Talk about a convergence of green concepts. Designer Chiyi Chen has come up with a concept that combines bike sharing, renewable energy, and regenerative hybrid technology into one system. The Hybrid2 would use ultracapacitors to store the energy produced by a bicycle and feed it back into the grid when the bike is put back into its stall. Chen envisions the power being used to power electric buses so you could track the power you generate on the bikes and use it to get credit for free rides. A system like this could get the Austin Bike/Ped program and Austin Energy on the same page an create a new energy stream for our utility with bike share.
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on Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
The problem with this idea is that it’s not cost effective.
A person on a bicycle just doesn’t produce a lot of power. A lot of people on a lot of bicycles could conceivably generate enough to be useful, but the cost of the hardware required to collect and distribute this would be many many times that of the power generated.
on Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Well, I think if you are already putting in a pay-to-use bike sharing program anyway, this might be a good supplemental program. A good program like that would have hundreds or thousands of bikes participating. It would definitely need to be subsidized to get it off the ground and make the numbers high enough to start becoming cost effective.
on Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
But that’s just it. It will never be cost effective. The amount of energy produced will not be enough to make up for the cost of collecting it.
on Jul 17th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Joe’s right. I posted this in the ACA-List list when it was posted there –
Your average casual cyclist averages something like 50 watts (and
that’s probably on the high side.) Even if 100% of this power was
saved (i.e. the cyclists rode nowhere) with 100% efficiency
(impossible), it would take 300 cyclists to power *one* car for a
similar amount of time (assuming that the car requires 20
horsepower average, which is just a guess.) As for the actual
energy recovered, 10% of your energy going into braking and
recovering 50% of that seems far more likely — so you’d need
6000 cyclists riding for one hour (or some combination thereof)
to power that one car for an hour. All that to save one or two
gallons of gas?
Storing energy lost to braking makes sense, but it would make
more sense if you could actually use it on the bicycle, rather
than trying to store it for later to power a *bus*. If the bike
would store energy when you used your brake, and then use that
energy to help you go again — THAT would be good.
Also consider how cheap 50 watts is. At $0.20/kWhr (a bit on the
high side), each cyclist is making one cent an hour — again,
assuming 100% power being saved (i.e. they’re not going
anywhere), 100% efficiency. That won’t even come close to paying
for the maintenance on the energy-saving system, let alone the
system itself. It would be far more cost effective to just put
some solar cells on the roof somewhere. Perhaps on the roof of
the bus itself? (Though the energy created by that even under
ideal conditions would be insignificant compared to the needs of
the bus — but covering the roof with solar panels would still
give your bus at least a hundred cyclists worth of `recovered
braking energy’ in bright sunlight.)
on Jul 17th, 2009 at 10:31 am
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on Jul 17th, 2009 at 10:48 am
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on Jul 17th, 2009 at 11:01 am
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