting the exercise they would have gotten anyway, but produced electricity as well. How many extra calories did they burn to produce the electricity?
Think hard now. It will come to you.
Let's say they would normally burn 250 calories exercising on a Tuesday. On this particular Tuesday, they decided to do their exercise generating electricity instead of their regular exercise.
You burned 250 generating electricity. You've been claiming no energy was expended.
Think hard now. It will come to you.
What will 'come to me'? That you did not do well in middle school math during the word problem time?
I think he's pointing out that no extra energy was burned, over and above what would have been burned anyway, but that the energy burned while on the bicycle was turned into something useful (electricity), whereas the energy burned on the rowing machine simply moved air around a closed room (not useful).
This is about right. An averagely (un)fit adult can sustain about 100W output for an hour or more. Superfit cyclists are in the 250W bracket, but they almost destroy their own bodies in the effort.
In the 10 years and 15,000 miles I have been commuting by bicycle I have not burnt about 500 gallons of petrol, and I have generated about
250KWh of useful work.
That would keep my house warm for 2 weeks in winter.... flat out my natural gas central heating boiler would get through that much energy in 18 hours.
The comparison between cycle power and gasoline is a tremendous awareness aid. It gives one example of a major peak oil mitigation that can be implemented right now by a very large majority of the population. Excellent article, Phil.
Anyone know how many calories of human fuel (food) is required to generate that output? I guess that is another dimension to the problem, and the amount of energy required to create the food and water.
Comments anyone?
I'm not sure of the exact figures, but it has been reported that in the UK the level of obesity has risen steadily since 1970 - in spite of the fact that people are consuming fewer calories. That is entirely due to people doing less walking, cycling and exercise generally. That in turn is probably closely related to the overall rise in car ownership.
Peak oil will have some benefits.
Well, straight from the mouth of Google:
2000 kilocalories = 2 324.44444 watt hours
So, if you consume the FDA recommended amount of food, you are putting that much energy into your mouth every day. Divide by 24 to get the average Watt usage:
2 324.44444 / 24 = 96.8518517
96 Watts. That's about 100 W you burn constantly through a normal day. This is actually relatively accurate for the heat production of a human. By that I mean that you're actually chemically reacting that energy you put into your mouth, and if you were doing an energy balance on a room, the people will generally count the same as a 100 W light bulb.
Now... if you get yourself worked up, the consumption easily climbs and falls in the range of 100 to 1000 Watts. Naturally, that depends strongly on weight, but when you're on a treadmill with it displaying the calories per hour you are burning, those generally fit in this range. If someone is fit and clearly exerting themselves, then you can expect in the upper range. Athletes are generally 1 kW machines (very 'generally'). So anyway, back to answering your question; the proposition we were dealing with was that the bikers produce 100 Watts of usable energy and you wanted to know about the energy inputs - effectively efficiency.
I'll have to preface this further. I'm not considering anything about food production. There have been other posts on TOD that dealt very well with photosynthesis and the efficiency of it, which is, of course, not good at all. Yes, food production takes other inputs, but I would maintain that the primary energy input is still the sun. We capture a lot of energy through the farms we maintain, and while biodiesel can't replace our transportation fuels, the fuels we use for food production is comparatively small to what nature is already doing. So ultimately, these calculations should ultimately culminate in some Watts/acres measurement, representing a humans capability per the farmland needed to sustain him/her. However, as I said, I'm not going there. As I said before, thermal energy of a human is typically around 1 kW, and the star bikers for the eco-concert were running about 100 W to the bike shaft, so a meaningful calculation will be 100 W/ 1 kW representing the general chemical to mechanical efficiency of a human. My answer (which is contestable, but I have confidence in) is:
10%
The food challenge to bike power also should be made in contrast to the amount of food that the 'Non-bikers' would be eating and is never being converted into such usable energy..
Most of our food calories today are simply thrown away.
Our food calories aren't thrown away, really. They are stored as fats - thus the increase in obesity!
First rate quibble! Ten points!
Of course, there are those countless calories burned in moving a person's excess fat around.. but since that person also needs the exercise, it's difficult to decide which category to put them into..
Sure some is. Excess sugar can be shunted out in the urine (the sweet smell of a diabetic's pee). Excess fat intake you will get oil slicks in your toilet. Undigested corn from corn on the cob.
And the fecal/urine has some energy value, otherwise plants and say maggots would not find 'em useful to their life cycle.
I hope nobody suggests that cycling for an hour requires more food than sitting around doing virtually no physical activity (e.g. driving a car). It doesn't.
OK I bite. Cycling for an hour requires more food than sitting around doing virtually no physical activity (e.g. driving a car).
Which is to say, it burns significantly more energy.
http://www.milk.co.uk/page.aspx?intPageID=122
Of course, most of us could benefit from burning those extra calories without eating any more food. Now, where are your references to the opposite?
I believe the point is no increase in the average food consumption would be expected. Western societies by and large have populations which consume much in excess of their 'sitting around doing nothing' caloric needs, resulting in a high percentage of overweight and obese people. All that would be lost, by and large, would be inches around the waist.
That may be true in the US and increasingly in the UK, but it certainly is not true in many parts of the world. When I was in India some years ago, the cycle ricksaw drivers were skin and bone.
I use my daily 50 minutes of cycle commuting to indulge in quite a lot of food. In the last 15 years I have put on one stone.
Rickshaw drivers are a distant outlier when talking about getting Western societies to bike more often and not needing to raise their average caloric intake.
Richard Manning ("The Oil We Eat") gives a figure of around 10 calories for every one calorie of food energy (with considerable variation depending on what is actually consumed...his figure for factory farmed pork is 65:1). I'm not sure if his figures are accepted in general here, but it was a key reading in my discovery of the issue of Peak Oil.
There are a couple of "feel good" exercises on campus here that have me rolling my eyes. The first is the use of compostable plastics in food services. My read is that these materials are more energy intensive than standard plastic. The official line is that they encourage composting on campus, but I can't help but feel that this is another example of "green-washing." Any thoughts?
The second exercise is a ban on bottled water. I don't necessarily disagree with this action, but I can't help but feeling that consistency requires a further ban on bottled soft drinks and juices, along with a ban on styrofoam and plastic cups. To illustrate the influence that Peak Oil has had on my thoughts, I find myself thinking that the impending end of cheap energy will make these kinds of issues moot soon enough.
I buy bottled water. I drink the water, refill from a tap. Rinse and repeat until the bottle is worn out. Then I put the bottle in the plastics recycling.
Very cheap and convenient.
just know that you could buy a $15 or $20 steel bottle or re-use a glass jar, and save a lot. bottled water costs 2000% more than tap water.
As noted above, zero calories of human food were required to generate that output. They burned the calories getting their daily amount of exercise. The electricity generated was a side benefit of the exercise, which they needed anyway. You should attribute the costs of the energy to create the food and produce the water to their daily exercise, where it belongs, instead of against the calorie-free side-benefit of the electricity produced.
Repeat after me: people need exercise.
Well, at least people need a certain amount of exercise. 30 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise seems to be a typical recommendation, so while some cycling could be useful since we need to exercise those calories away, that's only true up to a limit. All things considered, a hybrid electric velomobile would probably be the best of both worlds. Lower energy consumption compared to a typical cyclist, but the rider can still get in those 30 minutes of vigorous exercise per day.
The average electrical power produced by your team was 116Wh. Do you know the conversion efficiency? And how knackered did you feel at the end? You had the great advantage of no wind resistance.
Another way to look at it is:
You only have to look up into the sky on a sunny day to see the "fantastic amount of energy" being wasted...
Nick.
Just because energy is everywhere, doesn't mean its available. What If I told you I had 5 Chocolate bars for you. That's nice.. Then what if I told you that I spread out those chocolate into little pieces throughout an acre. Wouldn't that be a damn lie for me to tell you I had 5 chocolate bars for you, would you really agree with me that you have 5 chocolate bars? Total quantity's of energy for solar and wind are meaningless numbers, however the amount of energy per unit area/volume is a LOT more important and relevant.
All I know is that we had a team of about eight of us and we pedalled the bikes in 10-15 minutes 'shifts', although there was some down time as people changed bikes and adjusted seat heights etc. We pedalled much harder than I would normally during my cycle to work, which is admittedly done at a fairly moderate pace.
The reason that cycling matters (at all) is because the energy spent per mile traveled is so much less than that for a car. The human + bike is only about 100 kg while a car can run 1000 kg, the wheel contact area is drastically less, and the speed is about 1/3rd that of a car, meaning far less air resistance per mile as well (by 1/3 to whatever your drag exponent is).
This post assumes what I would call the 'Flintstones' philosophy. It's the thought experiment where we take a car (or whatever our modern convenience is), gut it, and replace it with human energy. Just like Fred Flintstone pushing the car along with his feet. Well, maybe his passengers help.
The flaw with this (that you know without me point out) is that the technology we use is already designed around the fuel sources, not the other way around. It would be nonsense to use such big speakers (or such large cars) without the commodities markets teeming with all-but-free energy. However, all is not lost, with huge reserves of energy serving us, we paid giant energy costs for ever-diminishing benefits in quality of life. The final marginal 1 Wh applied to the speakers or systems involved in the concert improved the participant's experience very little (if at all).
The post talked of energy-centric hedonism. Well, the very idea of outdoor concerts could be said to fit in this category (think acoustics). The bike energy generation is a good anecdotal demonstration, but overall meaningless. Get used to no cars and no concerts, not pedaling hard. But cheer up, the quality of your life shouldn't suffer much for it since it was a low return on energy investment... unless you really liked loud concerts :)
I'm not sure we need to give up anything.
Let me tell you a little tale (no link, I can't find the reference). Beset by noise complaints regarding the music for large gatherings, some musicians got imaginative: they set up a bunch of boom boxes on poles around the listening area, and broadcast to them over a low-power FM link. Everybody got to hear the music clearly but the sound barely carried; no speaker needed a range of more than a few tens of feet.
Now, boom boxes are rather low-powered devices, a few watts at good volume. They can operate on a few D cells for hours. One person pedalling a bicycle (or a few hundred watts of solar array) could supply a bunch of them, and cover quite some area with good sound. If analog FM links are too vulnerable to interference or hacking, digital infrared transmission is a possibility. There's a recipe for the "green" concert of Summer 2009.
Has anyone thought that in order to impart a concert, there is no need of electricity, if the musicians have the proper instruments and play them in front of the adequate public and play in daylight?
Has anyone thought that perhaps what is unsustainable is the type of multimassive concerts by night, requiring people to attend from very long distances and having to place them at distances from musicians that people can not here them directly, without electronics and powerful amplifiers and spotlights?
Why we go always to very complex solutions, even when looking for suppossedly "ecologic" or "sustainable" solutions?
I see these poor people pedalling like hamsters in a cage, inside a rotating wheel.
+5
I think that was the point. This is essentially publicity stunt to raise people's awareness how terribly wasteful we are and how much we rely on vast amounts of cheap energy.
I think this is really a great stunt. No matter how many times I explain to people how oil is such a cheap and concentrated form of energy it will be nearly impossible (if not outright impossible) to replace... they just don't get it.
When you actually *show* them what this energy means in terms of hours spend pedaling and sweating on a bike, maybe it can open some eyes. (We can only hope :)
The lesson would be all the better learned if the people actually did the pedaling themselves. Unfortnately, I guess that the people on the bikes probably already understood (which is why they participated in this event).
Great publicity stunt nevertheless!
Excellent point. Vehicles these days are just way heavier than they need to be. Obviously, using a 5 - 10 kg bike is smarter than using a 1000 kg auto. If due to distance, weather, freight (groceries etc) a larger vehicle is required, then we should have the option of dispensing with all the stupid "crash-worthiness" crap like steel beams in the doors, 10 klick bumpers, air bags etc. and the engineering / testing costs associated. I prefer to learn to drive well enough that I don't have crashes, and anyway, poor earth is so overpopulated with humans loosing a few random drivers is a service, not a problem to be mitigated with reduced efficiency.
Also causes a problem in stifling innovation, eg. only a company producing large-volume series of identical vehicles can afford to amortize the cost of the engineering and testing for crash-worthiness. The small innovator hasn't a chance. At worst, that stuff should be optional.
Yes the typical pv load ratio compared to a fully loaded class 8 truck is horrible. There are large gains to be had from better drag
coefficients as well. When everyone's commuting in a 4-passenger bus
with no passengers, is the answer converting the bus to natural gas?
Unbelievable.
Pedal car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwig1tgUtY
Humancar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBD2zRWLViU
Human hybrid ...
http://www.zoomilife.com/2009/01/11/the-human-solar-hybrid-car-from-san-...
Pedal hybrid entry in the x prize competition
http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/teams/tri-hybrid-stealth
Economically, pedal power only makes sense when pedaling a bicycle, since the bicycle make such efficient use of the energy, with very low cost. Substituting grid power is crazy. Even if the pedal power is free, the device to capture, store and convert to useful energy has a cost which is greater per watt*hour than then energy streaming out of the electrical grid. Pay someone minimum wage to pedal a generator, and you get a cost of nearly $100/kilowatt*hour, compared to $0.10 for grid power. It has to be slavely before pedal power makes any sense for capitalist perspective. Why not just use oxen? They run off of cellulose and its legal to enslave them.
I can't find any mention in the story or the linked website of how much energy it took to fabricate that bike power trailer and it's component parts, tow it to the site, tow it away afterward, etc. etc., in other words all the embedded energy in the project that would have to be paid off by pedalling before it made any net contribution to offsetting the energy used to actually stage the concert. I'd be very surprised if less than 50 KWh was used to set up this thing.
My inner "doomer / cynic" leads me to suspect that this "externality" was not considered, hear's hoping for some cheering up when I learn I'm mistaken...
The point is to make a basic demonstration, which it does.
Asking for such Euclidean Perfection is perhaps another demonstration that deserves mentioning, such as you have done.. but it hardly invalidates the effort. And of course, that assembly of bikes and generators on the trailer, whether still together or now dispersed is still capable of collecting more energy when asked to do so.. so it's embedded energy has many more opportunities to return the investment.
My mom just asked me if we can set up a bike to pump water up to a Solar Shower Heater at our camp in the woods.. The bike I'll do it with will also serve as transportation up there, and might be asked to power other things when it is on the Stationary Frame. Sewing Machine? IceCream Mixer? Fun Project!
My family used 12,158 kWh per year in our house in 2007. This electricity cost $1,212.30.
An athletic man can produce 100 Wh for 8 hours a day. I would need 14 men cranking 24/7/365 on my back porch. The men would be paid 1 cent per hour minus maintenance cost for the new system.
We live in a 1152 sq ft house with electric hot water, stove, and dryer and are normally frugal. However this past spring electrical rates shot to $0.50/kWh for a month. We conserved by unscrewing all but one fluorescent bulb from our fixtures, line drying, bath sink HW inop, HW heater @ 104 deg, lots of grilling, half the circuit breakers in house off, and installed hi-eff washer, efficient fireplace insert, hi eff oil furnace (I know). Our efforts led to a 30% reduction.
Anyone expecting a soft landing is whacked.
Cold Camel
The above post is what we need to know. The concert as described is a waste of energy and an activity that cannot be sustained into the future. Perhaps we can discuss whether solar or wind power, despite embedded costs, would be more efficient.
Also, with regard to humans needing exercise, perhaps they should get it powering wasteful concerts, but wouldn't they be prioritizing keeping the lights on in their house? In which case, after a certain number of hours of pedaling, they definitely would need extra food. I've toured by bike, pedaling 5-10 hours per day and will vouch for that.
duplicate
You need to be able to exist off the grid, totally, in order to survive.
What's that saying in AR?
"ROOT HOG, OR DIE"
This was timely for me - since the weather improved I have started cycling to work every so often. Generally this has offset use of public transport so little impact on oil use but I guess I would have used the car once or twice. However it has really brought home to me how inefficient is the automotive solution: in exchange for the benefits of car travel, which are basically convenience and autonomy, I have to move a ton of machinery 15 miles each way, I burn three litres of diesel, I pay to park and I probably eat sweets on the journey. The posts above put numbers to this. The car is as solid and heavy as the manufacturers could make it, electric everything, thick seats, wide tyres. The bike is elegant, skeletal, beautiful. At 30mph the car is a lumpen slug. 30 on the bike feels like flying. The bike takes a little longer (at peak times it's no different) but it gives me a real high that carries me through the morning. I have always felt a little immoral using the car to get to work, now I would feel stupid. The next task, of course, is to do it on homegrown food rather than ingested crude...
Does anyone know of better pricing/sourcing than this for LiFePo4 batteries?
http://www.batteryspace.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=4986
What are you building , Eric?
Same thing I always build Pinky - battery packs.
-48VDC is the standard telco pack. So by picking that, I'm most compatible with my battery bank(s), the Briggs/Strattion prime movers (2) that I have, the hub motors, the telco EQ and co-lo EQ.
The voltage range of Li-ion is extreme compared to lead-acid, so I'm not sure how compatible you're going to be regardless.
I've been lusting after those 60 AH cells myself. Got a few ideas.
.. and I suppose you've been here, but these folks have a constant discussion going about where to get and how to hack decent LiPo4 packs together, including returned ToolPaks, R/C racing packs, Chinese builds.. etc.
http://visforvoltage.org/forum/6069-what-best-48-volt-rear-hub-set-35-mp...
Look at Ebay
We did a group buy directly from China
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/lifepo4-purchase/
My 48 volt 20Ahr pack and discussion here .....
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=8705&start=120
I split the pack to fit half on each side of the bike
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10162336@N06/3361124121/sizes/l/
Does anyone, anywhere, market an exercise machine that generates electricity instead of wasted energy (heat etc.), or a device that, like the pedal power system for the "Greenfleet and Friends" concert, allows using my favorite bicycle as a power source with which to generate electricity?