Hampster Power, the worlds last hope?
Hamster Power
The Worlds last hope?
Let’s assume a hamster 50 grams can run up a 30-degree slope at 2 meters per second. This corresponds to a power output of half a watt. If it delivers the same power when running in a hamster wheel, we would need 120 hamsters working flat-out to light a 60-watt bulb.
The average hamster doesn’t spend more than 5% of its life running in its wheel, so we already need a brigade of 2400 hamsters just to light one light our bulb. It gets worse. The average UK household consumes in excess of 80 gigajoules of energy per year. This is the equivalent to a constant power consumption of about 2.5 kilowatts. Each house would need 100,000 hamsters. Multiply this by the number of households in the UK and we would have an environmental and economical disaster.
In addition, we would need to employ an army of animal behaviorists to devise a Pavlovian tricks to get these hamsters to run onto their wheels in response to surges in demand. And given that hamsters are nocturnal, this would force politicians and lawyers to debate animal welfare. The UK alone would need to employ everyone else in Europe to feed and care for its hamster population.
Perhaps we should let humans run on treadmills. It would not produce much electricity but we might end up with less of an obesity problem.
The Worlds last hope?
Let’s assume a hamster 50 grams can run up a 30-degree slope at 2 meters per second. This corresponds to a power output of half a watt. If it delivers the same power when running in a hamster wheel, we would need 120 hamsters working flat-out to light a 60-watt bulb.
The average hamster doesn’t spend more than 5% of its life running in its wheel, so we already need a brigade of 2400 hamsters just to light one light our bulb. It gets worse. The average UK household consumes in excess of 80 gigajoules of energy per year. This is the equivalent to a constant power consumption of about 2.5 kilowatts. Each house would need 100,000 hamsters. Multiply this by the number of households in the UK and we would have an environmental and economical disaster.
In addition, we would need to employ an army of animal behaviorists to devise a Pavlovian tricks to get these hamsters to run onto their wheels in response to surges in demand. And given that hamsters are nocturnal, this would force politicians and lawyers to debate animal welfare. The UK alone would need to employ everyone else in Europe to feed and care for its hamster population.
Perhaps we should let humans run on treadmills. It would not produce much electricity but we might end up with less of an obesity problem.