This thread is a response to this post.

My first guess is the power gained from the wind turbines would very little and nowhere near enough to justify the power lost due to the increased wind resistance.

I do like the treadmill idea, though it should be expanded to entire gyms with bikes, rowing, etc. An individual only occasionally using his or her exercise equipment would be insufficient. If said machines required I.D. cards for activation a win-win situation could be reached if the gym offers discounts or rewards of some sort to that member for helping to generate X amount of electricity thereby increasing profit. That should appeal to the free marketers.

Guaranteed. Turbines work by taking energy away from their motion relative to the air. Here that means stealing it from the motion of the car, so whatever you give back to the battery could be at most what you took away. The only way you could come out ahead if it was actually really windy out, and then you might as well leave the turbine on the ground.

If we could somehow extract power from hyperactive Jack Russell terriers chasing tennis balls...

I was initially wondering whether this was meant to be in WGARS - 'generating wacky powers'?

Ages ago I saw someone actually work out some of the numbers for connecting up gym equipment to generators. Unfortunately, at the end of a strenuous workout, you still wouldn't have generated enough electricity to make a cup of tea.

Well, one of the best sources of methane is cow farts. The problem is that the cows like to wander around. But this isn't really a problem. All we need is rubber tubing and some morally ambiguous cows...er, no.

What? We do all sort of things to cows that they don't approve of, like, oh killing them to eat their meat.

I was going to put in some smug comment about how I don't eat meat. But I realized that if we stopped eating cows, that would sharply drop methane emissions. As methane is a strong greenhouse gas, it would be like turning off multiple coal plants. Still doesn't generate an eV of power, but it does make things more efficient.

Wacky Power Idea: pizoelectric generators and restless leg syndrome. It'll work, I tell you!

Given AFAIK urned methane is better then methane with respect to global warming, we could mount pilot lights at cow butts, so their methane gets burned. And pastures would look great at night.

Actually, most of the emissions are from cow burps, but that's slightly less entertaining.

I fail to see how fire breathing cattle is less entertaining.

There is already such thing as an "energy-plus" house which generates more electricity than it consumes. It uses a combination of photovoltaic cells and a super-efficient construction (passive construction, which basically means the house is so damn well insulated you barely need any energy to keep it warm). This makes it possible to run a whole house on solar cells, even in a not so sunny climate, and then have some energy left over. The excess energy can be sold to the grid.

Some places in Germany are experimenting with using excess off-peak solar and wind energy to do electrolysis in order to produce hydrogen gas, which is then stored in the urban gas pipelines. When the energy is needed, the gas is burnt in a conventional gas fired plant.

The problem with solar cells has always been the cost, but I'm told that in the last year or two they have gotten so cheap because they're being mass produced in China. Is there a limit to how many PV cells the world can produce?

There are many different processes for making PV. Most of the better cells use rare materials. Others use common materials. Fortunately for China, they have direct access to all of the rare materials one would need.

I present the winner of an award held in this country for the most eco-friendly house. It can sink underground to improve insulation in the cold winter months, and rotates so that it can catch the maximum possible sunlight at all times. Not a power generator, but it saves a lot.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/08/rotati ... -sunlight/

Crazy ideas....

Well... we could always re-create methane by lighting carbon on fire in and oxygen-free hydrogen environment. Hydrogen can be kind of a problem to liberate from water though.

Having recently travelled through Indiana, Illinoise, Iowa, and Nebraska, I kind of wonder why more methane plants don't exist in those areas. In Indiana, there were tons of people using propane. A small barn containing 3 pigs is enough to replace the majority of tanks i saw sitting in people's yards.

After that, Black top collects an insane amount of heat. If we put radiators underneath roads to collect the heat and a thermal well just off to the side of the road to keep a constant supply of water at a particular temperature streaming into the radiators, we could have lots of hot water, or run Thermo-acoustic stuff and produce electricity. We'd need to find a way to take heavy trucks off the the road though.

With that in mind.... Solar powered delivery blimps. that's probably as far as i need to explain that idea, but... uh... if you want me to get crazy, i've thought this one out alot.