Can People Function as Electrical Generators?
A reader sent me a plan to turn low-skilled people into electricity generating machines, claiming that employees could be paid a reasonable wage. But his math is wrong. A human being produces about 80 Watts with his muscles, e.g., bicycling. That’s 80 Watt-hours each hour = .08 kWhs each hour. At the U.S. average electricity price of 11 cents/kWh, he’d be creating less than a penny of electricity an hour. I know we’ve hit hard times, but I don’t think we’ve quite reached that level.
While you are correct about not being able to make any money at this, I have always mused about building axial flux alternators into all the fly wheels in those spinning machines, stair climbers, treadmills and so forth. They could at least generate enough power to run the computer and the ride profile could be altered by increasing and decreasing the load on the alternator. No sense wasting that power. The rims of bicycles could be equipped the same way making for a better generator to run lights, charge cell phones, GPS devices, Ipods and so forth. No sense wasting that power.