I got to thinking about all the people in the world who are sitting on exercise bikes churning away and I wondered, “What if someone hooked them up to some electricity producing whachamadoohicky thing?”
There’s so much energy expended in fitness gyms and such that I then got to thinking about if it were possible to start building gyms where everything was hooked up to one of the whachamadoohickies. Would the gym, at least, be able to provide energy for itself in that way?
You can see I have very little understanding of what I’m talking about…
Aside from the excercise bike analogy, are there other places where energy is produced, but not captured in such large quantities that it could provide a significant amount of energy?
Back in the '70s (Carter Admin – Energy Crisis) a guy (from the Department of Energy, I think) gave a presentation at our high school that involved a volunteer pedaling a stationary bike hooked up to a generator hooked up to several appliances. The point was to show us how hard you’d have to pedal just to power a lamp and a hair dryer. And after several minutes the volunteer had generated less than a penny’s worth of power.
This looks promising, though. I’ve often wondered the same as the OP. In a short driving distance from here there are dozens of gyms and health clubs. With all the health clubs in all the towns in all the country, I wonder how much power could be harnessed?
Urine pulled out of sewage has electrical potential, which could be used to frequently recharge a urine battery.
Geo-thermal furnaces use heat sucked up from deep in the ground - they could be more widespread.
Aside from the cost of the panels, I never really understood why there hasn’t been a push from the government to get solar panel roofs on new construction. Depending on the size of the roof it costs a good $7000 for a new shingled roof. How about the government pitch in the rest for some decent sized solar panels that can power the building or home? I think the $2.7 trillion budget would suffice.
I’ve often wondered along the same lines as the OP, and I’m pretty sure the answer is that free energy isn’t free. It needs some kind of infrastructure that’s expensive and inconvenient. For example, if you take all the gyms in the land, and hook up all the treadmills to generators, you probably would only supply the energy needs of a couple hundred houses. And where do you put the generators, transmission lines, etc., and who pays the expense of maintaining them? Whenever the energy is generated by some non-fixed source (i.e., your average human donkey), you have a major efficiency issue.
Re bup’s post – “Geo-thermal furnaces use heat sucked up from deep in the ground - they could be more widespread” – has anyone ever estimated the effect if this was done on a wide scale? Presumably shifting heat from the interior of the earth to the surface would have *some * effect, but would it be negligible?
I seem to remember a comparison of energies that more or less indicated that if the whole world tried to go to 100% wind power it would take the entire wind energy of the belts of trade winds to accomplish that. No idea how it relates to geothermal, but that energy has to come from SOMEWHERE and if you’re removing it from natual systems inefficiently there might be ramifications.
On the other hand, geothermal energy is just heat, and efficiency losses in energy use become…heat. The question is how much does it hurt to move some of that waste energy from down there to up here, I suppose.
Changes in air pressure/temperature. IIRC there were clocks invented in the Renaissance that were self-powered by changes in air pressure and temperature (ridiculously complex, of course.)
Up to now, they haven’t been used more widely because of manufacturing costs. Which are now down to “$4 per watt.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Photovoltaic_cells This article says, “[S]hortages of refined silicon have been hampering production worldwide since late 2004.” I don’t know how that could be – isn’t sand made mostly of silicon? How expensive can it be to refine it?
Unfortunately the US won’t see this technology for another 10 years because the ConEds and other energy companies will lobby against it saying the “untested” technology may be harmful to the environment or to human exposure… something rediculous like that.
“If it don’t make dollars it don’t make sense.”
-DJ Quick
How 'bout the government use your money to do that? You want solar panels? Buy them. Meanwhile, another source of energy might be the earth itself. There should be something can be done with its magnetic field.
If this is anything like a lemon battery, then it’s not so much the urine making the electricty, but the corrosion of the metal electrodes; metal which has generally been refined at a higher energy cost than is produced by the battery.