Energy and Electricity - Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration - page 26

Section 5
Case studies: on ideas
and reality
In this section we present some calculations carried out by the students
at Berkeley which illustrate some of the points made in this chapter.
The carbon bicycle
Question: The Berkeley Solve Energy@home project has proposed that every person in
the world be issued a stationary bicycle which serves as an electric generator. Every
person is required to run the cycle to generate electricity for one hour each day. For this
service, everyone will be paid half of the minimum wage. The money to fund this pro-
gram would come from taxing oil. How much energy will we generate? And how much
do we need to increase the price of oil to pay for this project?
Solution: Forrest Abouelnasr, Josh Howe, Vicky Jun, and Karthish Manthiram.
It would be very difficult to construct an exact calculation for this sce-
nario because many of the numbers we need are not readily available.
However, one does not need very accurate numbers to see whether this
is a goofy idea or not. We need to make some basic assumptions.
The current (2012) world population is about 6.9 billion, which we will
use as our potential work force. Estimating minimum wage is a little
trickier due to the vast discrepancies in minimum wage from country to
country (and from state to state in the USA!). Given that first-world coun-
tries like the USA use disproportionately more power than developing
countries, we will set the compensation rate for our project to half the
2012 US federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. So in our scenario every
person in the world is paid $3.625 for one hour's worth of energy genera-
tion per day. This amounts to a total cost of roughly $25 billion per day.
The next step is to calculate how much energy is produced by our
cycling effort. The power-generating concept behind a stationary bike is
a simple one: One pedals, turning the bike's rear wheel, which in turn