Let me take this notion for a little excursion…
First a little lesson from history: The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
Horse powered transport was a very smelly business. Bear in mind that the horses were used primarily for transport and not all the other things we need to power such has heating and lighting. For that we had coal and gas to just to give a little sooty pep to the city air at the time. Life in the city at the turn of the 20th century was decidedly unhealthy.
Given that the major cities were facing a prospect of being buried in horse manure the popularity with which the new electric tram and street cars was unsurprising. The economics of running that new tech versus teams of horses were quite convincing. Horses were costly to run and coal was cheap and a lot more energy dense than horse feed.
But what if you had land for a horse and pasture for to grazing and did not mind spreading its horsey effluent on your rose garden?
What if we update that requirement to calculating how long it would take for a horse going around in circles generating electrical power to charge the battery…in an EV, a certain distance? Say to charge a battery of 50KWh to get 200miles range (on a good day). We could use the same battery to power a home, once the technical compatibility issues are resolved.
Now, of course, you could just ride the horse all that way for 200 miles. But you would not want to do that if the weather was inclement or you had luggage or passengers.
How long would it take for a horse to generate enough power to charge 50KWh? How much would it cost to house, feed, water the horse and dispose of the…emissions? Hire that man with a shovel?
To avoid delving deeply into horse economics, let us consider an more familiar animal. How about a human pedaling a cycle to generate electricity to charge a battery. This seems to be a popular project on youtube.
This suggests a cyclist could generate 1KWh/day.
50 days of cycling 8 hours a day to charge your EV…
Humans are not very efficient at converting the energy in food into muscle power and thence to electrical power. Horses are bigger and stronger, but having also to content with the overhead of metabolism, not much more efficient. I guess it would take a few weeks.
Solar panels are wind turbines would be a lot less trouble, for sure.
But pedaling away on a cycle for weeks on end to charge up your EV, would surely do wonders for the waistline! With a few bike generators and the whole family involved pedaling in shifts, that excursion in the EV could be possible in just a few weeks. 