Million Dollar Idea:

Alright, so here it is in a nutshell: A free energy producing Gym.

Genius, right?!

I know, thanks for the sentiment.

Seriously speaking, there has been a lot of buzz recently surrounding a few ideas that have come out of a myriad of intelligent minds regarding human generated energy, that is, energy generated by our bodies as we move, work, and play. It seems that there is a great opportunity here, for someone with access to a moderate amount of capital to invest in a chain of exercise complexes that are vastly cheaper than normal or maybe even free.



Basic research yields the following:

• An average rider can produce at least 150 Watts of power on a normal bike-based generator.
• Any given day, at a gym, there are can be anywhere between 5-50 people on stationary bikes at any one time, I'll assume that there are at least 5 people on stationary bikes averaged over 8 hours of the day. Probably very conservative estimate, but I have no concrete data for this one.
• There are over 17,000 gyms and health clubs in the USA.

Thus, we have the following equation:

150(watts) * 5(people) * 8(hours) * 17,000(gyms) = 102,000,000(watt-hours daily).

That means that everyday in America we are exercising away over 1 megawatt-hour of power every day. That is enough power to run more than 500,000 computers for 8 hours every single day. That is about $81,000 worth of electricity (at $.08/KWh), and this is an extremely conservative estimate, since this only accounts for the bare minimum, and only for stationary bikes.

Yes, it is silly, and no, this is not any type of accurately researched math, but it is funny how we are willing to burn off that much energy into thin air in order to stay fit. I guess this is where my mind goes when thinking of ways that I could make money, it would be easy to set up a gym that presents all electricity-generating devices (rowing machines, treadmills, nordic-skis, not to mention weightlifting machinery, etc), and tell patrons that however much energy they generate in a month gets deducted from their monthly fee.

It would be difficult to break even at $.08/1000 watts/hr, (that works out to an average of about $.01 rebate for every hour that you work out) but it is at the very least a start! Plus, people would get an instant reward for working out, the more they work out, the LESS they pay, as opposed to the other way around.

I'm not sure if it's even feasible, but I know that I wouldn't have any qualms about going to a gym if it was putting power back into the stream.

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