OT This why we need renewable energy.

[harry]

[Tim Streater]

You want renewable smog? Don't they have that already?

[Brian Gaff]

A few years back somebody very politically incorrectly came up with a variation on the old treadmill idea from penal colonies of the past, where prisoners were used to generate electricity by peddling bikes for a time in shifts. Somehow I feel this would be rather inefficient from the energy point of view as presumably feeding the prisoners would take more energy than could be generated. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

But aren't you going to feed them anyway?

UK Prison population approx 85,000, a resonably fit person pedling at a rate they can sustain ought to be able to produce about 100 W. So

8.5 MW but with eating and sleeping and an 8 hour shift pattern only 1/3 of that, at very best, would be avialable. Then there would be "un-fit" for what ever reason perhaps you might get 25%? or about 2 MW?

[Chris Hogg]

No it's not. It's why we need nuclear energy!

[tabbypurr]

India's pollution problem has nothing to do with how we should generate energy.

NT

[whisky-dave]

You'd have to feed them more. Such atheliets have specail diets too.

Were did you get that figure I heard 80w average for an hour.

I'd suggest we make it an olympic event why waste money on a velodrome when all you really need is a bike stand and a watt meter. Our team GB would also be doing something useful while training/practicing.

Although I'm not sure providing a certain Mr Armstrong or others with free drugs would make it economically viable.

[Nightjar]

+1

[The Natural Philosopher]

Vastly more Brian.

First of all the conversion rate of sunlight to crops - food - is about 1%.

And that's to burnable cellulose, which we cant digest, so in a typical veggie diet, most of that goes out as shit.

Or we can get cows to turn it into good meat, but that's another huge loss of energy along the way.

And then mostly muscles turn it into heat..

[Davey]

If you could capture the resulting methane, that would help by maybe 0.5 % or so. Every little helps, they say.

[Capitol]

But if we hang them istead of feeding them, their energy consumption reduces to almost zero so we have a win/win situation!

[alan_m]

The pollution comes from the factories producing solar panels.

[Bill Wright]

Western countries have very strict rules about pollution. In any case pollution is nothing to do with renewable energy. C02 is not a pollutant. It is essential for life.

Bill

[dennis]

We no longer have smog like that, unfortunately the clean air has resulted in a temperature rise and some idiots have capitalised on that by making nonsense claims about a global warming catastrophe.