Prodromus

As presumed Presidential nominee Barrack Obama taught us this week, it is vitally important for everyone to inflate their tires this weekend, and on a regular basis as well.  In addition, if you can also schedule a tune-up, that would be swell.  As Obama pointed out, “There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy.  Making sure your tires are properly inflated – simple thing.  But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling – if everybody was just inflating their tires?  And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”

Now I am not sure exactly what his definition is of “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling”, but that sure sounds like a lot.   The Energy Information Administration estimates that we could extract approximately 10 billion barrels of oil from ANWR alone, about 600 million barrels a year.  This is equal to just less than 10% of our total oil use in the US on a yearly basis. 

The federal government estimates the nation’s outer continental shelf might hold 85.9 billion barrels of crude, including 10.13 billion barrels off California.    Let’s call that another 600 million barrels a year just to make our numbers easy, it could be 4 or 5 times that number.

Just from those two sources, we could decrease our reliance on foreign oil by 15-20%.  If making sure your tires are inflated is equal to that amount, between the Republican solution (drilling), and the Democrat solution (inflating tires), we could lower our dependence on foreign oil by 30%-40% in 5-10 years.  That is great progress!  Way to go political leaders!

This September a human-powered sustainable dance club, called Club Watt by its owners, opens its doors in Rotterdam, Netherlands.  Club Watt proposes to power the club through human power.  This ultra-green dance club is deadly serious about taking themselves off-grid.

They create their energy through a high-tech floor that captures the movements of the dancers above and produces electricity down below.  Heavy duty coils and magnets provide the means of turning the moving floor into power.  The electricity is than stored in heavy-duty batteries and used as needed to power the Clubs’s sound system, lights, etc.  However, even with the high-tech floor, human power will only provide ~30% of the Club’s required energy.  The shortfall will be made up with solar power and a wind turbine.

What the company’s press release does not explain is that the average human only generates about one kilowatt-hour (kWh) per day.  At that rate, tapping into human energy to generate power proves to not be very efficient.  In the US, one kWH costs about a Quarter.  Obviously human energy will not be the US’s long-term solution for energy independence.

Human Power turns out be a great marketing tool for trendy companies that want to appear to look green, but in economic terms, it really does not make any sense.

If you think that this is shocking, read this.