5 Wacky Forms of Alternative Energy

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This light-bulb-shaped hot air balloon promoted Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia, a few days before the worldwide event. Earth Hour, where people voluntarily switched off their lights for an hour, was created to spread the word about climate change.

March 29, 2008, was an especially dark night for some people. Notable landmarks like Alcatraz Prison, the Sears Tower and the Sydney Opera House all went dark for an entire hour. This wasn't some strange coincidental power outage, though. Around the globe -- from Tel Aviv to Times Square -- people voluntarily switched off their lights to symbolize their growing concern about global warming. This show of unity, now an official movement called Earth Hour, is one of the more mainstream ideas to lessen our impact on the environment; others are decidedly more off the wall.

But drastic times call for drastic measures, and many people would categorize the current state of the environment as such a time. We live on a planet of finite resources -- some of which are crucial to our survival and others that harm the environment every time we use them.

Rather than wait for the oil wells to run dry and the ozone layer to become nonexistent, many people are looking ahead to cleaner alternative sources of energy. Some of these, like solar power, hybrid-electric vehicles and small, hand-powered gadgets are already catching on. Others, however, like feces-fueled water heaters, may take a little getting used to.

Here, for your reading enjoyment, are five of the wackier ideas for alternative energy. Some of them are already available for the more environmentally savvy among us; others may need a few more trial runs before they catch on. Either way, if you're reading this during a self-imposed Earth Hour, round up your hand-cranked flashlight and prepare to be surprised -- or even amused.

5: Pure (Human) Energy

Photo courtesy Convergence Technologies, Inc.
Hook up your bike to the Pedal-A-Watt bike stand and pedal your way to energy independence.

When you're at the gym, do you ever find your mind drifting off to ponder the perils of the planet? Do you feel even the tiniest bit of remorse as your legs pound away on an electric machine that goes nowhere, while the ice-cold air conditioner blows down on your neck? OK, so you're probably thinking of little more than how many calories you're burning, but if you're one of the more eco-conscious exercisers, you may soon be able to let those concerns melt away with the pounds.

Several innovative gyms are popping up that convert human energy into useable electricity. One of them, in Hong Kong, has exercise machines that look perfectly ordinary from the outside, but have generators inside that create energy from movement. So while you're busy sweating it out, your efforts are also triggering a generator that creates electricity to both power the exercise console and supplement the electrical juice required to keep the overhead lights on. The owner of the gym maintains that the average person can generate about 50 watts of electricity per hour on the machines [source: Blume]. So unless you like running in the dark, you better get moving.

Pedal generators like the Pedal-A-Watt bike stand use a similar concept but are more powerful. A person in top condition can generate 500 watts of power, while someone in couch-potato condition could generate around 150 watts. Although that may not seem like much, that's enough to power two laptops, two fluorescent light bulbs and a cell phone -- at least until your workout is over [source: Treehugger].

The Pedal-A-Watt bike stand, which works by powering a generator with the movement of the bike's rear wheel, comes with an optional PowerPak that stores the energy you create for later use. The PowerPak has an outlet where you can plug in and power any appliance that runs on less than 400 watts of electricity. For a frame of reference, a large television uses around 200 watts, a stereo 20 watts, a desktop computer 75 watts and a refrigerator 700 watts [source: Convergence Tech, Inc.]. So if you bike for two hours while generating 200 watts, you're not going to be able to keep your beer cold, but you could wind down with a lukewarm Bud while watching the game on television.

4: Floating Wind Farms

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Floating wind farms -- coming to an ocean near you.

While wind energy isn't necessarily wacky in and of itself, you've got to admit there's something a little out there about a giant wind farm floating in the middle of the ocean. If you plan on visiting Norway in the coming years, you may catch a glimpse of these towering turbines spinning off the country's southwest coast from your airplane window.

Offshore wind farms can only be placed in water up to 131 feet (40 meters) deep, but floating wind turbines are a relatively new concept designed to take advantage of the high-speed winds located farther out at sea. Since they don't have to be physically buried in the sea floor, floating turbines can be placed in water as deep as 2,297 feet (700 meters). Their ability to be situated far from shore is a large part of their appeal, since many offshore wind projects face staunch opposition from people worried about altering their multimillion-dollar oceanfront views.

Even more appealing, perhaps, is the greater energy capacity of these floating turbines. While winds moving across land may only average speeds around 13 feet (4 meters) per second due to obstructions like hills and trees, winds blowing over the open ocean reach speeds at least twice as fast. That makes a big difference since wind blowing at 33 feet (10 meters) per second generates five times as much electricity as wind blowing 16 feet (5 meters) per second [source: Economist]. Some reports suggest that wind farms could provide up to 15 percent of the world's future energy needs [source: Jacquot].

StatoilHydro, a Norwegian energy company, has plans to construct the world's first full-scale floating wind farm in 2009. According to the company's Web site, each turbine will weigh a total of 5,842 tons (5,300 metric tons). The turbine will stand 213 feet (65 meters) above sea level, while a 328-foot (100-meter) floating element under the surface will be attached to three anchors to keep it stationary. The 262-foot (80-meter) turbine blades should be able to produce 2.3 megawatts of electricity [source: StatoilHydro]. If everything goes as planned, Norway will have a significant energy source, but coastline dwellers will be none the wiser.

3: Fill 'Er Up with Bug Excrement

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Inventors have been tinkering with the DNA of tiny bugs to get them to excrete oil.

If you're like many human beings, you cringe at the sight of creatures with more than four legs. Ants, spiders and the other insects of the world just don't get much love. However, if some geneticists have their way, maybe these little guys will finally earn some respect.

How could bugs possibly help alleviate our energy woes, you ask? Why, by excreting crude oil. It may sound crazy, but some rather inventive people at a company called LS9, Inc. have been tinkering with the DNA of industrial yeast and harmless strains of E.coli, so these organisms can convert agricultural waste into fuel that's practically pump-ready.

Since crude oil is molecularly similar to the fatty acids that these tiny single-celled organisms normally excrete, the alteration isn't as "out there" as you might think. LS9 has already streamlined the gene-altering process from one that took several months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to one that takes just a few weeks and just $20,000 [source: Ayres]. That's not too bad when you compare these bugs to oil drilling, which can actually take years to get going and cost just as much (and more if you weigh in the environmental costs as well).

These inventors envision their bug excrement -- "Oil 2.0" -- as being both renewable and carbon negative. That means because of the raw materials it uses, the process will take even more carbon out of the atmosphere than what it puts back in. And these organisms wouldn't rely on any single agricultural waste, thereby eliminating the controversy over using specific food crops for fuel. Instead, the process would rely on whatever is abundant in the local environment.

As of June 2008, LS9 could produce the equivalent of one barrel of oil per week with a 1,000-liter machine that takes up 40 square feet (3.7 square meters) of space [source: Ayres]. So even though, as the project stands now, you'd need a building the size of Chicago to fuel the oil needs of the United States, you may want to reconsider squashing the next bug that crosses your path.

2: Text 1-800-Piezoelectricity

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Extreme multitasking: Drive, text and generate electricity all at the same time!

Everywhere you look, teens (and increasingly, adults) have their heads down, vigorously texting away as though their lives depended on it. Americans sent a whopping 12.5 billion text messages in just one month in 2006, and cell phone users in the United Kingdom send out one billion a week [source: CTIA, text.it]. Admit it -- sometimes that obsession with text messaging can be annoying, but what if each of those finger taps could generate power?

That's just the idea behind Push to Charge, one of the innovative entries into the 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition. The concept relies on piezoelectricity, which is a fancy way of describing the way some metals generate electricity when hit. (Electric cigarette lighters use piezoelectric crystals.)

The Push-to-Charge cell phone would feature plastic buttons sitting atop a layer of hard metal. The bottommost layer would be made out of piezoelectric crystals, so that each time you pressed a button, the hard metal directly underneath it would hit the underlying crystal like a hammer, creating a small amount of voltage. Small wires located between the layers would convey the charge to a battery for storage.

The electricity generated by hitting just one button would be miniscule -- an estimated 0.5 watts, according to the inventor. But when you add up all the buttons required to send a single text message and multiply that by the number of text messages sent each day, that's quite a lot of wattage [source: Parker].

The same technology could be used in any other product that features buttons, including computer keyboards and video games. If all the HowStuffWorks writers had their computers hooked up to such a device, the office probably wouldn't need to pay any power bills. You've got to admit that generating electricity simply by typing on a keyboard or keeping in touch with your friends is a pretty bright idea.

1: Biogas Digestion

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The Sintax biogas digester adds a whole new meaning to the phrase "taking out the trash."

One person's trash is another person's treasure, or so the saying goes. But human waste as treasure? Seriously? Laugh all you want, but before too long, your hot water heater may depend on yesterday's digested lunch. In several locations around the globe, communities are already converting things like cow dung, human waste and kitchen garbage into usable energy.

If you don't focus on the stuff that goes into it, biogas digestion is actually pretty neat. It works by capturing the methane gas that gets released when waste breaks down. Usually, sewage treatment plants just vent that gas into the air, but if methane gas gets captured, it can be used for things like cooking and generating electricity.

A test project is set to start using the process in July 2009 in Vancouver, Canada. Energy company Terasen Gas will capture the gas released from a sewage treatment plant and transfer it into a nearby gas delivery pipe for the utility's consumers. Officials say the initial project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 551 tons (492 metric tons) a year [source: Terasen Gas]. And while what goes in may not smell so hot, the methane gas that comes out is both odorless and clean burning.

Across the ocean in India, plastics manufacturer Sintex Industries has its own version of a biogas digester available for purchase. Bacteria in the digester break down the waste you put in, and the resulting methane gets piped into the storage canister. The contraption, which looks a bit like a plastic igloo attached to a trash can, will set you back $425. If that seems like a lot just for an igloo and a trash can, remember that most igloos can't generate enough energy for a four-person family to cook all of its meals with. The digester could pay for itself in less than two years. In a south Delhi neighborhood, biogas digesters attached to public toilets provide cooking gas for a 600-student school [source: Kahn].

Whether you opt for bugs or biogas, phones or farms, one thing is clear: With all of the alternative energies popping up, you don't have to rely on the old standbys anymore. There's no shortage of interesting (and wacky) forms of alternative energy all around us -- turn the page to learn more about a few of them.

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