Alternative Energy Forums

Hi guys and gals. I think this is a great project... most of the input seems to assume peddle power is the only way to produce human energy! if this is the case we are already doomed.

Listing formulas for energy production is nice however working smarter instead of harder is my suggestion. In other words a man can have a known estimated output of energy. What you do with that energy and how you chose to achieve it can not be a fixed sum. M-FTW The sky is the limit. I challenge this be the question answered.

Dennisbmennis

(Oct 15 2009 08:30 AM)Guest Wrote:  Hello.

I recently had an idea. I wanted to find out if anyone has information about large-scale human-based power.

I got the idea from watching a movie that had some shots of power-generating windmills, lots of them. If kinetic energy from wind can be converted into electricity in your home, why can't the combined power of thousands of people be used in the same way?

I had the notion that a person operating a bicycle would not be enough. But imagine an entire legion of people, all pedaling bicycles attached to generators at the same time for hours at a time. That's an energy AND unemployment solution. It seems like that would be pretty economical, but I wanted to find out what someone else thinks. It occurred to me that someone else surely must have thought of this by now and it wasn't done because it couldn't be. But, you never know unless you ask.

kleinicus

Hi kleinicus

we're a small pedal powered company based in London. We've no long finished filming a 'human power station' experiment for a science show in the UK called 'Bang goes the theory'.

We'd starting doing really simple bike generator and lanterns at a big festival, plus small PA systems. Then early this year we were approached by a production company asking if we'd like to design a human power station to power a family home for 12 hours. It was an interesting project for sure and we agree to do it despite having no idea how we’d do it. Anyway, we started with 11 friends, most of who were really hung over that morning and attempted to boil a 1kw. This worked ok although perhaps a bit clunky! It was at that point that we decided to use much bigger ultracapacitors instead of batteries for the project. What was interesting about that decision at that time is that we had no real idea how they'd behaved when 70 or 80 people we generating simultaneously; I mean 80 people each doing an average of 10amps? That’s a big current. So we worked on the kettle boiling system and took it to a few festivals improving each time we attempted it. The next step was to do a serious test. So we setup 30 bicycle generators at a local velodrome in London and recruited some serious cyclist to power a small kitchen! Neeless-to-say the test worked well! We managed at one point to boil two 3kw kettles and half a toaster, about 7kw. This gave an average of around 240watts per rider including all of the extensive losses (each generator was only about 35% efficient). This BBC filmed the event and will hopefully include it as a part of the main shoot we did the last September - one family living in a house, completely unaware of where their electricity is coming from; one human power station with 80 'human turbines'. The science bit: 6x 500F ultracapcitors, 3x 5kwa victron inverters, 12 morningstar ts-60 and enough dump load to heat a small furnace. You'll have to wait and watch the show to find out how this experiment went. The show goes out on December the 6th on BBC. It should follow on BBC iplayer shortly after.

I hope this goes someway to answers your questions!

Thanks
Colin
electricpedals.com