Danish Hotel Pays Its Guests to Generate Electricity on Exercise Bikes

LOVE IT LOL excersize + a free meal i wanna live there now :P

LOVE IT LOL excersize + a free meal i wanna live there now :P

Why don't we have food for energy programs all across the U.S.? Not just in hotels, but in soup kitchens and food banks everywhere. Mandatory pedaling if you want free food!

**PEDALLING

lets see. 10 watt-hrs of electricity. That's .01 kWatt hours of electricity. Average cost to residential end user of 1 kWatt hour of electricity in US is 10.93 CENTS. .01x10.93 cents = .0193 cents... 1/10 of a cent.

So they are giving away a $36 meal for generating 1/10th of a penny worth of electricity?

What a deal!!

SLNuke, I believe you have the number wrong. It's not 1/10th of a cent, its about 1/100th of one!

WE don't have them hear because, as SLNuke87 pointed out, they are essentially giving away $36 meals to encourage people to excercise.

852 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.
CO2 contributes to the global warming of the environment.
(Note that 1000 kilowatt-hours = 1 megawatt-hour, or 1000 kWh = 1 MWh)
(Recall that 1000 watt-hours = 1 kilowatt-hour or 1000 Wh = 1kWh)

pasted from a website, basically the carbon emission is reduced by some 852/1000/100 lbs, or .00852 pounds of emmisions reduced, and essentially zero electricity gained, at the cost of $36 (probably only costing 15-20 dollars, but losing the other 16-21 in profit).

Shining example of eco-obsession forgetting about actual science of the matter. This will only last if people are lazy enough to not abuse this deal.

Now homeless can get a meal for exercise.

I'm going to assume that you have to be a paying customer of the hotel to get this deal. And I'm sure the meals cost has been compensated in the price of the room you're staying in.

I rigged an excercise bike to do this years ago in my home. I knew it wouldn't be anything much but I was bored one day and figured if I'd be cycling anyway, I may as well produce as much electricity as possible. I just don't understand why they are harnessing such a small amount of energy from these bikes. My bike harnesses over 5 times that amount and I'm not in the greatest of shape. I am overweight and rarely use my bike. I have been monitoring my electrical output and have managed to produce about $2.50 per year. I'm in the money!

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I hope they are happy that they produced more carbon by manufacturing those bikes than they will ever recover pedaling and "producing electricity". I hope that this was just a marketing ploy and that there is really no one that eco-stupid out there. I love when people do crap like this and think they're making a difference.

It is possible, however, that PopSci messed up the production rate, because it seems that you could produce way more than that in 15 minutes.

I'm pedalinggggggg. Somebody add more gears!!! LOL

i'd be interested in an exercise bike (or better a rowing machine) that had a harvesting system that could charge gadgets. If it could provide enough juice to charge my ipod, that would be an intriguing motivation to exercise for me. $0.02 per day of electricity would do a fair bit for an ipod, wouldn't it?

I can jog for 15 minutes straight... i'm chunky and this exercise bike would make it easy. Crap I could pedal enough to earn a free week at this hotel (hmmmm... might be worth looking into for a vacation)

but as was stated, how much carbon was released into making a carbon saving device that only produces this much?

also everybody, dont forget they are thinking large scale, how much power would be saved if 1 million guests decided to do this (say several bikes every hotel, there's thousands of hotels in any given large city)

While optimism is the best substitute for lack of knowledge, I am afraid I'll have to disillusion those that think a giant concetrated effort might yeild some benefits.

In a day, you use about as much energy as a lightbulb.

Math:
100watt lightbulb = 100joule/sec *60sec/min*60min/hour*24hour/day=8,640,000J of energy.

Human=2000Cal/day
*1000cal/Cal*4.17J/cal=8,340,000J of energy.

Counting all the energy it takes to digest food, pump the heart, regulate your temperature, keep your brain functioning. (around 1000Cal)you would have to consume about 3200Calories of food a day, and do nothing but ride a bike, just to keep a lightbulb lit.

How much better can I say this? Its IN-E-FICCIENT!
Its S-I-L-L-Y.

@scubasdsteve87, this is what would hapen if 1million people did this.

15watt*1000*1000=15megawatts= $1,500 in electricity gained, and 12780lbs of CO2 reduced.

But at the current deal they're offering, it would cost the hotels $36 million dollars.

It would cost the people (not even considering the massive inefficiency) 20 million Calories, which is about 2000kg or around 4400lbs of raw fat in food.

See the problem? This isn't green. Its like eating celery.

Very sorry, treated expenditure as 15watts vs 10watt*hour.

Ok, redo:
10watt hours = 36,000J

36,000J *1million people = 36gigajoules (36 billion)

36,000J = 8.63Cal.

8.63Cal * 1million = 8,630,000Cal
8,630,000=863kg of pure fat=1900lbs of fat.

Still gained $1500 IN electricity. Still loses $36million.

Sorry for the exageration, but the point still stands.

@ScubaSteve - I was joking about the carbon released making the bike. I thought it was an obvious exaggeration of how absurd people get over a little bit of carbon.

Apparently it wasn't.

@brian144 - i don't think your analysis fits. How much energy our bodies use isn't the same as how much our bodies could generate. Exercise is healthy and most people don't do it enough, so the total exercise people should do for their health, but don't, can be viewed as an untapped energy source. Look at the article on the treadmill for cows Popsci put up today - the cows are given solid motivation, and they tread away. Now the question is if someone can design an exercise device that harvests enough electricity to motivate a human user.

The waste product of both power plants and people are co2. Assuming we're slightly more efficient (I don't know if we are or not) at turning fuel into work. Even if we hooked up enough people to power the hotel, the net co2 coming out would be at best only slightly less than running the power plant on the food directly. And a lot less exercise.

Good to see they are using those iphones at full capacity...

i like the idea, but what about single people?

They need to make these portable... I hate staying still while riding my bike. When they make a wireless one, so I can ride my bike around town and wirelessly send the electricity i'm producing back to my house, then I'll get on board.

(Please nobody post a scientific analysis of why this won't work)

I pedal to generate electricity for my laptop and some other items almost every day. I use the Pedal-A-Watt from econvergence net and it works really well. It may not be a ton of power but I love that I cna power things from my workout.

Lol, you people are funny. Clearly this is to promote the hotel, their country, and awareness of healthy / green / alternative lifestyle. Hopefully the meal you order would be a salad and not a donut ;)

@bdhoro87 you don't need to beam it back, you can just hook a battery to your bike to absorb the energy and take it off and plug it into your house if you were setup for such a thing. Or use your bike to trickle charge a cellphone or something. It's more of keeping the components for generating the electricity small enough to not knock off your balance on a bike or way it down. It's could be done, just not necessarily yielding enough power for you to care to do it.

Of course this is a promotion for the hotel. Of course these products are still made by methods that create co2, of course it's not really worth going out of your way to build these as an energy source. If your going to be pedaling anyway though, you might as well produce the electricity. In my earlier post I said I built a bike that produces electricity just because I was going to be working out anyway. I just still don't understand why their bikes produce so little. I built mine from spare parts in my garage. I just can't imagine why they couldn't do better with real parts. Just because it's a gimmick, it doesn't mean they can't make it work better.

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@bdhoro87 you don't need to beam it back, you can just hook a battery to your bike to absorb the energy and take it off and plug it into your house if you were setup for such a thing. Or use your bike to trickle charge a cellphone or something. It's more of keeping the components for generating the electricity small enough to not knock off your balance on a bike or way it down. It's could be done, just not necessarily yielding enough power for you to care to do it.

Of course this is a promotion for the hotel. Of course these products are still made by methods that create co2, of course it's not really worth going out of your way to build these as an energy source. If your going to be pedaling anyway though, you might as well produce the electricity. In my earlier post I said I built a bike that produces electricity just because I was going to be working out anyway. I just still don't understand why their bikes produce so little. I built mine from spare parts in my garage. I just can't imagine why they couldn't do better with real parts. Just because it's a gimmick, it doesn't mean they can't make it work better.

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Regarding carbon footprint, humans too generate energy through internal combustion and that also releases CO2 as byproduct.

Even more.. electricity generation through cycling requires more energy cause people have to move their bodies too along with bicycle, and therefore greater CO2 emission. So overall, this is an "extremely environment unfriendly solution".

Falling on all faces.....

Considering that $36 gets you an appetizer in most decent restaurants in Copenhagen, it's not too shocking that a hotel is "giving away" $36 meal vouchers for the sake of a supposed eco-publicity stunt.

We are getting there. People used stationary bikes to generate energy and coming up with different ideas on where to use them. They even use them in City Jails as this article shows www.dogengine.com/used-stationary-bikes.php#energy

This hotel should buy a generator and leave their guests relax, lol http://www.hotel-bucuresti.com/hoteluri/hotel_nelisse-117.html

At first sight there is nothing green about the hotel. Yet, the blank facades have integrated panels and TripleLynx inverters that make the Crowne Plaza hotel the first energy efficient hotel in Denmark and one of the first of its kind in the World. High quality, social and environmental awareness were key elements in creating the Crowne Plaza, Copenhagen Towers, located in Copenhagen, Denmark. It combines the largest facade integrated solar Photovoltaics (PV) installation in Denmark and frontline energy-efficient technology, cutting energy consumption by 53% compared to conventional hotels.
I live in Copenhagen and I must say that the hotel is a great new green landmark for the entire city!

sustainablecities.dk/en/blog