4 ms·

I'm surprised this made it to IEEE's website, as bicycle generators are long understood to be unsustainable. I think more could be gained by a small wind turbi

• fiziks_hckr 6y ago
  From my experiments making my own, got around 100W of power. For reference, a laptop is around 30watts, charging a cell phone around 5w, electric shavers, fans for air circulation, small monitors are also game, so there are things you can power. Storage can be achieved with a blocking diode and a supercap, or more conventional easily obtainable battery charging circuitry. The article wanted to use these as supplementary power, and so during an emergency wouldn't be far fetched for bike-power to be useful. That being said, for sustaining refridgerators (always on), or for using large power draw of washing machines, dryers, and microwaves, one would definitely need to rely on more than just biking (e.g. stored wind or solar as you pointed out). But again, bike power can be useful as a backup or for emergencies.
• TameAntelope 6y ago
  I think the novelty here that justifies the article is that this article challenges the oversimplification of "unsustainable" into "useless". This is an argument that bicycle generators can have value in some specific, non-critical instances, like when you already cycle daily and aren't very familiar with how to build and maintain a wind or water turbine (as you suggest).