Hybrid2 public bike concept promises to help power city buses
By Donald Melanson 
posted Jul 16th 2009 1:38AM
posted Jul 16th 2009 1:38AM
Hybrid bikes are one thing, but designer Chiyi Chen looks to have something far grander in mind for his Hybrid2 bike concept, which he says could one day help power fleets of city buses. To do that, the hybrid part of the bike (a regenerative braking system) wouldn't be used to help power the bike itself at all, but would instead store the energy in an ultracapacitor that'd then feed the energy back into the grid when its parked at a special bike stand, which would in turn be used to help charge the hybrid electric buses. Not one to overlook an ingenious little detail, Chen has also devised a special card RFID card that would not only be used to unlock the bike, but keep track of the energy that each rider generates -- build up enough credits and you can ride the bus for free. Intrigued? Head on past the break for a video overview from the man himself.
[Via Inhabitat]
[Via Inhabitat]
Every time I go past a gym and see all those treadmills and stationary bikes going, I think of this.
Also...
First!
And I was just about to give you a +1 too....
Would that be because that technology not only already exists, but has already been implemented?
We have all thought about generating electricity from a health club, but when you look into it, it doesn't make much sense.
You cannot generate electricity from a treadmill - a treadmill *requires* electricity.
The amount of electricity you can generate from a stationary bike (probably the optimum device you could generate electricity from in the entire gym) is trivial - less than $.01/hour.
Its not even enough to power the computer and display on the bike, never mind the personal LCD television (if it has one). If they had neither a computer nor LCD, in an average sized gym 10 bikes would probably generate less than $20/mo in electricity.
Seth, of course its enough to power the small display on the bike. Have you never seen those odd demonstrations where they light up a light bulb with a stationary bike?
Wow. See, when we watch movies set in the future/read books about the future, this is the sort of absurdly practical yet cool thing that you see. Yet, I know that this has such a slim chance of ever being created. Please, major cities, consider this! It's awesome!
The city of Sevilla, Spain already does this: http://www.trackchanges.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/seville.jpg
Charles: the image you supplied is for a bike rental service: Two more cities offering public bike rental services. While cool, these bikes are not storing up potential energy to power a bus.
Meh. Link lost in my reply. Link here: "Two more cities offering public bike rental services" http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/07/26/two-more-cities-offering-public-bike-rental-services-sevilla-an/
I must have missed the absurdly practical bit. The useful energy levels in a bike and a bus differ by at least 3 orders of magnitude; how is adding a conversion, storage, and distribution system just to make that tiny dent in the buses' power practical?
And if that weren't bad enough, you either put a big enough battery of ultracaps to store the longest rides people might take (~50 miles), and have that much cost and deadweight adding nothing for the 5-mile trips, or you cut it back and rip hard riders off on their bus fare.
The practical thing is to use a smaller ultracap on the bike (since you only need to store energy from one downhill or stop, for the next uphill / start, not the entire ride) and use the power on the bike, where the power levels are nicely matched. Since this bike will be easier to ride than a standard bike, you can rent them a bit higher, and use the difference to slightly help buy electricity/LPG/whatever to run your buses
Awesome - until kids learn how to hack out the ultracapacitors, and fuse the bikes to the charging stations for kicks.
Or turn them into steerable stun guns!
Too high maintenance.
More like the bikes will be ridiculously hard to ride. I don't know if anybody's ever even ridden a bike with a rider-powered headlight, but the amount of drag it generates makes it like 50% harder to pedal. Trying to power buses is gonna make every bike feel like molasses.
Read the article: "To do that, the hybrid part of the bike (a regenerative braking system). "
It only puts resistance on when you are braking. That's how regenerative braking works. This is just like any normal bike pedaling wise, it just weighs a bit more.
This is friggin' BRILLIANT. The card identifies you, so you can build up credits (and they can track you down if you don't return what is a pretty nice looking bike) and you've now got a reliable method of transportation around town with a free bus as a backup for rainy days, being tired, whatever.
Too bad it'll never get realized. Americans don't like bikes in their cities. :(
Like Americans are the centre of everything?
Read the comment of Charles Melbye again... it already exists in Sevilla!
I believe it is also tested in Paris now... but hey at least you can enter Engadget's recession antidote
This would probably work in Portland, I just spent a few days there and they love their bikes and public transit out there.
--JJ
http://www.PostcardFilms.com
Why doesn't it just power the bike?
The small amounts of energy saved, even after the lossy transfers would never make up for the infrastructure/maintenance costs.
So many things would be feasible, yet, then so worthless if materials/manufacturing cost was zero.
This is ridiculous... my bike's rim will get hot as I'm coming off a 1500 foot mountain, but it's cool to the touch within 30 seconds. The amount of energy generated by a bike's braking is about as useful as a 9V battery in a car. Heck, the reverse should occur - a single braking in something as large as a bus would easily power 10 bikes...
It's true. Of course, it's a lot simpler for the bus to keep the power and use it itself.
Uh. The weight of extra components will make them pretty un-ridable. Unless someone develops a really light way of storing power, this is unlikely to catch on.
Hence, ultracapacitor.
@ darklighter,
the best ultracapacitors have a power density of 30wh/kg, which is four times worse than simple Lion cells (a 0.5kg laptop battery stores about 60wh).
So let's say you put a 2kg (4.5 pound) ultracapacitor on a bike. That's 60Wh - the same energy capacity as the aforementioned laptop battery. A typical bus will use about 60kw of power on average for ~30mph city use. For one hour that's 60Kwh, or 60,000 watt-hours. Divided by the ultracapacitor capacity of 60wh, a fully charged bike can provide the bus with 1/1000th of an hour of power, or precisely 3.6 seconds. To fully power one city bus for one hour, you would need 1000 fully charged bicycles, which would save you a grand total of four gallons of gas (assuming a 45% efficient diesel drivetrain). Given the expense of producing bicycles with this capacity, and factoring in the weight penalty to riders, this idea is completely invalid.
Enviro gimmick doom to failure # 12444444222 and counting.
Evil neocon faux news viewer! Spreading your misinformed doom and gloom everywhere!!!!
If it's for the planet and green, clean energy, it's a brilliant idea! No matter what you deniers say! Everything that has a claimed green angle is good, pure, and required to save the planet!
And don't anyone try to tell me whenever they have these shared bicycle programs, the bikes end up damaged or stolen! This time it's different! Because it's green!!!!!
[to above] HAHAHA!
The problem with all these kinetic energy ideas is that people don't realize just how little energy they can actually produce. Here's my calculations...
Average size person using moderate effort cycling for 30 minutes = about 300 calories burned
100 calories = 1.1897 BTUs
One gallon of gasoline contains approximately 12000 BTUs of energy
Therefore, the cyclist will produce the energy equivalent of 0.0099147% of 1 gallon of gasoline.
Then factor in all the energy used to make and maintain all those ultra capacitors and the infrastructure and it just doesn't work out.
Sorry to burst bubbles. I think it's a great concept too but I've just never seen anyone prove how this stuff could actually generate any significant net energy gain.
Typo... Should have read "300 calories = 1.1897 BTUs"
What I was thinking of exactly. This will only lead to stolen or damaged bikes and a loss to the city.
Agreed... it seems like such an overly complicated way to use up such little energy. Why not just use the power on the bike itself? OR... why not actually just build in a battery to make the bike more, you know, usable? In China they have electric powered bikes for under $100... why not just build tons of those and spread those around cities?
Not only that, but amazingly the cost to society and the environment per mile for riding a bike is about the same as driving a car (and more than taking a bus). In the US it takes on average 10 calories to produce each calorie of food. Only at low speeds does a bike beat a car's efficiency by a factor of more than 10. So using food energy to power transportation is not on its face such a wonderful thing, and yet the first assumption is that an idea like this is pure genius.
I think most of the energy they are talking about collecting isn't the energy of effort of the rider (which goes mostly into propelling the bike forward), but rather trying to collect the energy to stop and slow down the bike, which usually just turns into wasted heat. So your calculations are irrelevant because they are comparing apples to oranges.
Granted, that dissipation energy also isn't that much, but it is still more than you think. Remember, hybrid cars reclaim a lot of energy when you brake and store it in the battery (that is the only energy source to recharge the batter in most hybrids). If you get millions of people using these bikes in a major city, just by shear volume it could add up to a lot of energy that is presently being wasted.
Don't forget, this technology is probably in its infancy, so the performance isn't that impressive, but if we give it a shot and keep innovating in the space, we could really get moving. Arguments like your make me glad that Henry Ford didn't listen to naysayers who said "Why do we need this automobile thing? It goes slower than my horse-drawn carriage!"
@ Mikey...
I think you are correct that, according to the article, the plan is only to harness the braking power. Therefore simple physics would mean that the power you get out of the braking is going to have to be less than the power you put into the pedaling. And obviously it would be significantly less because most of the energy of riding is dissipated as friction.
My point is not that there aren't ways of reclaiming power generated by humans. The point is how small of an amount it is. No matter how efficient you can make the technology you can't violate the laws of physics. Even at 100% efficiency, the human body is no match for other energy sources.
The other point is that most ideas like these are implying a net energy gain but they rarely talk about how much energy is used to produce the bikes, deliver them their locations, maintain their systems (including more travel by vehicles to where the bikes are), etc. To me this makes these plans more about politics and giving people "warm fuzzies" than actually making a difference for our energy needs.
Let's keep up the innovation like Henry Ford, but let's make sure that we are actually having an impact.
Eric,
that's a really shallow analysis. For starters, the food a cyclist consumes is not necessarily any more than what another human would consume-- Most people work out; someone driving a car is likely to go burn a bunch of food calories on a treadmill or playing field elsewhere, so your assumption that cycling inherently means more food consumption is off-base.
Further, food is a renewable resource. Fossil fuel is not.
I also think that when you talk about the "social cost" of driving, you're leaving out a lot of externalities. Fuel consumption and carbon dioxide production are only two of the issues cars bring up. Air and noise pollution, traffic fatalities, roadway building and maintenance costs, obesity (and subsequent healthcare costs), and a myriad of other problems all constitute social costs of driving that everyone has to bear, and that non-drivers bear disproportionately.
Finally, I'm not sure where you get the idea that a bike is only 10 times more efficient than a car. A fit person on a bike (not an enthusiast or racer) generally puts out in the neighborhood of 100 watts, or 1/7th a horsepower. Even with a more underpowered new car car today, let's say 100 horsepower, that's at most 1/700th of the power required to move the car around.
True, it takes longer to ride a bike somewhere than a car, so the power comparison isn't completely straightforward. But ignoring the case of cities (where bikes are often quicker than cars), let's assume the bike takes 3 times as long (i.e. the bike averages 15mph while the car averages 45mpg)-- even then, we're talking about 1/200th the total energy for the bike to get somewhere versus the car.
Are you sure you're not an auto lobbyist?
@ Eric:
that may be true, but people get exercise biking.
great idea
until someone decides to steal the bikes!
This story is proof that alternative energy is still just a joke...
So why even bother trying to improve the technology? Is that what you're saying? Pretty much ALL technology starts out as an idea that looks like a joke... but over time it turns into something amazing. Think how horrible the world would be if we cut off all potentially great technology in its infancy just because it wasn't practical at the time: no cars, no airplanes, no computers, definitely no internet, no plastics, I hope you like growing your own food because there would be no mass farming or refrigeration, no drugs to keep you alive past the age of 20, in fact very little of that new fangled "medicine" all the kids are talking about, no telephones... I think you get the idea.
I think your attitude is the joke.
This sounds incredibly inefficient...but I guess I could be wrong!
What happened to our society, that we give serious air time to a "solution" to the energy crisis that has absolutely no possibility of working, proffered by a designer who clearly has no working knowledge of physics or mechanical engineering?
With all due respect to what is an interesting design concept (and by "design" I mean "artsy-fartsy, blue sky, imagination building exercise"), there is absolutely no possibility that this could work at all, as other comments more clearly illustrate than I. Yet we're offered this solution--which is only slightly better than perpetual motion--as if it were a realistic and practical solution.
What irritates me greatly is that eventually a bunch of people will be saying "so why don't we implement this guy's solution? It's perfect!" And instead of accepting the idea that the Laws of Thermodynamics and energy transfer make it an impossible solution, instead we'll get screams of "Big Oil Conspiracy!"
We've become a world of people engaged in magical thinking, who believe if we just wrap it in a cool design and sell it to people, we'll get to a tipping point where people will naturally gravitate to solutions like this, and we'll all live happily ever after--regardless of physical reality.
Newsflash: Science is a harsh bitch. Magical thinking will not change the fact that the amount of energy required to accelerate a bus to speed is several orders of magnitude greater than the amount of energy needed for a bike rider to peddle around the corner.
Why don't you run some number's and see if its feasible yourself? I didn't, but I'm sure whoever thought of this did, and at least made sure it's possible.
Bottom line: they didn't.
If a bike rider and bike weighs 200 pounds and tops out at 10mph, a fully loaded bus 42000 pounds and tops out at 70mph, E=(MV**2)/2 tells us the energy difference is well over 10,000 times: it takes 10,000 times more energy to accelerate a bus to highway speed than it takes to accelerate a bike rider to average traveling speed.
Science is a harsh bitch. Sorry.
(And sorry for duplicate comments; I'm still getting used to the comment system here.)
I completely agree with you...its just that I can't believe such a story would get this much attention if there's such a huge discrepancy like that. In fact,. I'm not sure why Engadget posted it if its impossible.
so, all you need is 10,000 riders. I think there will be more than 10,000 riders riding those bikes every day.
the thing is that like what you said about "magical thinking" is also apply about that "physical thinking" you just single out every option that come to mind.
there were time when people thought about doing things and just did them.
all those ancients buildings and constructions would have never happen if they would have thought about it with your approach.
it's the 'ant' effect. Each of them are tiny, but as a collective they are powerful (well, ants are extremely powerful for their size, but that's besides the point).
Also, a cyclist can easily reach 30mph and buses in cities are probably limited to 50mph. Using your logic, that is a difference of about 600x. Assuming the hybrid buses have all the energy saving features you can throw at them (regenerative braking and all), this could offload a measurable amount of energy in bike friendly cities (say where 10% of the population prefers cycling when possible). The credit system promotes an energy conserving thinking.
Having said all that, I do agree with most people here, that the system will fail due to theft and abuse/hacking. It happened in London (bike rental service got abused). However, I disagree with those that bring the infrastructure cost and maintenance into consideration. It's negligible in the grant scale of things, if you consider the value of the service it provides to citizens, the savings it offer, the relative cost compared to building and maintaining other public transport systems.
It's scary that this many people on a tech blog can be fooled into thinking something like this could actually have a benefit.
TomKun: There are a couple of complications that make things worse than my original comments.
First, a bus will probably be in service for 12 hours. Which means you need 10,000 bike riders riding 12 hours a day, or 120,000 bike rider hours per bus. Assuming each person actively rides the bike 30 minutes per session, you'll need a quarter million bike rider sessions. (When I used to ride my bike to work when it was 6 miles away, it took me 35 minutes to get to work.)
And this assumes perfect recapture of energy from the bike rider. With that logic we could run a bus on a gallon of gasoline: the bus could just recapture all of its energy during breaking and reuse that energy starting back up. All the gallon of gasoline would be used for is to start the bus rolling in the morning.
The laws of thermodynamics essentially say you can't break even: there will be losses due to friction and resistance of all sorts. At best using some magical technique you probably could only recapture perhaps 30% of the total energy--which immediately triples all of the estimates above.
Meaning you'll need nearly three quarters of a million bike rider sessions of 30 minutes each per day to power a bus using regenerative breaking.
Feudal societies supported their feudal lords with a smaller ratio of peons to elite people.
Or, put it another way: if you want a free bus pass to ride the bus all day, assuming 50 people are in a bus (which is high, since a bus won't be near capacity for most of the day), you'll need to ride your bike around 72,000 miles first. (Though the transit authority reserves the right to increase this to match average rider capacity and to compensate for the fact that we also need to pay for the bus and the bikes: thus far, I'm assuming your ticket just pays for the energy used to move the bus.)
OK, I'll bite, I think the ratio of bike power compared to bus requirements is probably (certainly) too steep to mean that this is a practical solution... but what about powering (backup) lighting for the bus shelter that the stand is next to?
regenerating the breaking power to give the bike a boost later would be one thing.
but using it to power buses which are 100 times heavier is the stupidest idea i have ever heard of
i mean imagine a bus and a bike crashing in a head on collision, the bike's kinetic energy has practically no effect on the bus whatsoever while the bus effects the bike dramatically. therefore i think it would make more sense for the buses' breaking energy to be sent to the bikes instead where it would actually have a noticeable effect.
OK.. how about a bus and 10,000 bikes. Who wins there? Because that is what we are talking about. In a large enough city where enough people bike, there are thousands of people who use a bike as their primary, or at least a major, form of transportation. Not every place in the world is as lazy as America. Just visit a big city in Europe (I still remember being in awe of the number of bikes parked next to the train station in Amsterdam... easily a couple thousand) or Asia and you'll see.
@mikey- I was happy to see the number of bikes parked in Barcelona, but the number of people riding them still paled in comparasion to the number of cars and buses on the road. And let us not forget that the first thing that a lot of the bicycle riding in Asia is driven by poverty, not a desire to stay fit or be enviromental concious. I'm not trying to gloss over the fact the US is really bad at devloping and using alternative transportation, but the Europeans aren't as good as we like to imagine them being. Mostly they just travel less- http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=949.
The hybrid bicycle idea just doesn't provide enough energy to make it worth the weight and monetary expense of installing the components except perhaps in the case of electric bicycles. I'm a big fan of electric bikes as they avoid the nastiness of uphill peddling and behave better with car traffic than normal bikes, but still give you most of the energy efficiency of a bicycle.
Enviromentally, getting people out cars is 90% of the battle. Anything else is just gravy.
Wow the people who actually believe this nonsense are the dumbest tools in the drawer. Anyone who takes this as a "Alternative source of Energy" needs to get a damn education.
everything about this is completely believable. now whether its practical is another issue, but that's not what you seem to be trying to say. Instead you insult anyone who supports this. perhaps you should read your own comment.
While this is indeed unlikely to be even remotely efficient, it isnt quite as bad as some people above are painting.
Its NOT the equivalent of one person raming into a bus and having an effect on its speed; Its the equivalent of, say, 25-50 people raming into the bus and having an effect on its speed.
A single person isnt expected to pay of the energy consumption of the bus with this scheme, its merely they are expected to pay-of the extra electricity used by -them- riding the bus. Its like buying carbon-displacement when traveling by air, your not covering the whole aircraft, just (supposedly) your contribution by being on that flight.
We are also, of course, talking about an electric bus here, using an electric moter which is vastely more efficient in terms of energy conversion then a combustion engine. (and, of course, human muscles powered by food are also hugely efficient....and, ultimately, solar-powered, energy source. ).
Dont get me wrong, its still not going to cover infrastructure costs, and those capacitors will lose a lot of energy too.
Not to mention storing it before reaching the bus.
If your going to generate power from people, just feeding it back into the grid directly would be the better way to do it. At least then it would power some energy-efficient light bulbs easily enough.
And, actually, yes, daft as it sounds, using people in Gyms to generate power is sensible too....exercise machines are supposed to provide resistance, and dont have to move, and dont need to carry the weight of the capaciters so should be able to generate a lot more energy per-person.
The fact that this was posted is a testament to the poor quality of science education in the United States, or wherever the blogger is from. If you looked at this design and didn't think "this will never work," you have been cheated out of the quality of science education that you deserve.
The way I see it, his vision falls into the same trap of many:
* making things 10x more complex and expensive than they need to be (bikes, special stands, solar cells...)
* neglecting maintenance and vandalism in all of this, plus energy and cost of creating them
* negating one of the main pluses of bikes and stands and parts (low cost, simplicity)
* all for incremental gains (I think it's fair to call them very incremental if they are gains at all, at the end of the day)
most people here are missing the point.
the designer of this conception doesn't claim that cyclists will generate all the required energy to operate the hybrid buses. If you think about it, it's all about the credit system. It promotes the use of bikes in cities. It's an insensitive, which will offload the public transport system (mostly due to less people taking the bus). If it was for energy generation, installing solar panels on the roofs of those hybrid buses would be more effective (which is something they should do anyway)
Something that makes this even more impossible is that the concept is dependent on the recovery of power through regenerative braking. Many of the calculations have used the total amount of energy generated by the cyclist. The amount to be captured is but a tiny fraction of that.
An efficient cyclist typically avoids braking wherever possible which nullifies any potential energy recovery. Once you have scaled a hill you will carefully time your descent so that you go through the intersection at the bottom of the hill at 30mph rather than turn that potential energy into a hot rim.
Any attempts to have the cyclist actually generate and save power will result in a very noticeable increase in effort to which I expect few would volunteer.
I don't get it. Why would they design this bike to create power from regenerative breaking instead of just generating power from the actual cycling?
Because the cyclist would have to provide enough energy to not only propel the bike, but also enough to drive the additional energy creation (energy isn't free... if you use all the cyclists effort that normally goes into moving the bike and store it for some other use, the bike isn't going anywhere). How would you like to ride a bike that takes twice as much effort to go half as fast?
Regenerative braking energy is "free" in that it is energy that is normally just lost as heat dissipation. It requires no extra effort by the cyclist to gather.
This seems like an interesting idea. I hope to see it become viable someday.
Forget the bus ... it takes way too much energy. I can't think I or many other people would generate enough for a bus ride. Also, how far would I be able to travel on the bus?
Just put my an iPod, mobile phone, or laptop connector on the bike to allow me to charge those, and i'll be happy enough.
Batteries are heavy.
"ultracapacitor", is reading heavy too?
Wwhat: An ultracapacitor is heavier than a battery storing the same charge. So the comment about batteries being heavy doubly applies to ultracapacitors.
Apparently, knowledge is even heavier than reading ability.
It's stupid and amounts to nothing, if you bike you slow down beforehand and don't jump into the brakes, and the power you gather in a year from one bike would not even start a bus engine, let alone move it a foot, and what about that 'credit' you save and you get punished by getting to use freaking public transport? Yeah there's a motivator.
Still, you could give a fake name and steal the capacitor from the thing (note that I normally I would not even suggest stealing/damaging parts of public infrastructure because it's lame), and create your own project that does make more sense, a simple bicycle wheel with some slanted cardboard stuck in it in the wind will give you more output already than this after all.
Sorry for the negativity, but sometimes I calls em as I sees em.
Special bike docking stations... Sigh... Nice idea, but not very practical given the fact that human beings are involved who tend to like to have a choice in the bicycles they buy, pretty much don't like paying taxes for things like bike docking stations and frequently break things.
Stupid ideas like this are why designers go to art school and not engineering school. The basic laws of physics will argue with this system on every level. First off, humans do not generate very much power, we rely on systems of motion that conserve just about as much energy as they can. Secondly, the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy will negate just about any gains one would make in this system, then converting this energy back into mechanical force, well you are in the hole now and have lost quite a bit of energy, you would be better off just filling a bus with spinner bikes with generators on them.
They tried something similar to this in Charleston, SC. I think they just had bikes available for anyone downtown to use. They ALL were stolen within the first day.
an electric bus is powered by a 240 hp (~180 kW) electric motor while a bicycle is powered by a human generating 200 W (i'm being generous). [let's assume they are operated at similar duty cycles, stopping and going at the same times.] that's already factor of ~1000 and that's assuming in braking you can recover all the energy that you put in at 200 W. there's losses in pedaling (depends on cadence, chain, cleanliness of drivetrain... but it's usually >10%), in the generator (say ~10-20%), charging the capacitor (say 50%), converting back to grid AC (no idea but probably substantial)... what i'm saying is you'd be hard pressed to recover 40% of the original energy put in...
so to power your average electric trolley, you'd need at least 2222 cyclists on hybrid2s per bus. did i mention they also have to be dedicated bus powerers?
Wow, thats the coolest thing I ever seen!
RT
Cattle Kid pups
That actually makes pretty good sense dude!
R
love this concept. should be in many more cities around the country.
Keep the World Green!
http://www.friendlydogstore.com
How many people regularly ride both buses and bicycles? Is there a correlation with number of DUI convictions?
Stop thinking about gas cars/electric bicycles and immediately assume that it can never happen.
Think about a city like Beijing for a second
mass produce capacitors
mass produce the front wheels/brake systems.
install them on all bikes in Beijing
create a simply power upload grid all over city, not necesarily a special rack, just somewhere someone can plug in the bike, upload the power and receive credits
now imagine somewhere on the magnitude of a million riders using the system for 30 mins (probably much more ) a day.
I read complaints about how one would need "10,000 users" to power a city bus. I dont have time to do that math, but it seems like in magnitude, 1 million users would greatly increase that capacity.
don't fotget
http://www.jb-electricbikes.com/
there bikes is sundry