I built and operated a pedal powered generator [1] It's a regular bike on a stand, with a belt turning a 110v AC motor.

I can tell you, pedaling to making electricity is hard. It requires a lot of effort. On the flip side, if you told people they had to pedal before they could use the electricity for stuff like TV, xbox, etc., people would be doing those things a lot less.

I ended up giving it to a friend who powers his house with the bike, a 70W solar panel and three old car batteries :)

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/smoothie-bike

You can ask people if they want some toast, are they as strong as Robert Förstemann (hint: no, they are not):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ

Well, he could have toasted two slices - they didn't disconnect the second slot in the toaster.

An hour per day of cycling is a lot. I know it seems like good fun exercise to us decadent westerners but as Tom Sawyer would point out it quits being fun when you have to do it.

Yup and it's only "free energy" if you would do exactly the same exercise but waste the energy as heat. Otherwise you're going to need a lot more calories in your diet, which I bet alone are more expensive than more traditional solutions. And that assuming the cost of the machine is also lower than those solutions.

None of the projects seem so innovative or compelling; save perhaps for the geothermal concept. I particularly don't think a bunch of guys fooling around with tools can come up with great solutions for those basic problems (energy, desalination); the disregard for scientific more basic research seems myopic. That approach works best for niche problems that were overlooked. If there were a silver bullet of energy or a simple way to desalinate I'm pretty sure we'd have found it already. Just looking at the basic physics (thermodynamics, minimum energy to overcome osmotic potential) would give a hint. If they do come up with something useful though, all the better.

Indeed. And I'm sure you'd work up a sweat doing it. If you want a hot shower afterwards any energy gains would be totally lost in heating the water.

In India I'd probably want to turn up the air con.

Ha, yeah me too. Wouldn't want to power it by pedaling though.

yes, and an hour of cycling is not the same as an hour on the average bike ride. Unless you're cycling up a mountain.

With the low energy requirements of LED's it would seem much easier to give people a solar panel and a battery. Manufacture everything in Africa to create local jobs.

This kid, William Kamkwamba, in Africa did it with wind power. If I were this billionaire Bhargava I'd fund this kid with a foundation in Africa, probably for the price of a single engineer in Ann Arbor. Want to bet who would get the better results?

http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/

While that's true, you still need sun for solar panels. I grew up in the cloud forest without electricity, and solar panels are a drag. Hydro is a much better option there.

Alternative energy isn't a one size fits all sort of deal. And it's not an either-or deal either. The more research is done in any area benefits everyone.

You might also like this documentary about the CEO of Five-hour Energy, Manoj Bhargava.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=49&v=YY7f1t9y9a0

It details a lot more about his philosophy towards philanthropy and the inventions he's currently interested in. Interestingly enough, the result is something quite similar to YC Research in a way so I guess you could say YC Research is already market-validated.

Things like this give me a lot of hope for the future of humanity (though we're still honestly depressingly behind in funding for space exploration which I hope can still be fixed.)

Google had a contest years ago about landing any device in the moon but later was canceled. I believe the elite does not want to explore space because it will make clear that it was a lie that we landed on the moon on 1969.

It would be nice if there were some more (any) technical details on the bike. However, I can't see someone generating more than a couple hundred watts on something like that. Even in India, the average household power usage is apparently about 3kWh/day (less than 1/10 of the average in the US and Canada). Even if we say a very optimistic 300W generated, that's 10 hours of pedaling.

It could keep a few LEDs on with an hour of pedaling, but I have trouble seeing, "...can power a home's lights and basic appliances for an entire day."

A average person is lucky to get 100W sustained for an hour. 100 Whr can probably run a tablet for 24 hrs

and a kilowatt-hour from the power company costs $0.13. As much as I love bikes and wish I were riding one right now, it just makes no sense.

Video of an Olympic cyclist powering a 700 watt toaster. Painful but awesome to watch. http://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ

After you drink a 5-hour Energy, bicycling is effortless.

Reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror.

Reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty. The one with Colbert.