The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [67]
Boesel’s Green Microgym fits perfectly in this neighborhood: a modest, two-story boxlike structure with bright red exterior and no-frills interior. There are the usual ellipticals, stationary bikes, treadmills, and free weights, but look closer and you’ll notice a twist on those fitness staples. Boesel has retrofitted much of his exercise equipment so that gym members can generate a small amount of usable energy during their workouts.
He is not the first to ponder the potential of human exertion for generating energy. Inmates in nineteenth-century New York prisons were forced to walk on treadmills as punishment, and that energy was used to grind grain for the inmates’ daily bread. Today, a handful of fitness centers around the world are seeking to exploit the same concept—on a purely voluntary basis. California Fitness in Hong Kong has cardio machines to produce energy for the gym’s lighting, while the Netherlands boasts the Sustainable Dance Club in Rotterdam. The dance floor is made up of small modules that move in response to the people dancing, and this movement is converted into electricity that lights up the floor. A Boston gym has a special stationary bike with a laptop built into the handlebars. The laptop has no battery; it is powered entirely by the person pedaling, so someone can get in a decent workout and still surf the Web or answer a few e-mails. It is a multitasker’s delight.
Back in 1990, before being energy conscious was cool, actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. connected a bicycle to a 24-volt battery to generate the energy needed for small kitchen appliances. He has been known to make toast this way or to run a coffeemaker. However, Boesel and others think there might be the potential for a commercial market as well. Several companies have cropped up in recent years specializing in retrofitted exercise equipment, such as ReRev.com in St. Petersburg, Florida; Henry Works in El Paso, Texas; and entrepreneur Jim Whelan’s Green Revolution. There is an entire academic research program devoted to human-powered energy at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
It’s an ingenious idea. We spend hours each week running, cycling, or climbing in place, like hamsters on one of those little wheels, with no other goal than to burn off last night’s indulgence in a hot fudge sundae—all in pursuit of the slim, athletic figure so prized by modern society. (Admit it: For most people, the health benefits of doing so are largely secondary.) So why not try to harness some of that energy otherwise going to waste and turn gym rats into energy generators?43 The human body is essentially a machine—specifically, a heat engine. Boesel’s Green Microgym is based on solid thermodynamic principles, and this makes it an ideal learning environment for exploring the calculus of energy as it relates to diet, exercise, and the economic feasibility of harvesting energy from exercise machines.
BLOWING OFF STEAM
Every March in Los Angeles’ funky Echo Park neighborhood, the Los Angeles Wheelmen—a local bicycling club—gather at the foot of Fargo Street for their annual Fargo Street Hill Climb. Members compete to see who can make it up the road’s steep grade between Allesandro and Alvarado Streets the most times in a single day. It’s a daunting challenge: That one-block stretch of Fargo Street boasts a vertigo-inducing 32 percent grade, tying with nearby Baxter Street for the second-steepest grade in the city. (Eldred Street in the Highland Park neighborhood takes top honors with a 33 percent grade.) The current