Man Made Green Energy
I read an interesting article in this month’s Men’s Health (www.menshealth.com) today. One of their contributors, Grant Stoddard, tried out the Human Dynamo 4.2 (4.2 because that’s how many calories it takes to generate a watt), an exercise machine that acts as a generator for your home. (www.humandynamo.com) There’s a gym in Portland, OR (of course) that has whole banks of these for the members and is completely self sufficient power-wise. Pretty cool.
What he really thinks the added benefit is is for those business people who don’t have time to work out. If you want to watch the Dancing With the Stars you have to hop on and exercise. Burns extra calories and makes you fitter while making greener energy. What’s better?
What’s funny is he writes about how now that he’s in his 30’s he’s let himself go a bit and has added a daily 6 mile run in the morning which burns an extra 500 calories and keeps him generally in shape. But how great would it be to convert those calories burned into useable energy. I basically picture the sorority girl and emmaciated gay man saying, “I’m sooooooo fat,” when they are in good shape. Maybe this guy was a world class marathoner in his 20’s, its all relative, but I don’t know in what world someone runs 6 miles and only burns 500 calories. I was running short on time this morning and only did 20 minutes on the treadmill and, according to my heart rate monitor, burned a little more than 400.
So, Stoddard has one set up in his house by the inventor, Mike Taggett, and jumps on. He quickly realizes that he can’t power his home and spends the next day jumping on and off to charge the battery with the plan of watching tv that night. The news doesn’t get through the initial headlines before it flicks off. He discovers that getting through a tv show is a lot more work then he expected. He comments that he is more selective throughout the week he has the machine on what he needs to run and what he wants to watch.
He realizes that, although the machine itself is green, it effects the environment in other ways. To watch television he burned an extra 1,000 calories a day. To spend the extra calories he’d have to start eating more, which would require more agriculture, manure, pesticides, cattle, etc, not to mention trucks to transport the new food, all of which takes energy and wonders if he’s ultimately spending more than he’s saving.
I think he has a good point. At a place like a health club where people do cardio all day, and in large quantities, it can self sustain. It doesn’t seem like the normal person could run much more than the toaster. The idea is great though. Tagget mentions at one point that a world class athlete, like Lance Armstrong, could keep a tv on for like 3 or 4 hours, but how many people have Lance Armstrong to hang out in their house and pedal?
I think its a great step forward, though. What a great way to start creating energy. As equipment starts to get more sophisticated it might be possible to run parts of our home from cardio equipment. It’d be a great way to get in shape, although it could be weird while watching the World Series or something. I wouldn’t want to run my hot water heater on it or anything like that. It’ll be exciting to see where this technology goes in the future. We’ll have moveable floors so that which ever direction we walk we generate power. How Jetsons!