Green Gym is Powered By Sweat and Pedals
by Allie Comeau on September 13, 2008 
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Stationary bikes and elliptical machines are staples at every gym in the world. But could they also provide the electricity needed to run those gyms?
The owner of The Green MicroGym in Portland, Oregon, sure thinks so. Adam Boesel and partners just opened the country’s first “human-powered gym” and hope to one day power it entirely by sweat equity.
When members pedal on the gym’s bicycles, they generate power to fuel the television sets and the stereo system. While Boesel isn’t sure exactly how much electricity members are generating now, he says they’re just getting started…
“Our goal is to someday create 100 percent of the electricity we use in the gym,” Boesel said in the article on ABC News. “The short-term goal is to get all of the electricity we can out of the machines.”
Besides the spinning bikes, the gym also features a four-person team workout machine that features pedals and hand cranks to generate power. “Team Dynamo” as the machine is called was designed by a company called Henry Works out of El Paso, TX.
“It’s a little humbling — a person can make about a penny’s worth of electricity an hour. So it’s not a lot,” said Michael Tagget, president of Henry Works, adding that on his or her own, an individual can create 50 to 100 watts of electricity.
“But if 20, 30, 40 people are doing that in a gym, they can [create] all the electricity for entertainment systems. It’s better than nothing and the feeling of accomplishing something is worthwhile,” Tagget noted.
The Green Microgym also hopes to have energy-generating elliptical machines in the near future.
Of course, the same problem exists for human-powered electricity as for wind power – storage. Right now it’s impossible to store human and wind power for later use. There’s some work to do to make these sources more viable, but human-powered electricity is an interesting concept and makes sense to me.
