Cycle to Lose Weight… and Create Electricity

For those who live in NYC, are members of New York Sports Club and like to spin (and can handle the intense burning in your thighs), there’s a new spin class you may want to consider. Last year, the Chelsea club, located at West. 23rd St. and Eight Ave., installed Star Trac Spinner NXT bikes that are only available at 75 gyms in the entire country. These bikes not only get your legs into fantastic shape but convert your sweat, leg power and possibly tears, into electricity.

Writer Dorothy Spears describes the bikes in her New York Timesarticle “Pedaling Your Way to Environmental Nirvana.” The bikes are created by The Green Revolution, Inc.; according to the company’s website, it “connects health + energy + environment by turning human effort within a health club into usable energy… an idea whose time has come.” I can’t help but agree. People may not be willing to make significant lifestyle changes to reduce their carbon footprints, but they should have little problem getting on an exercise machine that tells them how much electricity they’ve generated.

Spears spoke to Green Revolution’s Mike Curnyn, who leads the company’s marketing and strategy. He explained how these bikes create energy:

Mr. Curnyn explained that each bike’s generator feeds into a cable connected to a black cabinet at the front of the studio. There, DC electricity is converted into AC electricity. This is supplied to the health club’s main electrical panel “the same way Con Ed is tied to that panel and pushing electricity into club for use,” he said.

Grid inverters in the panel play “traffic cop,” ensuring that human energy gets used first, Mr. Curnyn added.

The idea is certainly great, but there’s a reason that not all fitness clubs have installed these new bikes.

Although Green Revolution’s technology simply combines existing brand-name bikes with retrofitted generators, Mr. Curnyn admitted that it took roughly three years for clubs using his company’s product to make a return on their initial investment of $200 to $300 per bike, despite savings of “up to $1,000 a month” in club energy bills and the demand from cyclists who are eager to inject their workouts with a sense of higher purpose.

I hope that we hear about more gyms installing these bikes, as spin classes are popular with gym-goers. Imagine all the electricity that could be generated! And who knows, perhaps Green Revolution can create a special line of treadmills too.