Bike slavery!

Some of you may have been contaminated by the "green" misconception of energy, which, if I may remind you, consist of working as hard as possible to stop the power plants that reject the less CO2 and require the less material to build... in order to save the climate of the CO2 man-made rejects.
Maybe they consider that power plants are not man-made.

Anyway, some people may have considered that it is a good idea to create our energy out of biking apparatus. So, the question is simple:

How may biking slaves do I need to create my energy?

I consider myself as an average cyclist (I mean that I can climb a pass like the Galibier, but it will take more than an hour). On a gym bike, I am able to develop 250W during an hour i.e. 250 J/s * 3600 s = 0.9MJ

Unfortunately, energy units are typically given in Cal which corresponds to a kcal (more of that later), and 1 cal = 4.184J
Therefore 0.9MJ = 215 kcal or Cal.


Here, people will say that I am a fat lazy sloth on my bike: my rest energy loss is of the order of 60 kcal/h, more than 10 of those used for thinking... and hard thinking hardly consumes more energy (which is kind of sad in a way: we would need less workout, less heating during the winter, and scientists
would need to constantly use a heatsink hat).
Anyway, following me on the Galibier should show that I am a decent cyclist, so, there must be a problem somewhere!
The gym's bike shows a loss of energy of more than 1000 Cal, is my previous computation false? Nope! Or is this another example of incomprehensible US units (anybody: how many cubic feet in a gallon? Fast please!)? Neither!
To solve that, we have to look at the energy efficiency: during my biking, I sweat more than a kg of water! I spent 4.184 MJ (1000 kcal) of energy on my bike, but the muscular efficiency is of the order of 20%.




From Wikipedia: "For an overall efficiency of 20%, one watt of mechanical power is equivalent to 4.3 kcal (18 kJ) per hour".
Therefore 4.184MJ / 18kJ = 232.4. From that efficiency, 232.4W of power during an hour made me lose 4.184MJ. (The bike system takes the average muscular efficiency in its computation, but I wonder how that efficiency varies with people, age, etc.).

Comparison with professional cyclists

As a darkside scientist, I am not a professional cyclist. Being fit is just extremely useful for fleeing away from explosions when you made a mistake in a chemical experiment. Professional cyclists can spend almost twice my amount of energy at an equivalent mass. (Actually, I would like a better estimate: I took this one by looking at the "tour de france" estimation of power during pass climbing, it seems that some cyclists almost reach 500W during almost 10 minutes! The problem, in the following, will be with the possibility to use drugs to maintain that level of spending for a 7h day. The question of the efficiency of 20% is still applicable here, but we will not deal with the price of the food since pasta are quite cheap).

Application for our secret lair (on skullcrusher mountain)

Scientists often hear people asking them about the use of doing physics (out of the taxpayer money), but never about the use of paying sports player (from both taxpayer and consumer money!). Greece was very happy to have the Olympic games in 2004, all the money spent in infrastructure helped creating some problems a few years later (I am too lazy to actually look at the effective cost of it, but if we believe this paper, it did not helped).
So, let's find an economical use of our professional cyclists (since scientists are more and more asked to have an economical impact). Since a cyclist is good at pedal, let him make electricity. But is it efficient?

Let's suppose that we use several cyclists to turn a nice alternator, much more efficient than the usual bikes' ones (at 60% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator). For this example, we  will suppose a 75% efficiency.
Our professional cyclist will develop 400W of mechanical power, i.e. 300W of electrical power. Since we use "tour de France" cyclists, they will work 35h week, for one month (4 weeks) without holidays (remember, they are slaves for our lair). Therefore, one cyclist produces 300W*35h *4 = 42kW.h (42 is the answer!).
A one person apartment, with AC, needs about 500 kW.h of electricity per month. Therefore, a dozen professional cyclists is necessary for the lair.
Fortunately, we do not have to pay a minimal income for slaves!

Conclusion

A professional cyclist is not autonomous concerning his electrical energy generation: he is therefore of no use at all.

Conclusion 2

We need much more "tours de France" to improve the energy efficiency of cyclists (and athletes in general), as well as their average power. I suggest to legalize doping techniques for that! 

Conclusion 3

Our beloved CERN - LHC has an electrical energy consumption of 1000 GWh (http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/powering-the-large-hadron-collider) i.e. 1E9 kWh. This is an equivalent of 2 millions cyclists working all the year (LHC will therefore greatly help reducing unemployment: I told you physicists had a real use for society!).
Considering that a "tour de France" is about 200 cyclist-months, and that the LHC needs 2E6 cyclist-years i.e. 2.4E7 cyclist-month, we need 120 000 "tour de France" to run the LHC.