The bike rack that harvests clean energy from cycle commuters

Quote:

 The designers reckon that a rack for 30 bikes could generate one kilowatt-hour a day.

so, about 6p a day at feed in tarrifs, generating an income of £438 over a 20 year life.

Awsome

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"The system involves a front bike wheel with batteries which store the energy produced by the revolving wheel and through braking."

Energy isn't produced by the revolving wheel, it's produced by my reciprocating legs. And I want any energy produced by my reciprocating legs to go into overcoming air resistance, tyre rolling resistance and gravity. There may be a small amount of energy wasted on downhills and braking but it's barely enough to make the rims warm never mind run a toaster.

This sounds like an "invention" by people who don't do physics.

Or a scam.

I like the idea of recovering energy through braking as that would otherwise be wasted, but I wonder how they've implemented it (you wouldn't want the brakes to be less effective).

The idea of scavenging power from the rider is pointless though. I wouldn't want to ride a bike that robs me of 50/100watts and is heavy because there's a battery to store all the scavenged power.

I may have missed something here, but I can't help thinking that if there is a bike rack with 30 bikes in it, it might take a decent size canopy to cover them. If that canopy comprised some solar panels, it would probably harvest a lot more electricity. Makes more sense to me, using some tried and tested technology.

Just a thought.

30 bikes, 2.2m commute, 1kW.h.

-> that's assuming 30 cyclists going at 15kph giving 133W for free!

That is really painful so read/see so stupid things. A professional cyclist outputting 500W cannot even run a typical hairdryer comsuming >1kW.

I wonder how many miles the electricity generated by all these cyclists would power an electric car?

Quote:

Roukhomovsky and Verhnjak estimate that for a rack of 30 bikes, and an average commute of 2.2 miles a day, about one kilowatt-hour per day could be generated.

So, enough energy to run five 20W energy-saver light bulbs for 10 hours. Or boil about half a dozen kettles per day. Or roughly what any of the hundreds of wind turbines within about 30km of Amsterdam generate on average every 5 seconds. That is assuming their estimate of energy generation is correct - bicycles are so good as a form of transport because they're highly efficient, meaning there is little energy to be reclaimed - so either these wheels would be draggy as hell, or they did their sums based on somewhere a lot hillier. Given all the energy consumed in the manufacturing of batteries and installation and maintenance of the stands, this would pay for itself approximately... never.

Clean energy is too important to waste time on the idiotic schemes of attention-seeking design graduates.

So enough to run an oven for between 10 and 30 mins... Not much really.