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Power outages, high electricity bills and a fast depleting fossil fuels reserve are all good reasons to look towards renewable energies. Instead of thinking of the normal wind, solar and thermal renewable energy, are there alternative ways to harness and produce energy?
Here are some wacky ideas for alternative energy:
Muscle Power: When you are at the gym, does it ever cross your mind that all that energy and heat produced can be captured and used? A gym in Hong Kong has decided to take advantage of their members by adding generators in the bicycles, treadmills and other cardio equipment. This not only powers the machine that you are using, but also contributes to the energy required for the lights and air conditioning. As an example, a person in top physical shape can generate around 500 watts of power. Although that may not seem like much, that's enough to power two laptops, two fluorescent light bulbs and a cell phone - as long as you maintain that pedalling.
Coffee Power: Your morning cup of Joe that helps fuel us for the day could very well be what propels our vehicles forward in the future. A professor at the university of Nevada-Reno noticed that once a cup of coffee had cooled it had the sheen of oil floating on top and could be converted into biodiesel. The study indicated that coffee beans can contain as much as 20 percent oil that can be used to produce energy. The research indicated that all the waste grounds generated by coffee drinkers, if gathered and reproduced, could yield 2.9 million gallons of diesel a year.
Texting: We all spend hours and hours a day on our smart phones, sending text messages, emails and updating our social media profiles. In United States of America (USA) alone, people send 12.5 billion text messages a month and in the United Kingdom (UK), it is a billion a week. So what if you could harness that energy? A new type of phone called the Push-to-Charge cell phone is able to. The buttons are made out of piezoelectric crystals, so that each time you pressed a button, the hard metal directly underneath it would hit the underlying crystal like a hammer, creating a small amount of voltage. Small wires located between the layers would convey the charge to a battery for storage. If you consider that 0.5 watts of energy is generated every time you push a button, imagine how much energy you can generate in a month in the USA or UK?
Kites: We all blame oil refineries, cars and animals for global warming, however, ships continue to go unnoticed. According to a Maritime Organisation Cargo ships account for 3 percent of all green-house gases. So any technological advancement that helps ships to reach their destinations without burning as much fuel would be a big plus.
In recent years so industry visionaries have attempted to revive wind power, a method of ship propulsion that saw its heyday in the mid-1800s, as a way to augment large cargo ships' carbon-burning engines. One company proposed kitting out freight ships with gigantic 13 000-square-foot kites, which would fly 300 meters above the ship and pull it forward. Conservative estimates suggest that this could reduce a ship's consumption of diesel fuel by as much as 25 percent, a saving of more than $1 million in annual fuel costs for shipping companies.
With oil and coal reserves estimated to run out within the next 50 years, we need to search for alternative ways to produce electricity. This article shows four ways in which we can produce renewable energy and lower our carbon foot print.
Author's Note: I am Greg Jones, a gym lover and environmentalist. I often wonder as I pedal away on the gym bike, what if you could capture the energy I am producing. If we incorporated demand response systems into gyms, we would be able to channel energy produced into keeping the gym and surroundings buildings operational. Who would have thought that getting fit could save us money and help us go green?
Image Credit: Time
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