The prototype sustainable power plant that University of Toronto Professor Olivier Trescases (ECE) is demonstrating doesn’t look like much. A simple black-box battery connected by clips to red and yellow wires that go to a decades-old electricity meter, then by more exposed wiring into something that looks like an exposed computer motherboard, which is itself attached to a low-fi, normal looking stationary bike. It looks like the kind of exercise equipment someone would have in the corner of a wood-panelled basement, attached to the kind of rig your hobbyist uncle might solder together in the garage.
But according to Professor Trescases, this is an independent, freestanding power plant, the unpolished but working model for a fleet of machines that will simultaneously encourage exercise, reduce carbon fuel usage and toxic emissions and educate people, all while saving money at the same time. “I wouldn’t call this high experimental research,” Trescases says. “The aim is more education. The greatest benefit of this is awareness. Essentially we want to equate sweat with electrical energy.”
That equation was enough to win the project a grant of $10,000 at last year’s inaugural Green Innovation Awards presented by the City of Toronto and the Toronto Community Foundation. Electrical Engineering Professor Trescases, Hart House Gym Facilities Manager Chris Lea and Hart House Sustainability Coordinator David Berliner shared the award for their idea to harness the energy people waste using exercise equipment and use it to generate electricity.
“Each bike is an independent power plant,” Trescases says; “each one is individually connected to the grid.” Each bike is also able to connect wirelessly to a laptop computer or wireless mobile device to display real-time information about how much energy it is generating, how much it has generated recently and how much money that translates into.
