Moriah Waterland's Weblog

Tuesday November 15, 2005

Pedal your way to a cheaper lunch? A new chain of restaurants in the Bay area has proposed that they will give discounts to customers who are willing to ride stationary bicycles connected to a generator, helping to power the restaurant. Hmm, I am not seeing a downside to this. Burn calories + help the environment = get cheaper food. That's awesome!

It still irritates me, when I go to the gym, that I am wasting my energy on meaningless units of work. If the technology was feasible, it would be great to start a gym that could harnesses most of the energy expended by the patrons and sell it to other businesses. Then, you could give discounts to the people who generate the most joules:)
(2005-11-15 09:06:38.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Cool idea. The gym I go to has about 50 treadmills and they are nearly always being used. All that energy could be put back into the power grid.

Posted by shaun on November 15, 2005 at 05:27 PM MST #

There's a "bar" on Maui, on the undeveloped side between Hana and Kihei, where there is no electricity service. It has solar panels to run the refrigerators. If you order the hand squeezed sugar cane juice then you turn the crank on the sugar press. If you order a smoothie, then you climb up on the stationary bicycle and pedal to run the blender.

Posted by Walter Bays on January 09, 2006 at 01:37 PM MST #

I bet that the calories you burn to create the smoothies are a very small fraction of what you will consume*grin*. Sounds like an interesting bar though, I wonder how well that kind of business model would work elsewhere in the states. It seems a little strange that more businesses around some of the really eco-conscious areas (like Boulder, Seattle, or the Bay Area) haven't tried something like this.

Posted by Moriah on January 13, 2006 at 09:53 AM MST #