20 posts and no The Matrix references? We’re slipping.
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. 
Almost ruined an otherwise fascinating book for me.
You are not the only Paolo Bacigalupi fan out here.
There’s a reason that mills were powered by water or wind where people had figured out the technology. Grinding grain by hand could certainly be done - it was, for thousands of years in many places. Hitching draft animals up to turn a mill is also possible, and had been done. But even with their limitations, water and wind power were much better in so many ways.
Jeez, laughin’ out loud, here.
Dan
Well, for one, Rick Sanchez holds the patent on Gooble Boxes, and I don’t wanna be on the opposite side of a courtroom from him.
I don’t think that a modern, high-tech civilization could be powered effectively by animals, but it’s possible that a lower-tech, low electrical use one might be.
Consider that before the advent of electricity and steam/gasoline/diesel civilizations already were running on animal power (a lot of it human power). I could easily see some of that power going into making electricity. But it would be a much smaller and slower civilization, without our awesome system of communications and the internet. That’s a tradeoff I don’t think people would be interested in. And I suspect it would mean the return of involuntary servitude and indentured servitude. It’s long been my belief that the advent of steam is what made the anti-slavery movement successful at long last.
If you’ve ever hand-cranked a generator to run a light bulb (it’s a small tabletop-sized device) you’ll realize quickly how much “work” is required to power anything of much use. I just saw a video a few days ago of a kid cranking a generator with an incandescent light bulb, a compact fluorescent, and an LED. There were buttons to switch between the three. He could barely get a glow out of the incandescent, the compact fluorescent kind of half started, and the LED lit right up with no problem. I can’t remember where the video was though, maybe Facebook? Anyway, you could argue that today’s technology might enable animal power to be more useful for something like lighting, or maybe charging a cell phone or something, but anything beyond that requires quite a lot of power.
There was (still is?) an demo in the British Science Museum in London in the “Secret Life of the Home” exhibit with a mechanical refrigerator. Turning a crank would directly drive the compressor and make the evaporator coil in the display chill and become frosty. It would take several people tag-teaming turning the crank as hard as possible so that after several minutes it would finally start to frost over. They heated up the room a lot more with their effort than that little display would cool it back down, that’s for sure.
That would happen even with a modern refrigerator or any refrigerator for that matter. You cannot cool a room with a refrigerator door left open, the room will get hotter in the long run.
As a friend of mine once succinctly put it – “Refrigerators do not generate cold. They re-arrange heat.”
Slightly OT, but that reminds me of the second section of “A Canticle for Leibowitz” where the monks rigged up a re-invented arc lamp powered by a re-invented dynamo driven by four novices.
Yes but the statement isn’t as funny with all of the caveats attached. I thought the sign saying “refrigerators” was the evaporator for the hand-cranked system, but that appears to be its own independent unit. There’s just two small evaporator and condenser coils wrapped into a spiral inside the display case with thermometers on them. https://twitter.com/sciencemuseum/status/1001887240962936832/photo/1
I think Tim Hunkin (from the TV series The Secret Life of Machines) wanted them all connected, but it took so much effort to run the hand-cranked system that it would never build up enough frost on the lettering, so they had to separate them out. He wrote extensively on his website about designing and building the exhibit, which is fascinating in its own right.
Nor any references to Fifteen Million Merits, the second episode of Black Mirror.
The 1975 Italian documentary suggests a possible solution by the year 2037.
Here’s a previous thread on the subject, hamster variant, from 2012.
Oh, another one, human variant, from 2008.
It’d be more efficient to take the bike wherever you needed to go! I once read an article that compared walking vs biking vs taking a car, and concluded that in terms of energy spent converted to miles travelled, the bike came out on top. Obviously there are limitations to that.
In the book Make Room, Make Room (on which Soylent Green was based) there’s mention of the two men who share a room having a bicycle in their room to generate a small amount of power for a light or something similar. I don’t recall whether the movie mentioned that. I do remember a crank at a museum where you could try to power a 60 watt bulb - and it was really hard to spin that thing enough to fully light the bulb.
Here’s an article that seems to refer to the same source material as whatever I read. It seems to just talk about energy needed to get around, not energy which could be harvested by each method.
Human-powered mills were used in prisons at some point per Wikipedia (the article focuses on a penal treadmill which produced nothing, but there’s a brief reference to prisoner-powered mills which WERE used to mill grain etc.). I have to wonder whether there mightn’t be some sort of utility to setting up something, nowadays, that lets a prisoner help generate power in lieu of other prison work, though I suspect the idea would be shot down quickly.
Don’t they damage their sight adjusting the arc gap?
Those hand cranked and pedal driven demonstration generators needed variable gearing. Beyond a certain point you spent more energy cranking fast than actually generating electricity.