Category: Human Power
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Lees dit artikel in het Nederlands. We are in 2030 and the Dutch neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) is 100% carbon neutral. To radically reduce energy use, all household tasks are organised communally. Cooking, eating, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, showering, brushing teeth, going to the toilet: it all happens outside the individual household. Consequently, energy…
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Lees dit artikel in het Nederlands. We are in 2030. Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu), once one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, has become completely independent of fossil fuels. The neighbourhood has achieved this without the use of expensive technology and infrastructure. Energy production relies entirely on locally available resources: human power and…
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Lees dit artikel in het Nederlands. In a new scenario, the Human Power Plant will convert an entire area in Rotterdam into a fossil fuel free society. Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, and has been selected as a testing ground for the energy transition. Because it is not clear…
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Dredging Colony Friesland re-introduces human power as an energy source in the Netherlands. Dredging by hand is sustainable and provides work for thousands of people, who all become an active part of the landscape.
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In late May we organised a manual dredging workshop in Drachten, the Netherlands. The aim was to calculate how many people would be needed to dredge out the province and the whole country by hand. Here are the results.
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The dredging industry has been the backbone of the Dutch economy for centuries. If canals, harbours and rivers weren’t dredged out for a few years, the whole country would literally grind to a halt. Today, dredging happens with oil powered ships. However, the Dutch waterways were dredged mostly by hand for centuries, using simple but…
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The Human Power Plant is a multi-disciplinary research project into the possibility of sustainable energy production based on human power alone. In a first case study, we designed plans for the conversion of a 22 floor tower building into an entirely human powered student community of 750 people, and built a working prototype of a…
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Three floors of the human powered student building are taken up by the central human power plant, which is run by the entire community. How long the students need to exercise on these floors, depends only on their demand for energy.
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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 generation.
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Painting: The slave market, Gustave Boulanger, 1882. Unlike solar and wind energy, human power is always available. However, unlike a windmill, a solar panel or an oil barrel, human power needs to be motivated in order to produce energy. If we make a switch to human power production, would everybody generate their own power for…
Human Power Plant 