Renewable Energy Innovation

Re-innovation was recently comissioned to build the display system for an energy bike at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney, London. The energy bike is in the front-of-house at the theatre to help demonstrate and educate on energy consumption and efficiency.
This display system fitted to a pedal generator built by Magnificent Revolution. It has a bar-graph read out of the power and an actual value in Watts.
The system also worked as a voltage regulator, limiting the output voltage to 12V DC and shunting away the excess as heat, so that devices, such as phone chargers, can be plugged in for demonstration. The display is fully powered by the generator.

A few months ago re-innovation helped Magnificent Revolution Australia build their 8-bike pedal powered cinema. They recently used the pedal generator for a high-profile event in the heart of Sydney. More photos from the event are on their website here. It looked like a great event.

This followed the general design used for the Magnificent Revolution 20-bike generator, which I was involved with building a year ago. A blog post on the design and build is here.

We have been wanting to design and build an open-design, relatively inexpensive but fully functioned charge regulator for solar PV, wind, pedal and small hydro systems for a while now.

The majority of off-grid renewable energy systems are based upon lead acid batteries. Lead-acid batteries need to be protected from over-charging by the renewable energy source and over-discharging from the loads. This can be one with a series regulator (in the case of solar PV) or a shunt regulator (for PV, hydro and wind). Please check the web or my electrical design guide in the information section for more details.

I have been working at Loughborough University on the Low Effort Energy Demand Reduction (LEEDR) project. Chatting with a few of the researchers there I heard about a one-day workshop to stimulate debate on energy supply and demand within the UK. This was organised by students and researchers of the London-Loughborough Centre for Doctoral Research into Energy Demand, with the PV workshop being facilitated by Dan Quiggin of Demand Energy Equality.

The day involved a very practical session building a low cost solar PV panel, a session of games relating to the energy chain in the UK and a debate on the issues surrounding UK sustainable energy.

It was a great day where I met lots of interesting and motivated people, learnt some practical skills and got inspired. Here are some photos from the day and some information on building PV panels. I will be running a workshop to build a solar PV panel at the Nottingham Hackspace. Drop me an email if you are interested in attending.