Clearly I’m missing something here, else someone would have thought of it by now. But if we generate electricity by spinning turbines, then why not, say, hitch up a team of draft horses to a turbine and have them walk around in circles?
Animals in general and horses in particular are very ineffective at energy conversion if you just want to use their muscle strength. Then they sleep for hours every day, take years to grow, fall ill and generally defecate a ton. You’d be better off fermenting what they eat and burning the alcohol in a turbine. This is also more reliable and cheaper.
I came here for a discussion about whether it is better to connect the eels in series or parallel circuits. Damn!
Now, if we had Superman, we could talk.
I keep wondering as a science fiction scenario if a genetically engineered creature could be made that was a “reverse” electric eel: would feed on electric current and waste matter to grow.
Parallel. If it’s in series and one eel dies the whole battery goes down.
Eels don’t die, they just reverse the polarity.
Come to think of it, this brings the battery down too. OK, parallel then.
Animals used to power everything from cooking spits to mills. And there are people using them to provide electric power – here’s a couple of examples; for the first one I only got as far as the abstract, but it’s enough to get the idea:
However, as even those point out, these are setups best suited for small scale use by people who already have livestock and who don’t have easy access to other ways of generating electricity. Not really practical to try to power a city, or even most places in rural areas, by such methods.
Well, the old version of the SDMB took advantage of this - you’ll see frequent references to the hamsters.
Pro: they breed prolifically
Con: One hamster can’t produce all that much power; the array of wheels necessary to power the board was enormous, and they don’t live all that long.
Draft animals used for labor need, among other things, food, water, rest, health care, and they need to be kept reasonably content to keep working, they aren’t machines. And they create a lot of waste piss and shit that must be dealt with. They wear out too and must be replaced often. So you need some animal husbandry going on too.
Feel free to give it a try but you, or someone you employ is going to have a full time job dealing with all the feeding and shit. A lot of shit. The amount of shit from just an average dairy farm will overwhelm a person. They have to keep it in tanks and in my area they get rid of it by spraying it back on the fields as fertilizer.
Maybe you can get some low cost energy, but you now have a full time business dealing with shit. A lot of shit. Probably takes up all the energy you created just to deal with the shit.
What do you want? A team of oxen or mules? They both have pros and cons, and yes, personalities to deal with. If you want to be a HR manager of really stupid and cranky animals, who shit a lot, go right ahead.
Did I mention the shit part?
I’ve actually worked on a horse farm. Oh, yes, there are literal tons of shit.
But that’s only one part of it. You also need tons of feed going in the other end of the animals.
Also, horses (and cows, oxen, donkeys, mules, etc.) are large enough animals that they can hurt or kill you accidentally.
One reason the automobile caught on in the early 20th Century is the abrupt reduction in needing to deal with feed, large potentially dangerous animals, and shit.
Yes, you can use animals to power things. Our ancestors did so. They also jumped to new technologies fairly quickly when they became available because animal power has its downsides.
Dropping the cat behind them tended to help but shortened their lifespan.
For the same reasons we now ride motor vehicles instead of horses.
Let me just say that keeping a horse is a lot of work that you MUST do daily, even if you only keep one horse.
My car and pickup, on the other hand, I can just park for a week or two and they don’t care if I ignore them, and they aren’t harmed by it.
At least it would be easier to ID a dead eel than the old-style Christmas lights from when I was a kid. Remembering my dad having to try replacing every single light to find which one burned out and killed the whole string.
1 horsepower x 10 hours x 50% efficiency = 4 kWh
(All of those numbers are wrong)
Typical home electricity use is something like 30 kWh per day.
I wonder how the energy to produce the feed compares to what the animals can generate.
People have already mentioned shit, a lot of it. Feed, a lot of it.
I’d also like to add : clearing up forests to grow the feed. A lot of it.
Making fertilizers to grow / harvest / process that feed. A lot of it.
And lets not forget the shit running into the water and contaminating it. The measures that need to be taken to keep the shit away from water also take time and energy.
But we could–if necessary–use genetically resurrected mamoths to tighten springs for clockwork devices. (Let’s see who gets that one!)
I had an acquaintance who used to work and run a small family farm for 4 decades and he said dealing with horses was the worst experience of all the livestock he had. You can’t milk them, You can’t butcher them for meat(well technically you could do both but there is not a market in the US for horse milk or meat.)
And he said don’t ever agree board another person’s horse for them because a lot of horse people are high maintenance and demanding.
You will have to series them to get 110v, and then parallel those groups to have enough current.
We can feed them with guys who don’t pay their electric bill.
How about the deal in Gone With the Wind, where prisoners worked at the mill? We can have prisoners walking on tread mills.