Source: Takver, Flickr

Could the energy from avid exercisers be effectively harnessed to provide commercial electricity? The BBC has apparently tested this out in a programme going to air tonight in the UK, called (rather worrying for our gym-energy empire plans) ‘Bang goes the theory’.

The Guardian has seen the preview and indeed, it doesn’t end well:

This is the conclusion of Tim Siddall of Electric Pedals, the company hired to supply the bicycles and cyclists. For 11 hours, 100 volunteers rode furiously, getting no more than lunch and the chance to be on TV. “They were dead excited at first,” says Siddall. “But after five hours they had had enough of the boredom and the pain.”

There are some jokes about how many cycling slaves the BBC would need to power its film kit. But what we found most interesting was that the big problem (apart from scalability, presumably) was feeding the cyclists:

“You would use more energy feeding them than the energy they produced,” says Siddall.

In otherwords, the “energy return on investment” was poor — rather like American corn ethanol and (hypothetical) CCS-equipped power plants.

But such poor returns are something we may have to get used to.