Showing posts with label pedal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pedal. Show all posts

Saturday, October 3, 2009

How much energy is that, in human terms?

As I have wandered through the Web in search of hard information about energy efficiency, I have come to learn a little bit about the scale of energy that is required to run houses as we have built them in my neighborhood. Perhaps some of you have wondered, as I have, if there are not better ways to provide that energy. Maybe I could take human-generated energy, from riding an exercise bike, and use that to power part of my home.
Powering my home for a day in 2007, after my initial set of improvements, required anywhere from 9 to 37 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, with the average being about 22 kWh.

To put that in human terms, when I ride hard on an exercise bike at the gym, I can generate around 100 Watts (0.1 kW), perhaps double that in short bursts, according to the readout attached to the bike. So riding hard for 1 hour, using my body to generate power, would yield 1 hour X 0.1 kW = 0.1 kWh. In fact, if I pedaled all day without drinking, eating, or sleeping, and used that energy to power my home, I would generate 24 hours X 0.1 kW = 2.4 kWh, slightly more than 10% of my energy use on an average day.
To extrapolate further, to power my relatively modest needs, I would need 10 people riding generator bikes 24 hours a day, for every day of the year. Of course, no one could keep that up... to allow for breaks for eating, sleeping, and recovery, I'd probably need 20 or 30 people, pedaling as much as they could stand, every day.
In other words, my energy needs go _way_ beyond what I can provide with human power.