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• @sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 2026-09-28 17:14

  It’s just a simple calculation of how much endurance athletes, like marathon runners, can expend in energy, compared to the actual percent of energy used to drive a turbine. But if you actually look at the power produced on the machine itself, you have to grapple with human efficiency being only at about 30%. Among cyclists fit enough to hook up a fitness tracker to their workouts, 150 W is probably about the average power output people can maintain, for about an hour. That’s 150 Wh. Train them up to where they can average 200W for 2 hours per day, and you’re basically hitting 400 Wh/day. That’s less than 1/3 of the number I made in my previous comment of assuming perfect efficiency instead of 30% efficiency. This article breaks down the assumptions of what is feasible for 8 hours per day, estimates that the typical person can cover 2.4% of their electricity needs by cycling 8 hours per day, every day. This thread shows some similar analysis, including a television program where they got 80 cyclists to power a home for 4 hours. There’s just no feasible way around it. You’re better off taking that human food, setting it on fire, and boiling water for a steam turbine, rather than increasing humans’ caloric consumption to support large scale human-powered generators.

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