Joshua said:
"Prisoners could provide 8 hours green electricity each day to power our economy. Any lags that fancy doing overtime on the bike will receive a day off their sentence for every Mega watt they produce
Lucky them
"
A megawatt?? That's a fuck load of electricity!
Lets work it out, in tests in gyms the maximum you can produce on an excercise bike wired up to a generator is about 125 Watts per hour. So if you you kept your lags under the lash for 10 hours a day it would result in about 1.25 Kw per day at the very most!
A megawatt is 1000000 watts so it would take a lag, under the lash, 800 consecutive days or about 2.5 years to produce a megawatt, after which you would graciously give them "A day off" their sentence.
The problem with your idea is that it is a very inefficient way to make electricity, since you would have to feed your lags a huge amount of extra calories in order to get the energy out of them to pedal for that duration, even under the lash! You would also have to feed those doing the lashing as they too would flag from tiredness quite quickly.
So whatever energy you are gaining from the lags, you will be losing through energy used in the production of all the calories you need to keep them alive and furiously pedalling.
I'm afraid you might have to return to the drawing board for a more efficient way of increasing productivity amongst the prison population!
On the other hand all the cycle dynamos coud be connected to large truck batteries and an inverter-mains system could be created. With this idea you can at least store the energy created by the pedalling and the system could at least power the lights, PS3's, plasmas and hot tub heaters during the night. Some serious pedalling would be required to re-charge the battery store the following day though!
Simply add the cycle dynamos output to the trickle from the solar panels and voila, power for everyone!
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