Crowne Plaze Hotels in the UK May Start Using Guests for Power Needs

A green hotel that is located in Copenhagen is now claiming a world first. This is to actually use its guests to make electricity by riding on bikes. These bikes will then be used to generate electricity. This hotel is forgetting about wind turbines and solar panels and is going to use people power.

Starting today, people staying at the 366 room Crown Plaza in Copenhagen Towers will be encouraged to head down to the gym and spend a little time on its new fleet of electricity generating exercise bikes. These bikes have iPhones mounted on the handlebars, which monitor how much power is being produced and fed into the hotel’s main power supply. Any guests producing 10 watt hours or more will be rewarded with a free meal.

This new scheme is actually a pilot project that will run for a year. If it is successful then it will be rolled out to all 21 Crowne Plaza hotels in the UK. Allan Agerholm, who is the Copenhagen hotel general manager, said that these electric bikes offer their guests the chance to get fit and help power the hotel at the same time. It will be interesting to see how many guests take part and how much electricity that the hotel generates from it.

Experts say that getting the free meal is pretty easy. The hotel’s calculations suggest one guest cycling at 30kmph for an hour will produce around 100 watt hours of electricity. This means that he would reach his threshold for the free meal after about six minutes. However, some are saying that these bikes will be producing only a small token of energy to the hotel, and they are not sure just how helpful it will actually be.