Wednesday, May 5, 2010

God Bless Copenhagen

A hotel in Copenhagen is offering guests the chance to earn a free meal if they are willing to put some effort into powering the building. via BBC

The deal is if a guest generates 10 watts of power for the hotel they get a free meal at the hotel restaurant. If the food is decent and full of carbs that's a pretty good deal. 


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. Other sources are reporting that the free dinner requires 10 watt-hours, rather than watts (it makes more sense to measure energy rather than power). In the US, average rates are around $0.10 per kWh, so the 10 watt-hours that patrons have to generate is worth 1/10th of a penny. That's a pretty inexpensive dinner.

Julian said...

If you are doing moderate exercise and you are in moderately good physical condition, it takes about one hour to produce $0.01 worth of electricity in this way. If you go all out for a few hours, you may be able to produce more than $0.10 worth of electricity.

So clearly it's not an attempt to produce substantial electricity so much as an attempt to catch people's attention. The cool thing is, human-powered generators really can be practical in off-grid situations.