80 cyclists power family home - channel 1 right now!

I've got a friend who has recently, almost by accident, started a business converting watermills into generators, and he has loads of people on his waiting list. Micro generation seems like a great idea to me. Would make us use a lot less if we knew how hard it is to make power with our own physical effort.

A good and worthwhile thing, but insignificant compared to national energy consumption. It's called micro hydro for a reason, each one can supply the energy needs of only a handful of people, and there aren't nearly enough rivers and streams to go round.

The only way to do enough micro generation to meet our electricity consumption is to use fossil fuels. The idea is that by doing the generation at home, you get some benefit from the waste heat that generation inevitably creates. However, it turns out to be as efficient and much more flexible to burn the fossil fuels in a large power station and use heat-pumps to turn it back into heat at home. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c21/page_150.shtml

(and while the heat pump becomes carbon neutral just as fast as the power stations do, fossil fuel micro CHP plant continues to emit CO2 until it's switched off. (No, there aren't enough biofuels to go round either.))

Personally, I think we need every scrap of renewable power we can find (but lets chase the big scraps hardest), and nuclear (with reprocessing or very high burn-up, so the waste problem is smaller and decays quicker), and massive, life-style changing, economy changing efficiency improvements.