I think I found a truly free clean renewable energy source to

>>7944122
Why not use teams of horses?

>>7944122
The best way is to make this easy for the users: let the houses hook up and produce current to sell it back to the power companies. Several countries already do this, letting people generate solar power and sell it back to them.

>>7944124
What happens if horses go extinct yet humans somehow miraculously survives?

Plus it's much more funner to watch humans work out and be enslaved.

I was thinking of getting one of those pedal chargers for my phone in case of a power outage. Nowadays phones are one's primary source of information that this seems like a perfectly rational idea. But is it worth the $20+ dollars for such an invention?

>>7944122
shitload of problems with this.

a bike can generate 100W, so you would need a home uses about 1kW, so you need 10 people to pedal at all times to power 1 home.

it takes bout 1cal to make 1Wh, so assuming you get 10 pedal to do it, thats 24000cal per day spent on fuel per day. That amount of food will produce 240 lbs. of CO2 extra, compare that to a coal power station that produces only 40lbs.

So congratulations, your 'clean' energy makes 6 times more pollution than burning coal.

That just sounds like slavery with more steps.

>>7944425
also, how much should they get payed? assuming they get paid only for the extra food they eat as a minimum, and lets assume we give them the cheapest food we can get, flour, it will still cost $0.85 in food to create $0.36 of electricity, if they eat something like bananas it goes up to over $5 for $0.36 of electricity.

It will be more cost effective to just burn the food and use the heat to make electricity.

>>7944122
Many gyms already have this to help lower their electrical costs. I made a bicycle one some time ago for recharging some of my batteries. It works well enough for that. I can use it while I'm on the computer and sitting in my computer chair.

The idea of doing it specifically for power isn't a good one. You always have to couple it with staying fit and getting exercise. Getting paid for it isn't a viable solution at all. You are not making enough usable energy to be getting paid for it. even if you were getting paid $1 a kilowatt hour it'd still suck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ

I do think people should do this, but for coupling exercise with power generation as part of their health program. You can charge small batteries for stuff like phones and laptops, but that's about the extent of it.

>>7944122
That's the plot of a Black Mirror episode.

>>7944432
>It will be more cost effective to just burn the food and use the heat to make electricity.

No, it'd be more cost effective to eat the food, run the bike to make electric then put your food scrap waste, feces, and urine into the digester to make bio-methane and high nitrogen fertilizer then use the fertilizer to grow more food. Then you get maximum usage out of the food. Simply burning it is a huge waste due to our technology for heat conversion to electric being pretty terrible really.

>>7944122
>free
>paid
wat

>>7944425
>>7944432
So powering humans to live has way more impact on global warming then powering machines? How much humans can we sustain on the planet without the CO2 rising?

>>7944760
>due to our technology for heat conversion to electric being pretty terrible really.
I'm pretty sure the human body is far worse.

>>7944780
>leaving out the rest of the stuff listed

>>7944122
https://vimeo.com/96637576

This is a video from "Bang Goes the Theory". In another episode between Season 1 and Season 2 "3/12/2009" they use this human power station to power a family house for a day. There's one segment where they use a super insulated box to cook a chicken using two 60-watt lightbulbs in 90 minutes time. Here's the only source I can find for the chicken light bulb thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP12inOxG88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVjT2KJ5zYQ

I've been trying to find the full episode of the chicken light bulb, but I can't, even the BBC sight doesn't have the content working.

>>7944987
webm of the chicken thing

http://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1458491687376.webm

>>7944859
what rest? are you brain-damaged?

>>7945003
Did you just stop reading the rest of >>7944760 at "eat the food"?

Using the food energy to pedal for energy generation the use the waste, feces, and urine to make bio-methane and high nitrogen fertilizer to make electric and grow even more food.

That is a system that is far more efficient than simply burning food to make electric.

>>7944996
180Wh to kook a chicken!!!

The specific heat of chicken is 3.22kJ/kgC, and you need to heat it up by 60C to be cooked.

That looks like a small chicken, so lets say its 1kg, thats 180kJ needed, thats 50Wh.

How did he manage to make that setup so inefficient that it used 3x that?

>>7945015
so you are brain-damaged...

>>7945024
>180Wh
*150Wh

>>7945024
There was actually a huge math segment on it, but you can't access it on the BBC website anymore:

>Sorry, this clip is not currently available
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007rdn3

>it used 3x that

I'm sure it has to do with thermal mass of the oven interior & insulation and the thermal transfer of the insulation used. Also, chicken is only safe when cooked to an internal temp of 75C.

>>7945025
>burning food it more efficient

Full kek. You know absolutely nothing about what was posted do you?

File: black-mirror-_1.jpg (45KB, 614x347px) Image search: [Google]

45KB, 614x347px

OP's perfect utopia

I bet you'd sign onto porn and/or refuse to kill yourself, you fucking loser.

>>7945046
Full ep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMXKQdc5ZM

>>7944760
>Simply burning it is a huge waste due to our technology for heat conversion to electric being pretty terrible really
Actually it's pretty good. In a supercritical power plant with multiple reheat cycles and regenerative heating, we can approach the Carnot efficiency quite closely.

>>7944122
You just described episode two of Black Mirror.

>>7945024
So you're criticizing him for cooking a chicken using only three times the theoretical minimum amount of energy (although you've underestimated it by using an unsafely low internal temperature), when a typical household oven would use about fifteen times more?

File: 1456359669354.jpg (85KB, 600x511px) Image search: [Google]

85KB, 600x511px

>>7945039
>Full kek. You know absolutely nothing about what was posted do you?
There's only so much chemical energy in food.
You can get nearly all of it out by burning it.
Sure, sure, a modern combined-cycle gas turbine (for example) is only about 50% efficient.
But human muscle tissue is far worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle#Efficiency
>The efficiency of human muscle has been measured (in the context of rowing and cycling) at 18% to 26%.
...and what if you aren't obsessed with generating electricity in particular?
Burning carrots to heat water can be nearly 100% efficient.
Feed those same carrots to a human and most of the digested energy is wasted, and sure, you can recapture the undigested energy, then convert it to "bio-methane" (is there any other kind?).
But then you're still burning the food energy that wasn't wasted by being processed by a human digestive system.
Not to mention the fact that you wasted a human being's time.

>>7944739
Exactly this.

>>7944776
humans are super inefficient at converting raw materials into energy.