A House Powered by Exercise Will Keep You in Shape While You Keep the Lights On

According to the artist’s statement, “the house offers an ironical model of citizenship for future sustainable societies: the ‘Jane Fonda model of citizenship'” (the fitness celebrity whose initials the home bears) “which defines the ideal citizen as an individual who can satisfy all her domestic energy needs through her own bodily exercise.”

Not a chance in hell, unless we’re talking about a massively scaled-down lifestyle.

Other articles on the topic discuss this as supplying part of one’s energy needs through exercise, and that’s true, but as I’ve explained several times before in this space, it’s silly. Unless you’re going to do the exercise anyway and want to minimize wasting the output.

Trying to do all of the energy is a pipe dream. This is an art project, so it’s pretty clear that little consideration was given to the physics and biology of the matter, but it’s pretty simple: the maximum sustained power output of top athletes is around 500 Watts — that’s what Floyd Landis was able to do for ~4 hours for part of the Tour de France (and, remember, he was doping!) But the average customer in the US uses energy at a rate of around 1.3 kiloWatts, on average, over the course of the day.

Maybe, as the blog’s title says, you could keep the lights on. Especially with CFL or LED technology replacing incandescent lights, and you don’t need it especially bright, and you have the ability to cycle hard for an hour every day, perhaps you could store up the energy to run some lights. If you’re going at a 250 W rate, that’s enough to run a pair of 60W equivalent CFL bulbs for the evening (~5 hours’ worth). 250W of electricity production is around a kW of effort, because of the efficiency of our bodies, so you also gain in your heating bill…if it’s cold outside. If it’s warm, this is extra energy the air conditioner has to remove.

But doing this as a reason unto itself, look at the cost. That kw-hr of energy you burned up is 860 Calories of food, which is the intake of a decent-sized meal (or ~one bite shy of a quarter pounder® w/cheese and medium fries, if fast food makes for an easier conversion). Several dollars’ worth of eating for a dime’s worth of electricity. Just for the lights. There is neither an economic nor a sustainability justification for this.

There’s a reason humans went away from individual labor and used other animals and machinery driven by the sun, wind or stored sun (i.e. fossil fuels) as we grew our civilizations. Offering human power as a substitute is incredibly naive. Or, viewed another way, there’s a reason the world’s population was limited before we made these adoptions. What we do in modern society is energy intensive. Without machinery running on the sources of energy we’ve tapped into, we couldn’t come close to our current lifestyle.