The Workout That Gives You Energy

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday May 14, 2008

Jennie Curtin

A Sydney gym owner has turned his exercise bikes into small-scale power generators that are putting electricity back into the grid and reducing his power bills. Jennie Curtin reports.

Forget building muscles, increasing fitness or losing weight. Former boxer Danny Morgan has finally created a useful purpose for the gym - creating electricity.

Morgan has had his gym's bicycles fitted with generators so when his wannabe Schwarzeneggers spin their thing, they are sending power back into the grid and reducing his electricity bills.

Morgan first had the idea back in 2003 when he worked at a busy gym in the city. Watching the sweat and toil being worked up by those working out, he wondered if their efforts could actually produce power. But he didn't know how to find out.

"I had the idea but I'm not a technician so I was quite lost," he says.

It remained on the back burner until he set up his own gym in 2006 and decided to find someone who might be able to help.

After some searching, Morgan teamed up with Clive Campbell, a production engineer and managing director of Windpower Australia, an alternative energy supplier based at Austral.

"Danny was very fortunate to contact us I think because we're involved in putting grid systems in," Campbell says. The bicycles were not simply going to be powering a generator for the lights or fans in the gym, they were to be returning power to the grid.

"We had to do a lot of development work because nothing was really available that we could straightaway use," Campbell said. "As far as I know it hasn't been done anywhere in Australia."

The process involved installing an alternator to convert the pedal power into DC power, which is put into a storage battery bank and then exported through a DC-to-AC inverter to the grid.

The bike component of the system is very compact and sits beside the front wheel underneath a fibreglass box. The six bikes in Morgan's Surry Hills gym look just like any other fitness bicycle. They are fitted with regulators to increase resistance and call for more effort from the cyclist. "The effort isn't wasted - it's creating more and more energy," Campbell says.

Having done it once, he now has the package all set up and is ready to do it again. "We have all the tools and knowledge to build more - that's what we're hoping to do."

Morgan says his clients are thrilled that their physical efforts are doing more than creating healthy bodies and are helping the environment too. He estimates a person of average fitness pedalling for an hour will produce about 50 watts, a modest output but enough to power a couple of laptops.

Professor Faz Rahman, head of the Energy Systems Research Group at the University of NSW, says only a very small amount of power would be returned to the grid by a cyclist and Morgan concedes his first post-installation electricity bill shows that the bikes have saved him only a little. Still, it's a start. He's thinking of applying the same technology to treadmills next.

"If larger gyms fitted the same equipment to their exercise machines and undertook measures to become more energy efficient then the fitness industry could be carbon neutral," Morgan says. "It's just a way of harnessing energy that would otherwise be going to waste."