Human Power Plant

Dredging Colony Friesland -- The Movie

In late May we organised a manual dredging workshop in Drachten, the Netherlands. The aim was to calculate how many people would be needed to dredge out the province and the whole country by hand. Here are the results. 

How to Dredge Out the Netherlands without Fossil Fuels

The dredging industry has been the backbone of the Dutch economy for centuries. If canals, harbours and rivers weren't dredged out for a few years, the whole country would literally grind to a halt.

Today, dredging happens with oil powered ships. However, the Dutch waterways were dredged mostly by hand for centuries, using simple but ingenious tools. Could it be done again?

Two New Case Studies

The Human Power Plant is a multi-disciplinary research project into the possibility of sustainable energy production based on human power alone.

In a first case study, we designed plans for the conversion of a 22 floor tower building into an entirely human powered student community of 750 people, and built a working prototype of a human power plant.

In the coming months, we focus on two other concrete cases in the Netherlands, aiming to reveal what can be learned from a strictly human powered perspective. 

Sustainable Decadence on the Roof

Located on the roof of the Human Powered Student building are ten Skystream windturbines. Together, these can supply 20 kW of power with a strong breeze (11 m/s).

Whenever it’s windy, human energy production is taken over by the wind turbines. During windy periods, students thus enjoy free and effortless energy use. Daily working duties are reduced or eliminated.

Video Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Human Power Plant (1.2): Work Songs

Video of the prototype in Antwerp. Made by Laura Zuallaert.

Everybody's talking about sustainable energy, but what is it exactly? And how does it sound? We try to answer these questions with the newest version of our prototype Human Power Plant, an off-the-grid renewable energy source that produces electricity, compressed air, and water under pressure.

In order to try and motivate people to generate their own power, we have equipped the human power plant with sound production. In earlier times, when physical labour was much more common than it is today in the industrialised world, people sang songs to increase work productivity, keep boredom at bay, or coordinate the actions of different workers. At the same time, these work songs were an outlet for humour, ridicule, and frustration.

Following the same logic, in the Human Power Plant every movement that produces energy now also produces sound. Consequently, each time the Human Power Plant is operated, a work song is composed. 

Daily Power Production: Work Schedules

The lower floors of the human powered student building are reserved for communal energy production. How long the students need to exercise on these floors depends on their demand for power. Because the energy users are also the energy producers, there’s a strong incentive to reduce energy demand. 

How to Feed a Human Powered Building

The human powered student building is self-sufficient in terms of energy use and produces no CO2. However, humans need extra food when they produce power, and producing this food also requires energy.

Assuming a typical Dutch diet, one kilowatt-hour of human generated electricity produces up to 30 times more greenhouse gases than one kilowatt-hour of grid electricity. How do we keep the human powered community carbon neutral?

The Human Power Plant: How it Works

The Human Power Plant is a working prototype of a muscular power generator, manned by a group of people. We cooperate with makers and sports coaches to build exercise machines that are suited for different types of human power sources, are fun and social to use, and produce a maximum amount of power.

The Human Power Plant is an all-round off-the-grid solution. It can supply energy anywhere and anytime, provided that humans can be motivated to operate it. The power plant supplies energy in the form of electricity, water under pressure, and compressed air. It is built from simple and durable parts.

Biogas Production

The food waste from the kitchen and the excrements of 750 students are used to produce biogas that supplies the thermal energy for cooking.