Solar Swadeshi: handmade electricy
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 06. 3.05
a treehugger commenter has proposed a remarkable concept on his blog: just as Gandhi would spin yarn for an hour a day, practicing "swadishi- that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote." we should be practicing solar swadeshi, generating electricity for our immediate surroundings.
Gmoke's proposition:
Gandhi was a middle-aged man when he first asked his wife Kasturba to teach him to use the spinning wheel. Once he had mastered the wheel, he practiced spinning every day for the rest of his life. Home-spinning became a symbol for independence and self-reliance throughout India under his encouragement and direction.
Gandhi would spin for an hour each day, usually producing a hundred yards of thread, and helped develop a simple spinning wheel (charkha) that allowed many to do the same. He believed that spinning was the foundation of non-violence. I believe this type of practical labor has to be the core of any sustainable ecological action.
We need a solar swadeshi, an ecological practice on a daily basis that allows us to live within our solar income. Gandhi used the charkha, the spinning wheel. What would be an ecological charkha, a solar charkha? I suggest a hand cranked, pedalled, or treadled dynamo. Work it for 30 minutes a day and generate watts and watts of electrical power for your own use or to put back into the grid for the benefit of others. Solar swadeshi. Hand-made electricity. 21st century khadi cloth. Real electrical power to the people. True energy independence with minimum waste, at least in terms of generation. Doing what Gandhi did with cloth but now with electricity.
We are, for once, at a loss for words. Continue reading at ::Solarray
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Match this post with the one about capturing energy from gyms, and you've got your answer.
Gardening at home, with enough to produce for your kitchen and occasional food gifts to the neighbors is an eqivalent solar capture. It is also from the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, yeoman farmer.
Funny. I was thinking the other day while at gym whether anyone else had thought of connecting up all those stationary cycles, glidex machines, rowing machines, in fact any machine that uses human energy to burn kilojoules, to the grid, or at least to offset the power that the gym uses to operate.
Think about it, there must be plenty of watts being created everyday just in the name of fitness. What if we could harness all that energy for a useful purpose.
Hmm... On to the drawing board! :-)
I have thought the same thing about the gym! Really anywhere there is motion there is engergy, and there is lots of wasted motion.
My boyfriend and his friends are all MIT educated engineers and I posed the gym scenerio to see what they thought. They said it actually wouldn't make much of a dent, you wouldn't produce enough energy to power the treadmill you just ran on.
But still - if you, say, use 200 watts of energy to power that treadmill and you're able to generate, say, 40 watts (these are made up numbers) that's still a 20% reduction and every little bit helps. Right?
One would hope so; however, coming from the solar industry, I can say that putting any electricity back *into* the grid is a nontrivial engineering trick, if you want to avoid screwing up its fairly finely balanced operation with your intermittent power. You would need thousands and thousands of dollars of inverters & power conditioning equipment to get the power back out of the gym, along with testing, certification, etc. - the existing solar and small wind turbine equipment does a good job of this, but would not adapt readily to this kind of source...you'd almost certainly end up blowing more money and resources than you saved. Note that Gandhi was able to achieve a lot of success by turning energy into valuable products using only a mechanical intermediary - using an electrical one is probably a loser.
There is a company out there that sells an adaptor for bikes so they can be used to generate electricity. The product is known as the Pedal-a-Watt. I was going to buy one, but the difficulty in finding a low-power utility intertie inverter and my desire to not deal with batteries prevented me from doing so.
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2004/12/human-power-stations.html
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Human Power Stations
Here's a company that sells human power generators
http://www.windstreampower.com/humanpower/hpg.html
There's always Freeplay and they have a "FreeCharge Marine Power Pack" that's "available soon"
http://www.freeplayenergy.com/index.php?section=home
And this company, Dynosys, seems to have optimized the wheel-rim generator
http://www.dynosys-ag.ch/indexe.html
As for going back into the grid, is it Astropower or Evergreen Solar that has a grid-compatible inverter built-in on their PV panels?
We could also trade batteries. AAs as currency.
It is a wonderful feeling to do something for the Earth each day to know you are making a difference. Any volunteer work for environmental charities is one great way. More individual "ecological charkha" work ideas:
1. Mending or making clothing out of leftover cloth.
2. Gardening to grow food (mentioned above).
3. Gardening to replace paved surfaces or grass with more diverse ecosystems.
4. Rebuilding old bicycles.
5. Picking up stuff from parks that belong in recycling containors.
6. Pulling out glass bottles, cans and newspapers from garbage cans and recycling them.
7. Or how about turing off your electricity for an hour each day and spend the time in bed.