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The bike rack that harvests clean energy from cycle commuters

S-Park would turn energy produced by cyclists into electricity for the neighbourhood

The S-Park bike rack is pitched as a means of harvesting the clean energy produced by cyclists during their commutes. The designers reckon that a rack for 30 bikes could generate one kilowatt-hour a day.

Amsterdam’s city centre has little space for clean energy infrastructure with solar panels and other visible interventions not permitted on historic buildings. Nevertheless, the city has pledged that a quarter of its electricity will be sustainably generated by 2025.

This has given rise to the Clean Energy Challenge, a competition seeking innovative renewable energy designs. Fast Company reports that the S-Park is the submission of designers Guillaume Roukhomovsky and Blaž Verhnjak.

The system involves a front bike wheel with batteries which store the energy produced by the revolving wheel and through braking.

When the cyclist returns home, they park in the S-Park bike rack that’s connected to the power network and the power in the wheel is captured and used.

Roukhomovsky and Verhnjak estimate that for a rack of 30 bikes, and an average commute of 2.2 miles a day, about one kilowatt-hour per day could be generated.

Amsterdam is planning to invest tens of millions in cycling infrastructure by 2020, so they are also hoping to present their idea to the mayor.

S-PARK from Guillaume Roukhomovsky on Vimeo.

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12 comments

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wycombewheeler | 2 years ago
2 likes

Quote:

 The designers reckon that a rack for 30 bikes could generate one kilowatt-hour a day.

so, about 6p a day at feed in tarrifs, generating an income of £438 over a 20 year life.

Awsome

 

Avatar
haruto | 2 years ago
0 likes

looks great for using clean  energy. I have strong interest in using solar and wind energy id daily life and making some engine will be use such source of renewable energies. But for making such tools we need to use automation equipments like https://eltra-trade.com/catalog/sick-encoder

Avatar
FrankH | 5 years ago
1 like

"The system involves a front bike wheel with batteries which store the energy produced by the revolving wheel and through braking."

Energy isn't produced by the revolving wheel, it's produced by my reciprocating legs. And I want any energy produced by my reciprocating legs to go into overcoming air resistance, tyre rolling resistance and gravity. There may be a small amount of energy wasted on downhills and braking but it's barely enough to make the rims warm never mind run a toaster.

This sounds like an "invention" by people who don't do physics.

Or a scam.

Avatar
hawkinspeter | 5 years ago
1 like

I like the idea of recovering energy through braking as that would otherwise be wasted, but I wonder how they've implemented it (you wouldn't want the brakes to be less effective).

The idea of scavenging power from the rider is pointless though. I wouldn't want to ride a bike that robs me of 50/100watts and is heavy because there's a battery to store all the scavenged power.

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Sriracha replied to hawkinspeter | 2 years ago
0 likes

I'm sure that if the brake recovery bit worked as advertised then the ebike manufacturers would already be all over it. But 2 years have passed and I'm not seeing any.

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grumpyoldcyclist | 5 years ago
10 likes

I may have missed something here, but I can't help thinking that if there is a bike rack with 30 bikes in it, it might take a decent size canopy to cover them. If that canopy comprised some solar panels, it would probably harvest a lot more electricity. Makes more sense to me, using some tried and tested technology.

Just a thought.

Avatar
jerome | 5 years ago
1 like

30 bikes, 2.2m commute, 1kW.h.

-> that's assuming 30 cyclists going at 15kph giving 133W for free!

That is really painful so read/see so stupid things. A professional cyclist outputting 500W cannot even run a typical hairdryer comsuming >1kW.

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BehindTheBikesheds replied to jerome | 5 years ago
0 likes

jerome wrote:

30 bikes, 2.2m commute, 1kW.h.

-> that's assuming 30 cyclists going at 15kph giving 133W for free!

That is really painful so read/see so stupid things. A professional cyclist outputting 500W cannot even run a typical hairdryer comsuming >1kW.

You're not accounting for regen energy from braking, not saying it's going to add up but you still need to account for everything.

10mph cycling is 13.2minutes for 2.2 miles x 30 = 396mins cycling, how much energy could be generated from that

I read "Bang Goes the Theory" demonstrated a human-powered home in a TK programme, 8.5 kW of power required 70 cyclists, of fairly typical fitness, or about 107W per cyclist.

There's already regen tech in e-bikes currently, people are losing their shit over this, it's an experiment, instead of giving it a ton of negativity why not see what happens, and if you think that 30 cyclists might only produce half a kw/h doing 2.2 miles a day then IF someone manages to produce a retrofit unit to capture energy from bikes, how much energy could say 100,000 cyclists produce, or 1 million?

 

Avatar
wycombewheeler replied to BehindTheBikesheds | 2 years ago
0 likes

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

jerome wrote:

30 bikes, 2.2m commute, 1kW.h.

-> that's assuming 30 cyclists going at 15kph giving 133W for free!

That is really painful so read/see so stupid things. A professional cyclist outputting 500W cannot even run a typical hairdryer comsuming >1kW.

You're not accounting for regen energy from braking, not saying it's going to add up but you still need to account for everything.

10mph cycling is 13.2minutes for 2.2 miles x 30 = 396mins cycling, how much energy could be generated from that

I read "Bang Goes the Theory" demonstrated a human-powered home in a TK programme, 8.5 kW of power required 70 cyclists, of fairly typical fitness, or about 107W per cyclist.

There's already regen tech in e-bikes currently, people are losing their shit over this, it's an experiment, instead of giving it a ton of negativity why not see what happens, and if you think that 30 cyclists might only produce half a kw/h doing 2.2 miles a day then IF someone manages to produce a retrofit unit to capture energy from bikes, how much energy could say 100,000 cyclists produce, or 1 million?

 

more energy would go into making and installing these racks than they will recoup in their lifetime. Scaling up will not help.

And thats before we consider that the average cyclist using this rack will be using half their energy to charge the battery and half for movement of the bike.

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burtthebike | 5 years ago
0 likes

I wonder how many miles the electricity generated by all these cyclists would power an electric car?

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handlebarcam | 5 years ago
11 likes

Quote:

Roukhomovsky and Verhnjak estimate that for a rack of 30 bikes, and an average commute of 2.2 miles a day, about one kilowatt-hour per day could be generated.

So, enough energy to run five 20W energy-saver light bulbs for 10 hours. Or boil about half a dozen kettles per day. Or roughly what any of the hundreds of wind turbines within about 30km of Amsterdam generate on average every 5 seconds. That is assuming their estimate of energy generation is correct - bicycles are so good as a form of transport because they're highly efficient, meaning there is little energy to be reclaimed - so either these wheels would be draggy as hell, or they did their sums based on somewhere a lot hillier. Given all the energy consumed in the manufacturing of batteries and installation and maintenance of the stands, this would pay for itself approximately... never.

Clean energy is too important to waste time on the idiotic schemes of attention-seeking design graduates.

Avatar
John Smith | 5 years ago
2 likes

So enough to run an oven for between 10 and 30 mins... Not much really.

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