The Black Mirror episode, Fifteen Million Merits, depicts a future dystopia where everyone is obsessed with reality TV and silly virtual objects (i.e., it is just like the present). In the Fifteen Million Merits world, however, the society is powered by everyday individuals who ride bicycles for hours a day and earn credits in return for doing so. So just how easy would it be to power a technological society on bicycle power? Apparently, it would be largely a waste of time unless the world of Fifteen Million Merits is incredibly energy efficient.
Micahel Bluejay, who styles himself as “Mr. Electricity,” has an interesting analysis of the economics of using bicycles to generate electricity which he sums up fairly directly,
You can’t generate a meaningful amount of electricity with a bicycle, and it won’t save any money, either, because bike power generates such a tiny amount of electricity versus the cost of the setup.
According to Bluejay,
A typical bike generator can produce 100 watts. If you pedal for an hour a day, 30 days a month, that’s (30 x 100=) 3000 watt-hours, or 3 kWh. That’s less than 1% of what a typical family uses in a month (920 kWH). You generated 0.3% of your energy, and continue to get 99.7% from the grid. Good job.
But how much money did you save? Well, since the average cost of U.S. electricity is 12¢/kWh, that one month of pedaling saved you $0.36. Congratulations. If the system cost $400, it would take only 93 years to pay for itself.
And that’s before we consider the cost of food. If you’re overweight, like most Americans, then you can consider your biking energy “free” since you could be burning fat. Likewise, if you ride the exercycle instead of doing some other kind of exercise that you were going to do anyway, then the cost of your energy is also free. But if you’re not overweight and not exercycling instead of some other exercise, then you’ll be buying more food to fuel your effort. Since it takes about 1 calorie to produce 1 watt-hour of electricity, your month of pedaling would require 3000 calories. With the cheapest food you can buy, oil or flour, you’re looking at $0.85 to create $0.36 of electricity. So instead of saving money, it’s costing you money to run your generator. Other foods are even worse: Figure $5.41 for Cheerios, $6.15 for bananas, or $22.22 for Big Macs.
There is one possibility, however, which would still make this consistent with Black Mirror’s dystopia–the people who run the society already have a cheap source of energy, but keep people in the society unaware of this and bicycling away as a form of social control.