Green electricity: how to produce energy riding a bicycle

With the spread of low cost technologies, we can notice the development of an increasing energy’s hunger, that is the continuous request of energy necessary to feed all the daily used objects. However, when we use electrical and electronic devices, we usually don’t take in consideration what it is beside our home’s electric socket and this ignorance can lead to an irresponsible use, or even abuse, of electrical energy.

A new way to spread the education forward a more conscious use of electricity, is to show how much “work” is necessary to produce this invisible energy; for example, people can be used to produce electricity, turning themselves into “living generators”. It’s a quite simple idea that employs the well-known law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can’t be created or destroyed, but just transformed. So, this idea consist in adding another step in a process of energy’s transformation that we daily make with the movement. The chemical energy contained in our cells is turned into mechanical work when we walk, run, dance; we can convert this physical energy into electricity.

This technology can be easily employed in gyms. For example, in the “Green Microgyms”, an American chain of gyms, they use the exercise done by users to generate electricity: this society produces and sells the equipment necessary to transform the common gym machinery in power generators and it can be easily used even at home.

Even the laziest, can keep in touch with this technology, thanks to an English society, the Electric Pedals, that supplies events like stages, cinemas, workshops, art installations feeded by the audience, using pedals generators. They also produce a huge variety of products: bicycle, little electrical stations, kit ready and adapted to particular skills, as smartphones’ charger or mixers.

Dealing with the idea of avoiding energy’s waste, a lot of realities are spreading also in Italy, for example bicigeneratori®, a society that suggests installations in which you can make machine coffee work, feed videogames and also light up Christmas trees!

Using this kind of machinery, a common person produces 75 W in one hour: remember that with 8 W in one hour you can feed your smartphone’s charger!

These enterprises represent not only clean, fun and good  way to produce electrical energy but also an opportunity to promote sustainability, fitness and education, in order to teach people not to waste electricity.