End to the world's energy crisis?

Or someone who is just really bad at math and logical reasoning? This article recently ran in VeloNews. While some of the points I think are valid such as pointing out some things our society does that wastes energy, and advocates taking the stairs or riding your bike to work. However, some of his ideas are just.... stupid. Replacing a power plant with a bunch of cyclists on stationary bikes. Let's do some math here.

Coal power plant at 500MW is to be replaced by cyclists. (Not to mention a nuclear plant at a few gigs...)

Let's say each cyclist is producing an average of 100W over their workout. Sure intervals would be much more than this, but as the numbers will show, we'll need A LOT of cyclists, so its not all serious racers here.

Let's just throw in a 75% efficiency rate from power at the hub to electricity, so basically each cyclist is producing 75W of electricity.

Plugging those numbers in, that is 6.67 million cyclists. For one coal plant.

Yeah. Good solution.


His other thought that just made me smack my forehead was the thought that we should take the stairs UP to our floor in a building, but take the elevator down, and hook the elevator up so that its potential energy at the top is converted to energy as it brings people back down. Ok buddy, how does the elevator get up there??? Yes you would get a net benefit of the weight of the people that you are only moving down in the elevator and not up, but considering that the weight of the elevator itself far exceeds the weight of the people, you're never going to break even with this system. If you approached this by saying people should walk up stairs so that they aren't as fat, then I'd buy it.

Sometimes the mix of bikes and social concerns is good (more bike lanes!!!), but when people who have no idea what they're talking about throw out the idea of replacing power plants with cyclists... it's not good for anybody.