- Tom Olson
- Ada, MI
- United States
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Community power bikes
Most of us know what bike shares are. What if we could utilize human kinetic energy and turn it into electric energy. There are disk breaks that use the energy lost from stoping to produce energy for the community or run safety applications like cameras and GPS systems on the bike.
We could also add batteries on the bike to store energy and drop it into the grid when you lock into a kiosk station.
Topics:
alternative energy community empowerment
Tom Olson
My true vision is that people will be riding a bike that will just charge there clothing and the kiosks could have a wireless charging system that will take the energy, unless you were to keep it for personal use. The kiosks would also reward the riders by giving them a coupon, of some sort depending on the amount of energy they produced, for a local business that endorses community power.
To make the system simple there would be a touch screen that acts as a visitor center for the city on each kiosk. These would be powered by solar panels and could be the size of a ipad or bigger.
Andrew Quan
Therefore there is a tradeoff between 'ability to store more energy' and 'the ability to carry a large heavy battery on a bike'
Perhaps do some calculations on what critical mass would be for this to be viable to "drop [energy] into the grid when you lock into a kiosk station"
Connor McCall
It's bold, certainly, but banks on a lot of goodwill. The first requirement - idiotproofing, or more accurately, building a durable, affordable design - is entirely feasible for this idea. But the second - thief-resistance - is much more difficult.
Tom Olson