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"Unlike solar and wind energy, human power is always available, no matter the season or time of day. Unlike fossil fuels, human power can be a clean energy source, and its potential increases as the human population grows. In the Human Power Plant, Low-tech Magazine and artist Melle Smets investigate the feasibility of human energy production in the 21st century......."
Could we? Should we? I remember analyzing cost of human muscle power about 15 yrs ago when gas first went up over $2/gal--- given the cost of food at the time, that was about the break even point. As I recall, the cost of a Burger King Whopper to power a 20 mi bike ride was about the same as the gallon of gas to drive that far. As I read this article, they don;t seem to take cost of food into account, but they do note that generating electricity with a pedal bike for an hour only generates a few fractions of a cent worth of juice-- not real efficient.
Given the way automation is taking away jobs, maybe this is the way to go in the future to give people gainful employment. It's the efficiency of human power in a labor excess market that allowed the Romans to avoid inventing the steam engine.
Anybody who wants to do that is free to forsake all the labor saving devices and live the life of an 18th century farmer. It was a hard short life for most.
A well trained athlete can put out about 1/4 HP for sustained efforts. This is 187 Watts. So you can look at the different things you want to power, and if it consumes more than 187W you can pretty much forget about it.
Virtue signalling. Cf- installing alternative energy when the grid is readily available
I had to look it up. "Virtue signaling" is just recent new buzz words that youngsters use to represent something ostentatious and without credibility that is elitist and thinks far too highly of itself as it demands attention and advertises its imagined virtues with meaningless platitudes and a lot of hot air. (By the way, I, like most old people, prefer to read and use plain ordinary language though, not new buzz words that mean nothing).
So, in other words nothing of value could be offered by or to humans to motivate them to go through all the effort of creating human power.
Well right, that's exactly what I think too.
Most of the human power that was used in the past was forced unwillingly out of people through slavery. Nothing motivational about that and I doubt that anyone in this world now would willingly submit to slavery to power their gadgets.
Heh. If they did, that would mean people were far worse slaves to their gadgets and luxuries than they already are.
As I read this article, they don;t seem to take cost of food into account, but they do note that generating electricity with a pedal bike for an hour only generates a few fractions of a cent worth of juice-- not real efficient.
If you are generating power with the bike you are introducing more energy required to move the pedals, because of losses due to friction you can never get as much energy out of it as you out into it. In other words the energy you get out of it could never equal the energy in food you would need to eat.
Similarly this is why you cannot put on wheel on the road to spin a generator. The only time this will gain you energy is when it will be lost anyway, e.g. recovering it from braking.
A well trained athlete can put out about 1/4 HP for sustained efforts. This is 187 Watts. So you can look at the different things you want to power, and if it consumes more than 187W you can pretty much forget about it.
The bigger question is how many "watts" of food does the athlete need to produce 187 watts of electric. When I was involved with a lot of sports in my early and late teens I was probably consuming 6 or 7 thousand calories per day. 2 lunches at HS cafeteria and 4 to 5 pints of milk , my HS school lunches were typically pretty good and they were generous.
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