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• #51
JimL
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Eventually there would be no more fat people to burn and the problem with oil running out would be back. What if they dieted before being useful? Someone could start a survey of the least liked nationality and they could be fed up and burned to keep us running. We work down the list until noone else remains. Pigs are more equal.
fatties are more renewable than fossils. there must be 150 million obese Americans, alone. The best bit is that as the supply of flabby batteries dwindles, demand for energy would also decrease.
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You realise that that means killing about 3 billion people world wide? The smell and fumes would be noticable for miles. When do we start?
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Energy storage - compressed air if its gotta be portable
Or flywheel if notThey powered a shower for 5 mins in the clip on website. Thats 0.62kWh if the shower's rated at 7.5kW, which works out at ten pence using TSKs rate. Electricity will only get more spenny, so we'll be looking to all these things more in the future. You can waddle, fatty, but you can't hide.
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This remind anyone else of the fast show sketch? Chris Waddle.
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That's why I deleted it.
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The best way to store the energy is to pump it back into the national grid taking advantage of government subsidies to effectively offeset your normal usage. Therefore you energy is used by someone else but you get the benefits... You may even be able to apply for a local authority grant to offset the additional costs - not sure if you could stretch it to a custom built frame as this would be more efficiant for energy production though....
New regulation coming in next year will also mean you get money fo the amount of generation you have regardless of how much you produce back to the grid to incentivise people to invest in microgen
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I didnt watch the program.
However the maths sounds seriously Iffy,
I mean, what about the fact that you have to fuel the people with More Kj of energy than they would be able to produce from the cycling, and with all of the other losses ontop, this would be unbearably inefficient.
Energy don't come from nowhere.
In Fact, you could burn the food directly, to produce more energy than the bicycles. This way you cut out the middle man, literally.
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I didnt watch the program.
However the maths sounds seriously Iffy,
I mean, what about the fact that you have to fuel the people with More Kj of energy than they would be able to produce from the cycling, and with all of the other losses ontop, this would be unbearably inefficient.
Energy don't come from nowhere.
In Fact, you could burn the food directly, to produce more energy than the bicycles. This way you cut out the middle man, literally.
That's why you stick the fatties on the bikes. Exercise and starve them 'til they're thin then let them back into society.
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Imagine the smell of that many fat people sweatting themselves thin.
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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.
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You realise that that means killing about 3 billion people world wide? The smell and fumes would be noticable for miles. When do we start?
Omelette/eggs.
We should start immediately. At the current price of fish and chips our fuel source will be increasing faster than we can cull it. In fact I'm surprised the ONEWORLDGOVERNMENT hasn't already started building the secret slaughter facilities (cunningly disguised as burger joints).
nods and taps nose
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Or flywheel if not
My raving-lunatic best friend and I have discussed this at some lenght. What we've come up with is an idea for a health club that is nothing more than a series of stationary bicycles linked to shafts that are geared to spin a large flywheel. Efficiency actually works out to about 85%, every time you run power through a geartrain you los a little... but 85% isn't all that bad. Anyway, have a coin box on each bicycle. Feed it a small amount to start using it. Every 5 minutes, one of the following things will occur:
1) If you're not pedalling hard enough (say, < 100 watts), you need to put in more money.
2) If you're pedalling just hard enough to keep up (say, 100-125 watts), you get to continue free of charge
3) If you're really working hard, say 125 watts and up, the machine starts dropping coins back out at you.Given two dozen pedalling stations, a fairly heavy flywheel (something on the order of a couple ton) running in good bearings and turning a generator head, you could fairly reasonably expect to be able to keep the lights on most of the time. Low-voltage LEDs would be the way to go, of course.
When I build my home, sometime in the next three years, I don't want to use anything higher than 12V DC in my home. Heavens, here in the States, there's an entire industry for mobile appliances: I can buy refrigerators and microwave ovens that will run on 12V DC, and recent advances in LED technology make using them for home lighting a viable alternative. They require smaller wiring, too, reducing cost that way as well. Not to mention that the risk of an electrical fire gets vanishingly small. I'm pretty firmly committed to making all my own electricity, and so when I bought the land on which I wish to build, I was delighted to find a waterfall on it! It isn't much for flow, perhaps 25 gallons/minute, but it's over an 80-foot drop. I know I can power a turbine with that, perhaps in two stages (two 40-foot drops).
Now all I have to do is win the lottery!
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Pedal powered generator course in London:
http://www.lowimpact.org/hackney_course_outline_pedal_power.htmBest bang for buck is a wind turbine, and the UK is the windiest place in europe. Photovoltaics are fantastic but a bit expensive. Either way if you aren't grid connected you'll need a battery bank. You could in theory connect your genercycle to the batteries as a little extra top up, especially useful in the winter months.
As Captain Blight says, LEDs and such are really helping to cut electrical usage. If you have to generate all your own energy you'll be a lot more frugal with it and the benefit from having a bike generating electricity will get effectively greater. If you live in a 1960's house with electric heating then you may as well not bother at all.
The average house is so inefficently designed with hightly inefficient appliances and lighting and heating systems. Basically everything is completely backwards. A correctly designed house will not even require a heating system, or at least an extremely small one.
http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/
I went to visit this building here and on a freezing January morning it was warm and toasty inside. It has a wood pellet boiler that was donated to them but it hasn't needed to be used. All the heat is provided by the sun and absorbed by the walls and floor and then re-radiates back out into the living space at night.As a side note, there are courses about for building your own wind turbine. These guys below used to do one but this appears not to be available any more. General renewables courses available though.
http://www.lowimpact.org/courseoutlinewindandsolar.htm -
You don't get something for nothing - the energy you'd be creating would be nothing compared to the energy used to grow and transport the food and drink you've used to gain the energy to turn the pedals. As well as resistances in the pedals and the non-100% efficiency of the equipment and your body at coverting energy.
So pretty suckish really!
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