Extremely Weird (and Futuristic) Ways to Generate Electricity #1
When people usually talk about electricity, they talk usually about fossil fuels and climate change, or renewable sources like Solar, Wind, and Nuclear. In this post, I'm not going to focus on anything like that. Instead, in this series, I will focus on wacky things, like running, and the futuristic, like fusion. (TL;DR tips: read only the bold.)
RUNNING
Believe it or not, running is more efficient than you think. A 150-pound person running at 6 miles per hour will burn 681 calories an hour. That person is a 792 milliwatt generator, which, if that person runs for one hour, would cost 0.01 cents. If that person were to run a hundred hours a year, it would be one cent of extra cash. That doesn't seem like much? How about all marathons?
I will assume that 500 thousand people run every year and that there is an equal number of men and women, to keep things simple. (Also that the average person is 170 pounds.) Then, there are more than 1.6 billion calories, enough to make a large bathtub of water by 5298 degrees Celsius, or in a different form of speaking, the combined oceans by about a billionth of a degree. That sums up to about $220. This could also power 170 houses for a year.
RAINDROPS
From Google, I know that Raindrops fall at 9 meters per second. There is a place in India that has a rainfall average of 463 inches of rainfall a year. I will completely destroy the town and put a 1 X 1 square mile square of turbines instead. Using a revised equation:
27878400 ft^2 * 11.76 m * 9 m/s (assuming 100% efficiency). We turn that into the amount of total liters of water, which is 30,500,000,000 liters (30.5 B.) Now,
W = 30.5 B liters * 9m/s * 1 = 274.5 B Watt-hours. This is also 274.5 Gigawatt-hours/year, which will cost almost $33 million. Also, this much energy a year is the equivalent of running the entire U.S. consumption... for 30.926 days, or about a month. This means this project will generate about 1/12 yearly the entire U.S. annual needs! That was a lot more than expected!
RUNNING
Believe it or not, running is more efficient than you think. A 150-pound person running at 6 miles per hour will burn 681 calories an hour. That person is a 792 milliwatt generator, which, if that person runs for one hour, would cost 0.01 cents. If that person were to run a hundred hours a year, it would be one cent of extra cash. That doesn't seem like much? How about all marathons?
I will assume that 500 thousand people run every year and that there is an equal number of men and women, to keep things simple. (Also that the average person is 170 pounds.) Then, there are more than 1.6 billion calories, enough to make a large bathtub of water by 5298 degrees Celsius, or in a different form of speaking, the combined oceans by about a billionth of a degree. That sums up to about $220. This could also power 170 houses for a year.
RAINDROPS
From Google, I know that Raindrops fall at 9 meters per second. There is a place in India that has a rainfall average of 463 inches of rainfall a year. I will completely destroy the town and put a 1 X 1 square mile square of turbines instead. Using a revised equation:
27878400 ft^2 * 11.76 m * 9 m/s (assuming 100% efficiency). We turn that into the amount of total liters of water, which is 30,500,000,000 liters (30.5 B.) Now,
W = 30.5 B liters * 9m/s * 1 = 274.5 B Watt-hours. This is also 274.5 Gigawatt-hours/year, which will cost almost $33 million. Also, this much energy a year is the equivalent of running the entire U.S. consumption... for 30.926 days, or about a month. This means this project will generate about 1/12 yearly the entire U.S. annual needs! That was a lot more than expected!
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