People Power vs Horsepower
James Watt promoted the term ‘horsepower’ as a marketing ploy for his steam engines.
A horsepower is equal to 745.7 watts. It would be difficult however for a horse to sustain that amount of output over a long period of time.
For humans, we can produce short bursts of up to 1500 watts using something like this human powered generator (a motor with bicycle pedals attached). That’s the equivalent to about 2 horsepower for a very short duration (less than a minute?). Humans can’t sustain that speed. It is far more likely that we’d drop down to about 200 watts or even less than 100 watts for a very long period (more than a few hours).
Human Power is roughly equal to 0.1 horsepower over a sustained period. It’s estimated that just by walking, we could harvest 67 watts of energy. Check out this D-I-Y parasitic power pair of shoes from MIT. Here we’re still talking about micro-generators for low-powered devices. Imagine how much electricity could be harvested from your daily workout with the right equipment. Spinning pedals is only one way to harvest all that energy.
Read more about human powered kinetic energy technology.
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