The Human Power Plant is a working prototype of a muscular power generator, manned by a group of people. We cooperated 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.
Exercise machines for strength training can produce a lot of power in a very short time, making them an interesting addition to stationary cycling machines for human power production. Because most of them work on the basis of lifting weights, their power potential can be precisely calculated.
The House of the Future is a spin-off from the Human Powered Neighbourhood scenario. It is located in Bospolder-Tussendijken in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and explores how a community can run become sustainable.
Can we work together to find ways to save energy? Who decides what the future will look like? What exactly is sustainability? And what about human power? At the House of the Future, we will search for the answers to these questions with our neighbours, residents of BoTu, and a team of artists and researchers.
Come in for a chat, or for tips and tricks, and test the prototypes to make our neighbourhood a man-powered energy plant. Think with us about how things can be done differently.
The Lighter Bike combines the two most important sources of energy in human history: human power and fire. With these two energy sources, we can always build a new civilisation - without fossil fuels. The lighter bike is powered by human power and makes sparks by short-circuiting. Those sparks can be used to make a fire in the oven mounted on the front of the bike. It also produces a stream of air to fan the fire. The cyclist's "gas exhaust" can be directed to the sparks - with the right diet, making fire just a little bit easier. The lighter bike is independent of fossil fuels and, with proper maintenance, has an almost infinite useful life.
We built a pedal-powered generator and controller, which is practical to use as an energy source and exercise machine in a household – and which you can integrate into a solar PV system. We provide detailed plans to build your own, using basic skills and common hand tools.
Many people have built pedal power generators and published the manuals online and in books. However, when we set out to make a pedal power generator ourselves, we found that these manuals are incomplete when making the bike generator practical to use. The focus is on building the power source itself, with comparatively little attention to what happens with the power that comes out of it.
To try and make human power production more useful, we built not just a pedal power generator but also a control panel in the form of a “dashboard” attached to the handlebars. The dashboard allows powering or charging a wide diversity of devices – no matter what voltage they run on. Furthermore, multiple devices can be powered simultaneously, allowing the cyclist to adjust the resistance on the pedals for an optimal workout.