By Amanda Froelich at trueactivist.com
Would you exercise for an hour every day if the workout powered your home for twenty-four hours?
People often complain about the high costs of energy and the fact that they “never have time to workout.” This invention certainly solves both conundrums.
And, most importantly, this free power invention has the potential to lift the 1.3 billion people who presently live without electricity out of poverty.
As Manoj Bhargava, the founder of the Free Electric hybrid bike, shares in his video above, it is possible to generate electricity at home while simply doing a daily workout routine.
When an individual pedals the bike, the action drives a flywheel, which turns a generator and charges a battery. This means from just one hour of pedaling, a rural household can be supplied with energy for 24 hours.
The billionaire and his team developed the bicycle to take advantage of mechanical energy created by humans to solve one of the world’s most pervasive problems.
“Everything requires energy. Energy is the great equaliser,” says Bhargava, adding that over half of the world’s population have no access to electricity or access to electricity for two or three hours per day.
Having access to clean, free energy will enable poverty-stricken communities to not only light their homes but to connect to the internet and get educated. Bhargava says the reason the majority of those who are poor stay poor is because they have no power. He aims to fix this with the free energy bicycle.
One bicycle could potentially provide a small village with electricity if each household spends on hour per day pedaling the bike.
In developed nations, the bike could also be utilized to cut energy costs and remedy the obesity crisis.
The bicycle is also a clean way to generate power. As Bhargava says himself, if half of the world uses a Free Electric bike, half of the world would be using eco-friendly energy.
Manoj’s plan is to distribute 10,000 of the bicycles in India next year. In addition, he has pledged 90% of his wealth to charity and research.
What are your thoughts on this amazing invention? Comment below and share this good news!
This article (60 Minutes On This Bicycle Can Power Your Home For 24 Hours!) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.
I think this is an awesome idea, basically its a win-win situation, when your workout rewards you not only with burned fats and callories but also with electricity 😀
I would so do this, is it available in Canada
A great episode of Rick and Morty in season 2 about universes created to provide energy syphoned off to next higher universe. Starring Stephen Colbert. Very funny episode with obvious sequel opportunities. Peace among worlds, Rick.
The average home uses 4killowatts equals 4000 watts this generates 500watts per hour of cycling. Does this mean you you need a family of 8 to cycle for 1hour each? A 2 slice Toaster cost 700watts to toast bread in 3 minutes by itself. It takes an oylmpic cycler about 3minutes 15seconds at full chat, exhaustion, to toast the bread nevermind trying to do an hour albeit at lower speed.
My BS meter pegged reading this too. If you could power your house with a bike, we could drive around like the Flintstones. No way a bike could power an HVAC or a dryer…maybe that guy is really a 20-foot tall giant in really good shape or something.
Not sure if you know what poverty is but they don’t usually have hair dryers or toaster or kettles for that matter……watching the full video you would see that his aim is the bring people out of poverty by providing them with energy, education and a connection to the outside world….
Very well said. We’re talking about a 40w bulb or even less and power to charge a cell. That’s hard to understand when we have free power to keep the engines oil warm in winter in a parking lot.
A top tier cyclist can produce 300-400 watts for an hour, or 400watt/hours, or .4kw/hrs. An untrained (ie, non-olympic) cyclist will produce much less than that. You could run 1 40w bulb for 10 hours. or 10 4 w LED bulbs for 10 hrs. Refrigeration, resistive heating (oven, cooktop, etc) are out of the question. Water pump? Hardly. .4kw/hrs per day is not much at all. I think the claims made by this product’s marketing defy the laws of physics, or else they have teeny, tiny houses with no fridge. You could get .4kw/hr much easier with a single photovoltaic panel. A 100w panel costs about a hundred bucks. Much more efficient way to produce home power, and it’s in use already.
someonewhoactuallywatchedthefullvideo: the headline says “..power YOUR home for 24 hours.” The only person he’s going to bring out of poverty is himself.
So why is he saying it can power all your needs in America after a natural disaster?
‘…..everyone needs a cell phone & the internet….’
Adding the flywheel I can see how it makes generating the power easier, but again it must be one helluva generator to produce the levels of electric required to support a western home.
True but does the average third world village need an iphone and a compact fluorescent light to escape poverty or do they need something like an irrigation pump to bring water to their meager crops? An old early nineteenth century stationary engine and a barrel of kerosene would do more for a third world village than a pedal powered generator for their useless iphone or LED light.
That one stationary engine (affectionately called “hit and miss” engines by collectors) could power many useful implements from pumps to grain mills to washing machines.
A single 55 gallon drum of fuel would power it for a long time too, this is what would reduce their work load and give their kids a chance at education to better themselves.
Read the article, it’s designed for rural homes or energy/cash poor villages, however there could be a use for it in modern life as a motivator to lose weight or to keep fit and generate some free energy too.
Well if you read you would see it said developed counties it could cut energy cost, not eliminate it. Small rural villages are not running hvac systems or televisions etc. Entire families live in one or two rooms, for 500 watts would go a long way to improving their lives.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. An average person can keep up 100 to 200 watts for an hour to several hours. An exceptional athlete might produce 500 watts for a short period of time. So no, this would not produce all the electricity a household needs in a developed nation. Not even close. But for people who have no electricity at all, this could easily produce enough energy to run LED lightbulbs and maybe a few small appliances. Kids could study after the sun goes down. People could charge their cellphones, maybe run a low power laptop computer for an hour or two. It does have its uses, but it is not the solution to the world’s energy problems.
Actually, most exercise bikes will allow the average human to generate about 200Watts, which is about a 1/4 horsepower. Only the fittest athletes will generate about 300 w and then only for about an hour.
P;lug in a PC and 1 hours pedaling will only generate enough power for about 30 min running time.
The hardware in the photo would create about 6 cents worth of power an hour. That means you would pedal for 1 hour per day for 17 days (17 hours) to create $1 of power. Assuming the machine cost $1000, you would be pedaling for 17 thousand hours over 47 years to pay back the machine. Doh.
I’ve been looking around to see where it states it’s statistics and keep falling short. Do you have a source for that figure?
Very good idea. Where can you obtain electric hybrid bike ?
I would also like to know where or when these can be purchased.
Why not build your own?
I would love to buy one too. I really wouldn’t know how to build one myself. Where and how much are such a bike?
I truly don’t mean any offense when I say this.
If you don’t know how to build one, it is easy to see why you and many others are so easily conned by the claims of this man and his generator.
The machine is simple, the technology is, in relative terms, very old, I had a bicycle when I was a kid that had a little generator on it to power a headlight. This is nothing new, we have had these things for 70 years. That fact alone should tell you all you need to know, if we already have these, why doesn’t everyone use them?
The input power required for this generator to do anything useful in your life will guarantee that it remains in your closet collecting dust for years. A simple solar cell on your roof or even on the back porch will produce more watts of power per dollar spent and it won’t drive your grocery bill through the roof to feed you the required calories need to pedal this generator.
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very good idea, i too like to donate some cycles if I am informed of the cost.
Sorry for my comment. I appreciate the innovative idea, that is, apart from the genius that created it, very simple.
But, there is no “free energy” if produced by conventional ways.
Have you thought about what would be the human body in this energy system? It would be the engine: an engine that consume resources like food. That is done by electricity, gas and other stuff. So, the balance of the equation is: I produce “free” energy with my body, but I will need to eat more to respond to the physical effort. So, we should even consider the efficiency of the human body.
I don’t want to destroy this very nice idea, I am an estimator of the bike like it is the best transportation way of the world, but the very “free” energy systems are other 🙂
if riding the bike for an hour burns 500 calories and you lose some weight so you burn 200 calories less a day.. A net cost of 300 calories. That is 3 slices of bread with butter which is not very much.
Yes, there is no free lunch if you investigate a bit. You cannot produce much electricity with pedaling no matter how effective the bike is.
Too bad 🙁
Maybe its more the technology of creating more energy with less effort? If I hooked up a kids tricycle to this, there would be a lot of energy required, if I hooke up a Time Trial bike, there is now less effort, if in the case of this video, your using a Flywheel to store energy, hmmmmmm so think of it more as creating more energy with less work. NASA is putting in considerable “energy” into creating flywheel based energy storage systems to replace batteries hmmmmm
You can only generate about 200 watts, regardless of the bike type or speed. A light bike will get you further and faster for your 200W but it is still only 200W
That is a good answer, it is what is often overlooked by “free energy” enthusiasts.
People need to go back to the basics, blow the dust off of those horrible science texts you ignored in high school and learn the laws of thermodynamics.
If only the mass of humanity could somehow come to understand the very simple concepts of energy balance equations and entropy.
The very reason we have internal combustion engines and large electrical generating stations is because we were sick of muscle power for everything we did and the fact that to do what we do now requires more than a team of draft horses and Aunt Elma hand cranking the cream separator.
David, your word choices will get you in trouble with the physics teacher. You said…
“Maybe its more the technology of creating more energy with less effort?”.
The poor word choice is the word creating. We can’t, never have and never will create energy. We can only change it from one form to another and always with a net loss, never a net gain.
The power output of any device will always be less than the power input. In this case, the person pedaling will put in more watts or horsepower of work than he will get out of it, even if it had a thousand flywheels made of unobtanium.
The flywheel adds nothing to this device other than to smooth the power output. It doesn’t increase output, it doesn’t make it easier to pedal and the energy it briefly stores still comes from the guy sweating at the pedals.
As for NASA, they can’t even send a sandwich to the guys on the ISS anymore, they have to rely on other countries to do their heavy lifting. Let’s take your vision of NASA replacing batteries with flywheels and see it through to its logical conclusion…
We currently have a nice, small, fairly lightweight battery based on an electro negative metal like lithium. Easy to use, easy to load, easy to recharge using lightweight solar panels that are already in place on the ISS.
It produces a nice constant rate of power and it can also be shaped to fit in some of those unavoidable empty spaces in various spacecraft. All in all a very nice and convenient power supply.
NASA says “scrap that nonsense battery crap, lets put in a flywheel”. Here is what they do…
The batteries all come out.
An entire extra payload section is created and attached to the craft to house the flywheel. Another smaller section is built to house the old school generator that the flywheel is attached to. These extra sections add a lot of drag on lift-off and accelerating to escape velocity but we can add another fuel compartment for that too.
Then we build massive mounts and bearings for the flywheel to sit on, the flywheel has to store a lot of energy so it needs a lot of mass, this takes a lot more fuel. Add another fuel pod Dave.
We will also need a method of spinning up the flywheel before lift-off, this will be a mechanical coupling through the hull so an off board engine can rotate it just prior to count down then be detached. Pressure hulls don’t particularly like holes in them but we will add another bit of mass and drag with the new coupling hatch.
-3,2,1..lift off. Our craft is racing towards space with a spinning flywheel producing all the electric power we need, at least until it runs out of speed, at which point we have no way of re-spinning it. But while it’s spinning, it’s great, yes it does cause a lot of trouble when we try to roll or pitch the craft (conservation of angular momentum and all) but the addition of that 7th fuel pod to power the extra directional thrusters needed was a small price to pay. Those additional directional thrusters do get hot though considering once we start to coast out in space away from the Earth’s gravity that damned flywheel is constantly trying to rotate the ship around it instead of it rotating inside the ship (damned angular momentum).
Good thing we added the eighth fuel pod to power the constant counter thrust need.
This could go on for some time, here is the take away…
Flywheels have been around longer than batteries, there are reasons we use flywheels and there are reasons we use batteries. Flywheels were at the apex of their technological evolution a few weeks after they were invented. How much innovation can you do with a rotating mass? Improved bearings, better balance but it’s not like you could discover some lighter, stronger material to make them out of, weight is what you need. I guess you could make them out of a very dense metal like plutonium or osmium but they would still weigh a lot. Added weight is not something you try to do with things that fly.
Batteries on the other hand have seen enormous leaps in their technological evolution, we may be reaching their apex but who knows? They are getting smaller, lighter, hold charge longer, recharge faster.
If you want a very long term, compact electricity source, I would suggest a small nuclear core surrounded by a simple peltier device. Dangerous? you bet, but it will provide power in a small, easy to stow package for a very long time.
Dave, I forgot to mention…
Every time you accelerate, decelerate or change direction, you impart a force on the spinning flywheel that slows it down (conservation of momentum again). So if your spacecraft is to really make that spinning flywheel last as long as possible I would avoid any course corrections, don’t do any rolls to expose your scientific equipment to their intended subject matter, in fact, avoid lift-off altogether.
Where are all the batteries for storage?\?
See battery behind seat?
I’m also curious what the energy consumption is in a home in India compared to North America…
Regardless, I would buy a bike if I could afford it
That was my thought. How much energy is it producing for the 24 hours (TV, oven, stove, fridge? ) But, even so, I’m in! I ride a stationary bike 1/2 hour 5 days a week now – I could add in a little more…Can I get energy for crunches as well?
Go to the used auto parts place in your area, buy an alternator and a 12 volt car battery. Go to the hardware store and buy a couple of pulleys and a vee belt.
Bolt the alternator to your stationary bike, mount a big pulley on the wheel of the bike and a small pulley on the alternator and put the belt on.
Hook the alternator leads to the battery (battery needs to have some charge in it or the alternator won’t work) and start pedalling.
Cost not including the bike…$100
Output…12 volts
Want 120 VAC? buy a cheap inverter from an auto parts store and pedal like a mad fiend to watch one minute of television before you’re exhausted.
Great idea, but there are still massive hurdles to overcome in terms of manufacturing half a billion of these and then distributing them where they are needed. And what about installation and maintenance? As someone pointed out, you will also need extra calories to power this thing. Wonderful idea but hardly a magic bullet. Ironically I see this taking off a lot faster in the developed world where people have the up-front capital to buy, implement and maintain it.
SO WHERE CAN WE GET ONE?
What a great idea,wish this would be a reality. Put that in a gym where people work out daily , then it would be a gym / power plant 😀 Keep some and sell the extra power to some other , maybe could get the effect that a powerplant could be turned of. Depends on the battery though.
As always with great ideas, the negative side of me think like this. The power company buy’s the patent and the rights , then stuff it in a filing cabinet faar inside a room and forget about it and keep people useing nuclear/coal power ,because free power is poor business for them.
This idea isn’t patentable. People have been building these for decades, so there is plenty of “prior art.” Anybody could build one, and several companies are currently building commercially available pedal generators.
Hmmmm well for starters, this is not a pedal generator, in the sense of what your implying. This is a Flywheel, storing energy and driving a generator. NASA is putting in a considerable amount of engineering into designing flywheel based storage systems to replace batteries, soooo if it was soooo easy and already commercially available why is NASA not buying one from Costco ?? LOL
A fly wheel is not a very good energy storage device. It does have its uses but it also has some serious drawbacks, to name a few…
Storage capacity is directly proportional to mass, hydro-electric generating stations use the surplus electricity (generated in off-peak times) to pump water back up into a reservoir. That Lake or reservoir represents an enormous mass. A flywheel of similar capacity would require a similar mass, however, this mass would decrease as rotational velocity increases.
Thus, to store a lot of energy, you need a lot of flywheel. A lot of flywheel takes up a lot of space. It is also very costly to manufacture since the larger it is, the more precise it needs to be balanced and the more massive are the mounts and bearings that support it.
Reduce its mass by increasing its velocity requires even better balance and mounts and bearings. There is also a limit on rotational velocity before the thing destroys itself. Immagine if you will, a flywheel of several tons spinning at 20,000 rpm in everyone’s garage in your neighborhood. Your drunken neighbor Luther can’t even be bothered to cut his grass, maintaining his flywheel is not gonna happen. One day the bearings on the lower mount fail due to lack of care and a slight wobble in the massive flywheel ensues. Moments later and without warning, Luther’s flywheel rips itself apart and 300 pound fragments go slicing through the neighborhood at high velocity.
Frictional and gravitational losses will also cast the flywheel in a negative light, what goes up must come down, spinning wheels slow down and come to a stop even without any work load being placed on them. Are these losses acceptable to your system?
Flywheels hate road trips and avoid directional change at great cost.
Using a flywheel in your car to store braking energy sounds good on first reading but look at the weight you are adding to your vehicle.
Just because it’s already spinning when you are stopped at a red light doesn’t mean it won’t take extra energy to get it moving forward in your car when the light turns green, mass is mass and inertia is inertia.These things don’t magically disappear because of an environmentalist’s dream. That spinning mass will also resist any change in direction (conservation of angular momentum) and will make lane changes a real pain.
Conservation of angular momentum also means that whatever the flywheel is mounted to must be considerably more massive than the flywheel or else it will do the spinning and the flywheel will sit stationary and laugh. This conservation of angular momentum also puts enormous loads on the flywheel mounts and bearings which necessitates that they be made even larger and stronger.
All of these same types of issues (the laws of physics) affect all of our technology. Wind power, solar power, biodiesel, ethanol, all of these technologies have physical limitations that can’t be circumvented by new “magic alien technology”. The laws of physics are immutable even to aliens.
In engineering the simple fact always remains, you can gain “this” but always at the expense of “that”.
There is no free lunch.
Power company buys the patents and the rights?
Are you serious? A patent for something that has been around since the late nineteenth century?
Buy a house, build a garage, fill that garage with some good tools and start tinkering and learning (half of your shop should be devoted to the text books you didn’t read in grade ten).
All of the people in the gym likely won’t produce enough power to run the HVAC unit that cools the place, the gym won’t be selling any surplus back to the evil power company.
a human can produce 500W in one hour. With that you are not gonna power a home in the USA, but maybe have a single LED light glow in a 3rd world home.
An LED uses 14 watts of power. Explain your math again.
that would be a cfl lightbulb
an average led uses between 3-5 watts
A simple LED that we use in electronic displays is 3.4 volts a 30mA or 0.03 Amps.
Amps X Volts = Watts
0.03 X 3.4 = 0.102 Watts for each little LED bulb
You’re right nowhere near enough for a western home, but I have built an off-grid community environment centre in Java where we manage with a tiny 10W solar panel with batteryrunning 4 led lamps and a mobile phone each day, plus a fee solar desk lamps. We pump water by hand and have no fridge, tv, kettle etc. Because its a community space we could have around 10 adults a day using the bike so we could power a couple laptops or a watch a movie on a projector now and again, which would be handy, but my concern with it is that people are not overweight there and do not have extra calories avaiable to burn – they are living on about a a dollar a day or less which feeds them ok but only just. Also its hot and humid, so id say 20 minutes tops for cycling time per person.
Where can these be purchased? How do I acquire one of these?
What an amazing idea! Definitely would help in poverty-stricken areas and war torn countriesas well, brilliant on his behave to think of such a great idea. For homes that’s already set up to regular electricity in North America is it feasible to do this with our type of electricity it’s already set up here?
I don’t know who is not doing the proper research, but a human riding a bike can only produce a few hundred watts of power at a peak. We will call it 500 watts constantly. That means it would take 2 hours of non stop biking to produce 1 kilowatt hour of power (1 kWh). The average price of energy is the US is $0.12 per kilowatt hour. Congratulations for spending two hours sweating and eating an extra 5 dollars in food to get 12 cents of electricity. Not to mention that 500 watts cannot nearly power an average home during peak hours. The whole, bike an hour a day for electricity idea is ridiculous.
EDIT: I now remembered that it is actually closer to 150-300 watts peak so an hour would be worth 2 cents to 4 cents
Sooooo many ways to make structures more energy efficient, too bad, the energy corporations from the local power corporations to those in the construction supplies corporations don’t want it, down to the logging companies. That’s why there are a million hurdles to building out of materials such as Hempcrete, not to mention the prohibition of hemp itself here in the U.S. forcing hemp products to be artificially inflated in cost. Why you can build outside of conventional building codes but it takes allot of money to sway officials, even if what you intend to build is way more structurally sound, and have engineers attesting to that fact. That’s why living “off-the-grid” has been outlawed everywhere, why it’s illegal to collect rainwater in many locations. In some places local county commissioners have made poor decisions with water plants and even forced those relying on private water wells to pay an additional water bill to cover the stupidity of overzealous commissioners.
Sadly the politicians don’t represent the people, left, right, it doesn’t matter they’re in the pockets of major corporations and industry, and those interests like their captive controlled markets. Self reliance is a threat to the corrupt established order. Even the “environmentally friendly” candidates or mainstream party (the democrats) have no concern for the environment or anyone’s freedom, too much money to be lost, and control to be lost in promoting or even allowing such. Not that the republicans are worth a crap, but behind every bit of legislation is dollar to be made and funneled to some corporate entity, not common people.
Lovely idea with the peddle power concept, but unless it goes open source and machinists want to unite with the Maker-Space crowd to make it readily available until the government outlaws that….. Then again, “the BILLIONAIRE and his team” don’t want that either, and allot of us can think of better ways to create or conserve power, but we’re just subjects of the Authoritarian State and our freedom isn’t a priority to our blood-sucking overlords.
Look, if you want one so bad and really believe there is a conspiracy to stifle this “technology” I will be happy to produce as many units as you like at a fraction of what Mr.Bhargava will charge. In fact, for every ten units you purchase, I will donate one to your favourite charity.
There is no magic, there is no new breakthrough technology, there is nothing for the evil corporations to fear from this pedal powered electrical generator.
Go to any major City, they usually have a Science and technology type learning center or museum. In every one of these Science centers is a pedal powered generator hooked up to an old black and white TV or some other similar consumer device. Hop on and try before you buy. I promise you won’t buy.
Hi I’m a marine veteran I was wanting to know how I would be able to get a free bike. Thank you
how can I get one
Yup, put this in all the gyms around the world. Make the weight machines operate on a similar system where each rep is contributing to stored energy. Use the gym to power the block or more. But honestly, I love the idea that you working out is not only improving your health but it’s ultimately making you physical money in the form of electricity that you don’t have to pay for anymore.
Where do I get one? Can I sign up for one?
He is planning to give 10,000 away in India. Maybe nay Sayers should listen to the video.
Why can’t the energy created by the rider run another generator that powers the bike and let’s the rider have a break? If you gear it so the bike wheel spins faster the rider becomes obsolete and you get endless free energy, no?
No.
“Back in the 19th century, charlatan inventors would pop up from time to time showing off miracle machines that seemed to be able to drive themselves forever. Inventions like this are called perpetual motion machines: they seem to be able to move forever without anyone adding any more energy. Often, machines like this were blatant tricks: the mechanisms were powered by a concealed assistant who sat in the shadows turning a hidden handle! Some of the machines sound plausible, but all of them unfortunately fall foul of the conservation of energy.”
It has been tried many times before, but it’s yet to be successful.
Yet the U.S. Patent office still receives hundreds of applications per year for perpetual energy devices, there is no free lunch!
Damn that first law of thermodynamics!
Paul, see Bob’s reply
Funny, but, as some people here have already pointed out, sadly, nonsense.
Actually, there’s a lesson to be learned from this kind of scam. Invent a nice story about saving the world, entrepreneurship and philanthropy, design a fancy-looking treadmill thingy, screw some light bulbs onto a panel for illustration and add some stock clips for flavour.
Tell people what they want to hear, and do it well. No matter how bizarre the message, you’ll have your viral video. This is how online works.
If you actually believed this for a second, you should consider revising your media reception strategies.
First of all Mr The physicist, if Wind Turbines do the same thing, than why can’t this bike work? Oh I get it, you are working with the American government and are really pissed that there are actually some great people in this world that actually care for other humans, no matter what their dollar value is. How about instead of just bashing peoples hopes and dreams, you bash your own head into the walls that you are obviously surrounded by. Your kind of people need to be wiped clean from this earth and more people like this billionaire need to be rich so we can all thrive, not just the ignorant wealthy few. Now go make a video and try to become viral if you think you’re so right you fucking moron.
the math is not even close. It’s bogus.
I am repeating my earlier comment.
Louis. There is no conspiracy in the maths and physics. There is no government support or coverup because it is simply inaccurate information. Check the dial on an exercise machine. They are often calibrated in Watts. [750W is approximately 1 Horsepower]
Actually, the average fit human can generate about 200Watts, which is about a 1/4 horsepower. Only the fittest athletes will generate about 300 w and then only for about an hour.
Plug in a PC and 1 hours hard pedaling will only generate enough power for about 30 min running time.
The hardware in the photo would create about 6 cents worth of power an hour. That means you would pedal for 1 hour per day for 17 days (17 hours) to create $1 of power. Assuming the machine cost $1000, you would be pedaling for 17 thousand hours over 47 years to pay back the machine. Doh.
I think you will find wind turbines for feeding power into the national network have sail 50m long. That’s 100m / 110 yards diameter of power generating capability spinning a 1.5-2 megawatt generator
In the USA:
“The widely used GE 1.5-megawatt model, for example, consists of 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet. The blades sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre.
The 1.8-megawatt Vestas V90 from Denmark has 148-ft blades (sweeping more than 1.5 acres) on a 262-ft tower, totaling 410 feet.
Another model being seen more in the U.S. is the 2-megawatt Gamesa G87 from Spain, with 143-ft blades (just under 1.5 acres) on a 256-ft tower, totaling 399 feet.”
Yep, that’s the ticket, wipe from the Earth the few of us who remain that still understand the laws of physics. Your Utopia would die of mass starvation and disease within weeks.
The real scam artists and evil corporate empires are the sacred halls of higher education that pump out tens of thousands of SJW’s with diplomas in critical race theory or gender studies instead of teaching even the fundamentals of science.
No one said this bike won’t work, but if you think that it will solve the world’s (imagined) energy problems or that anyone would actually use it to power anything other than a shortwave radio after the zombie apocalypse is proof that you have graduated with honors from one of the vaunted Universities of America.
If third world nations lack access to affordable electricity or food or water or healthcare, it is the fault of the evil dictators who rule them, the western governments who support them and the citizens who would rather live on their knees than die on their feet to fight back.
There is nothing preventing Somalia from building a large electrical generating system and power grid other than humans, it sure isn’t because they lack some marvelous new technology that is being suppressed by Exxon.
Hmmm then I wonder why NASA is putting in considerable engineering in creating “Flywheel” based energy storage systems to replace batteries? because that is the concept this video is using? Flywheel based energy storage ?
a friend of mine says “I have thought this should be engineered for years. Instead of people driving to gyms for spinning classes, we could set up little spinning centers everywhere that you could walk to, swipe your card, spin for an hour, and have the electricity you generate count towards your electric bill. Incentivizes reducing our carbon footprint and obesity at the same time.” I like it. I was picturing individuals having them in their homes, but that’s isolating. Making a little neighborhood center with a number of them builds community. You can be chatting with your neighbors while you put in that hour on the bicycle! Wonderful! And it cuts down how many of these need to be manufactured, since each one would get a lot more use and serve more people.
Were can i acquire a such a Bicycle?
I have solar panels, but sign me up for 2 of these bikes. Why can’t more rich people be as concerned for the poor and middle class as this guy is? Maybe if there were more, than we could all get along.
It is a great idea but we have to change the way we use eclectrity , you could charge a large battery and run your lights on 12v LED lamps . Lots of TVs and other electrical devices have step down transformers in them . We don’t always need 240v but sometimes we do . Design of our in house electrical systems is required
The average non-elite athelete can put out about 250 watts. If this device was 70% efficient (which would be high), an hour would generate less than a fifth of a kilowatt hour, which is valued at about 3 cents here. The person working the machine would need about 500 extra calories to generate this energy. Even the cheapest food sources cost more than this. Even ignoring the cost of food to power this, if this device plus storage batteries could be manufactured for $100 (which I doubt), it would take close to a decade to even recover the cost of its manufacture.
Can’t imagine that this bike would cost less than a couple of solar panels that could produce the same amount of electricity or more. He could probably get a pretty good deal on 20K-30K solar panes to give away.
OM,
FROM WHERE IT CAN ACCQUIRED,
LOT OF BENEFIT, PHYSICALLY. ECONOMICALLY . CLEAN ENVIORMENT,
Too much ‘free’ energy stuff on the inet
Start with basic physics…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance
250Watts per hour = a solar panel ~75watt for 4 hours assuming inefficiency with a small battery bank
Great idea but the large energy corporations will lose too much money and they might not like that idea. I heard that in several US states there is a new a law prohibiting the use of rainwater, even for your own purposes. More and more people choose live “off the grid” but they won’t let us disconnect from the “Matrix” so easy ; ) Sorry for my english
For Nay Sayers: Five 60W Bulbs that light up the pathway to the outside Lavatory is a God send to a little child who’s afraid of the dark. Only One phone that’s always charged can help a village be in permanent contact with the outside world. You Nay Sayers miss the point. Go live in a village with one outside Toilet, no constant electricity, miles away from any civilization for a year. Then you will understand the wonder and value of a mere 500w of power a day.
Agreed, and for a few hundred dollars that village can install a solar panel and battery to provide that power (one question, if they have a charged phone, I assume they have cell coverage and cell towers which need power and…).
That same village relies on every able bodied person (children included) to work a long hard day just for their sustenance, could they afford to lose one member of that workforce everyday to pedal this inefficient generator?
I live a long way from the nearest small town, I have grid electricity but I also have several alternate sources. These alternates will power what I consider essentials during a long period of grid down emergency.
My entire horse paddocks and pastures are surrounded by electric fence that is 100% solar powered. It was cheap and easy to install, I really mean cheap! Not thousands but around $100 for the solar panel and the battery is from an old tractor. This same setup, available at any big box store, will give your village the power it needs for the things you mention, go buy one and send it to them.
The problems of the world are not the fault of the few rich people who own the company you work for, they invested their time and money to build a business that subsequently employed you, thank them for that or risk your own savings and do the same.
How is it that the lack of access to cheap electricity wasn’t a problem in Sierra Leone back in 1850 but it is now? Why wasn’t it a problem in Idaho back in 1909?
Humans have required clean drinking water and light to navigate to the outhouse for millennia, somehow this is only a problem now because we have it and they don’t. We also have “Dancing with the Stars” and “Keeping up with the Kardashians”, should that be a priority too? Perhaps those in war torn, dictator ruled, third world cesspools should stand up to the warlords and fight for Liberty, we did at great cost back in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
I will concede one point, our governments meddling and/or support of dictatorial regimes in those third world cesspools isn’t exactly helping.
For those wanting to know where they can buy one of these, there are several companies that make similar devices. See for example:
http://www.econvergence.net/The-Pedal-A-Watt-Bicycle-Generator-Stand-s/1820.htm
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1533?gclid=CM3Zs9q8nckCFYKUfgods9cDIg
There are also a number of web sites that will show you how to build your own. See for example:
http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/gadgets/make-bicycle-powered-generator-10-steps/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Build-A-Bicycle-Generator/
Be forewarned, however, that this will not power your entire house. You could run a good number of LED lightbulbs, your laptop, or a few small appliances, but that’s all.
They are no close to being similar, the ones you supplied are direct drive, or direct human drive generators, this article is using a Flywheel as an energy storage device. This is a person, driving a Flywheel, driving a generator. “Flywheel” is the key to this system.
The flywheel is driven by the person. Did you think that the flywheel has some inherent ability to move on its own?
What makes you think the devices listed don’t have flywheels? What makes you think you need one? A battery also stores energy.
If you put a flywheel at the end of a crank, you will need to put in extra energy to get it up to speed, once moving, it will continue to move for a while but will slow down and stop. Energy in = x, energy out =x-losses.
No fly wheel on the crank means you don’t have to put as much power into the system to get it moving but it will also stop moving sooner. Energy in = x, energy out = x-losses. Both are connected to either a load or a battery storage or both.
It is simple, the fly wheel allows the operator to be inconsistent in his pedaling and still keep the power output even. The operator can take a bit of a break every so often, he still must pedal but it doesn’t have to be at a constant, unchanging speed. However, he must really exert himself to get the thing up to speed, fill the tires of your mountain bike with lead shot and see what I mean. You would have to push hard on the pedals at first to get it going but once moving, it would be easier. The total amount of energy expended is still the same.
Country like India needs this technology to provide electricity to those villagers who are living in remote areas. Becides creating infrasutructure from grid to villages this technology can be more economical for government.
I love all the armchair engineers here, this is not a bike hooked up to a generator, this is a bike hooked up to a “flywheel” hooked up to a generator – maybe do a little research on, what a flywheel is, and do a little reasearch into the new technologies that have come out lately increasing the “energy potential” of flywheels. When a flywheel is spun up to very high speeds, a flywheel becomes a reservoir for a massive amount of kinetic energy, which can be stored or drawn back out at will. It becomes, in effect, an electromechanical battery.. The bike is not driving the generator, the flywheel is driving the generator. “A traditional lead-acid cell— the battery most often used in heavy-duty power applications— stores energy at a density of 30-40 watt-hours per kilogram: enough to power a 100-watt bulb for about 20 minutes. A flywheel-based battery, on the other hand, can reach energy densities 3-4 times higher, at around 100-130 watt-hours per kilogram. Unlike the battery, the flywheel can also store and discharge all that energy rapidly without being damaged, meaning it can charge up to full capacity within minutes instead of hours and deliver up to one hundred times more power than a conventional battery.” The bike is storing energy into the flywheel. Once the flywheel is up to speed, it will keep spinning with less effort, the only things that will slow it down are air resistance and the friction of the bearings, again look up new technologies, that are increasing the efficiency of flywheels. NASA is funneling considerable resources into developing flywheel systems, which they believe could completely replace batteries in space applications. The “Flywheel” is the secret to what is going on in this video.
To get the flywheel up to speed you need to apply energy. Due to inefficiencies in energy conversion you could get at best about 90% – [2nd law of thermodynamics]. So to give your example, a 100w light bulb for 20 mins uses 300w per hour. You would need to pedal flat out for an hour – longer if you are not an athlete, plus a percentage to cover inefficiencies, to put the energy into the flywheel to get 20 mins of light (or replace the 100w globe with a 15W lED globe and life would be easier).
My goodness this is hard.
David, go back to a real school and learn some basic physics.
“the only things that will slow it down are air resistance and the friction of the bearings”, really? the only things? armchair engineers?
The load of the generator or the devices being powered don’t slow it down?
An electromechanical battery? The bike is not driving the generator, the flywheel is?
That’s like saying the gasoline doesn’t power the engine, the hot expanding gases of combustion power the engine. The person pushes the pedal, the pedal pushes the flywheel, the flywheel pushes the generator, the hipbone connected to the…
You make it sound like there is something very high tech and special about a flywheel, almost as if, once up and spinning, it will provide power all by itself because it’s a thingy whiz with electro-mechanical binary super stuff.
It’s a rotating mass, something that has been in use since the first steam engines. Yes it stores energy but not very well, it sure doesn’t store it indefinitely and it absolutely doesn’t multiply it or make it more energetic. It serves one function and one only, to smooth out the power output because the power input is not consistent (the pedal pusher slacks off sometimes and doesn’t always push on the pedals with equal force). That’s it, that’s all, a generator can take some effort to turn, adding a flywheel allows you to input varying amounts of effort.
You want to know why fossil fuels are used so much and so often and for so many things? It’s because fossil fuels store large amounts of energy almost indefinitely in an easily used and transported medium and here is the best part…
Much of the energy needed to crack heavy complex hydrocarbons into more useful light hydrocarbons has been done for us through geological activity over the millennia, we only need to input a bit of energy to final crack it and make a great fuel source. Ethanol requires more btu’s of energy in than it produces on combustion, that’s a net loss. Solar is great but it is weak, inconsistent and not at all concentrated over millennia like fossil fuel. Wind is even more untrustworthy and cumbersome.
Understand the laws of thermodynamics, they can’t be changed, a constitutional convention of the states can’t amend them. Energy in = energy out minus losses.
You always get less than you put in, you never get more, there is no interest paid, you can’t even break even.
Where can I get one!? I’d use it EVERY DAY!!
When its going to come in mass production and be available for purchase?
1844, the Woolrich Electrical Generator was the first in production for industrial use.
The input method has always been up to the end user, in this case, pedal power.
hi there this is the master chief if they say it powers a house for 24 hours houses in us uses 4 kw that means this thing needs too produce 96 kw in 24 hours
This is a con.
Oh you own a device to power a generator? Well you know theirs a tax for that. COMING SOON! THE MANUAL POWERED GENERATOR FEDERAL AND STATE TAX!!!
Don’t believe it? Go have a look at those electric cars to see their special tax in some areas.
just hook up a 1/2 horse power motot to it for an hour and 20 min and you can sit on your ass and watch tv lol
I would TOTALLY get one of these if it is 4real.
A typical home uses approximately 10,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year (about 830 kWh per month).
I don’t see this contraption putting a dent in that figure.
What is the price ?
This just showed up in my facebook news … The subject line is very misleading – you would not be able to run a Fridge, some lights and some kind of sound system using the power generated by that bike, it would not be enough. However, it is a novel idea for countries like India to help people, granted.
What a WONDERFUL idea. We ARE the energy source.
And what powers us?
Where do you find time to earn money to buy additional groceries to be able to sit at this thing and pedal 24/7 just to power a bar fridge that won’t hold those extra groceries?
great invention if it lives up to the hype expressed….on the dark side though, it will never become the next “better mouse trap”…the energy conglomerates will kill it just like they killed the H2O powered vehicle engines, while protecting their petrolem interests
Where can I get one?
it creates only 100w for 1 hour pedalling, it means you can run a 4.16w led bulb for 24 hours if the battery efficiency is 100%
If you do the math, and size an x number of pulleys add a decent weighted flywheel you can get a 1/3hp a.c. induction motor running on about 750watts to produce about 3500watts from a generator. So it’s not impossible to do it with pedal power, and that looks like a pretty fricking big flywheel. Now what kinda battery bank needed is a different story
Is there in somewhere to buy it?
If you want or have representation in Brazil, let me know.