Every Day Adventurers

Worldbike and Xtracycle are inextricably linked; Xtracycle founders Ross Evans and Kipchoge Spencer formed Worldbike to bring heavy-duty, well-made, well-functioning, cargo-hauling longbikes to some of the world’s poorest people to give them both transportation solutions and income-generating potential.  Worldbike is now also partnering with Potenco, a San Francisco-based  company with the goal of providing the world’s poor with clean, efficient, inexpensive, human-powered power.  Potenco has already developed a Pull Cord Generator (PCG), a small, human-powered generator that stores upper-body muscle action as hours of charge for portable electronics.  Potenco intern and Stanford masters student Jonas gleefully demonstrated the PCG for us at Interbike.

Jonas told us that pulling the cord for just one minute would provide about one hour of LED light, or 20 minutes of talk time on a cell phone (much of the world now has good cell phone coverage, but still has spotty electricity availability), which we took advantage of late in the day as our iphones were starting to run out of juice.  The PCG produces about 15-20 watts of power, and has already been field tested in several countries with good results.  Potenco is even partnering with One Laptop Per Child to help power computers with this device.

What does this all have to do with bikes, you ask?  Well, Potenco has also developed, with Worldbike, a bike-powered Mobile Power Station potentially capable of charging cell phones, lighting houses, pumping and purifying water, or doing anything else one could think of that requires electricity.  Potenco and Worldbike came to the Xtracycle booth on the last day of Interbike to demo this system on a Big Dummy.

Although the most efficient use of the generator would be through pedalling at a reasonable, constant rate for about an hour, people who tried out the generator at Interbike decided that this was the electricity-generating stepchild of gold sprints.  The screen detailing the pedaller’s power output added to the competitive nature of the demo.  Jason gave it a go, with some impressive wattage.   

If Jason could continue pedalling at that rate for an hour (Jason, you’re strong, and we have faith in you, but that’s not very likely to happen), he could have pumped 84 gallons of water, powered 1446 minutes of cell phone talk time, or lit a bright LED light for more than five hours.   

Passersby also gave it a try.  This guy brought not only some impressive (short-term) wattage, but also, fittingly, a message for OPEC. 

Just think of what we could power if we all had these devices hooked up to our commuter cycles…