Guest essay by Eric Worrall
What could be better for providing light in a poor country with no electricity than a cheap kerosene lamp? A group of renewable entrepreneurs think they have found the answer – meet Gravity Light, a third world LED lighting system powered by lifting a bag containing 12Kg (27lb) of rocks every 20 minutes.
GravityLight Brings Clean Energy to Kenya
In Kenya it’s estimated that one in seven people live without access to electricity. Sixty eight percent of Kenyans rely on kerosene as their main source of energy. Kerosene is expensive as a fuel, and can be dangerous as a flammable in the household. GravityLight is one of several startup companies working to make clean and renewable energy and lighting available to families in Kenya and around the world. The foundation has partnered with Shell to send more than 3,000 lights to families in Kenya.
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The light isn’t very bright. According to the specification;
| Product weight (empty bag) | 1.2 kg / 2.6 lbs |
| Max loaded bag weight | 12.5 kg / 27.5 lbs |
| Nominal Voltage | 2.7 V DC |
| Max current | <0.031 A |
| Max electrical power | 0.085 W |
| Luminous flux | 15 lm |
| Luminous efficiency | 208 lm/W |
| Colour temperature | 5000 K |
| Colour Rendering Index | > 70 |
| Beam angle | 147o |
Read more: Specification Document
But hey, the idea has an endorsement from Bill Gates. And think of the health benefits. Instead of studying for hours by the steady flame of a kerosene lamp, risking DVT from all that sitting down, every 20 minutes someone has to winch up a heavy bag of rocks.
Perhaps the benefits will spread to first world countries. Who needs an industrial economy and a steady supply of fossil fuel powered electricity, when you can have the healthy exercise benefits of owning a human powered gravity light?
There are a wide variety of wind-up lamps available on the market, from headlamps to flashlights (UK ‘torches’) to lanterns. Usable by people who can’t lift 12 Kg of rocks at one time. Many feature selectable light levels, and they last much longer than 20 minutes. One by C.Crane will power 15 LEDs for 5 hours on one winding (9 LEDs for 7 hours). http://www.ccrane.com/Emergency-Windup-CC-LED-Lantern
GravityLight may prove to be the BetaMax of the portable lamp industry – badly timed, bad read of the market.
I did have a similar one as well as a wind up radio. neither lasted long, the winding arm breaks or the generator is not good quality. It’s a great idea though, and if they improve the quality I’d buy another one.
Agreed. The quality is not great and the winding doesn’t last long. However, they are okay in a pinch.
“Usable by people who can’t lift 12 Kg of rocks at one time.”
Did anyone actually read the article? Eric certainly could have provided more information if he wasn’t so busy taking cheap shots a renewable energy. The new design incorporates a winch so that you don’t have to lift the whole weight in one go.
It. Is. Still. Crap. Ya know that white spot on top of a pile of chicken sh*t? Its chicken sh*t, too.
If I was a contestant in a beauty pageant (I know, not gonna happen) my stock line would be, “I’d like to see safe, inexpensive, reliable, electricity to anyone who wants it.”
The real revolution is the LED . That answers an awful lot of the need for light but not heat or motive power .
Haven’t you heard? LED lights are destroying the planet with light pollution. The disruption in migratory patterns, circadian rhythms, and insect swarms have been nothing short of catastrophic. (According to the International Dark-Sky Association.)
http://spie.org/newsroom/1015-led-light-pollution
A decade ago I moved from Lower Manhattan to 2500m up in Teller County , CO . Now I’m aware of the phase of the Moon w/o thinking . But I am still amazed by the amount of light from Colorado Springs and even Denver .
When I was at Northwestern , they had built an impressive observatory , http://ciera.northwestern.edu/Observatory/lindheimer3.html , at the corner of their new Lake Michigan land fill . My immediate thought was what a stupid place to put an observatory ; pure show .
LEDs do not inherently cause or increase light pollution, any more than any other electric lamp technology does. Light pollution is caused by the choice of how much light and what wavelengths of light to produce. Those who replace non-LED lamps with LED lamps can use LED lighting to not change anything except for reducing electricity consumption, which has many benefits – even if manmade climate change is not a serious problem or significantly reduced by increasing the efficiency of lightbulbs.
Donald L. Epstein — I think you are a light pollution denier. You must be burned at the stake. Sorry.
..So how exactly does this cook their dinner ? Or will they be too tired, from gathering food and water all day and then continuously lifting 27lbs in the evening, to bother eating ?
I would think that significant lifestyle improvement would require a “stack” of tech advances rather that isolated ones such as this gravity lamp.
For instance, there are groups building efficient “rocket stoves” for folks who cook with wood/coal/dung and suffer from indoor air pollution and deforestation. These stoves have often been a hard sell. Now imagine such a stove with a built-in or detachable peltier generator which charges a capacitor or battery which then connects to a reading light after cooking is complete. That would be three “stones” stacked: cleaner cooking, micro electrical generation, and one micro-electric device. But that could be the foundation for many cheap follow-on devices. For example, even in the US I can buy a USB reading light for a dollar.
I have a clock that works like that. And sure enough it keeps the clock ticking for about 24 hours. Then I have to pull down one of the weights to cycle it again. Think I’ll figure out how to hook up an LED light. Send money.
Thanks for the chuckle, we have one of those, the weights don’t go down anymore but the time is accurate twice/day. One needs to think long and hard as to why in 2016 some people in this world need to be relegated to such primitive and inadequate technology while those of us in other nations just need to get off our butt and turn on a switch.
We don’t even have to do that. Clap on. Clap off. And now we don’t even have to do that. Google, turn on the lights.
Pamela: Never! Google will not run my house, if I have to disconnect from the grid or use a gravity light. Never, ever.
Or, we could teach them how to grow potatoes and just give them the electrodes. Send money.
..LOL, my favorite experiment many eons ago…along with the Lemon trick…
Wouldn’t a “Pendulum Generator” make more sense ?
https://youtu.be/M6xLglhs3rs
What powers the pendulum? In my grandfather clock, the operator winds the weights to the top of the clock just like the generator in question.
…Roving Broker, a simple tap on the pendulum …Would that not be better than, after a hard, hot day, be simpler than lifting (more work) 27lbs. every 20 minutes ?
Marcus … You didn’t do well in high school physics did you.
It is not the idea that is poor — it is the scale. But only if all that one wanted was light in the home in the evenings.
This little light of theirs produces the same number of lumens (the measurement unit of luminous flux) as your average table candle (not a tea light candle, but a real taper) 12-15 lumens. I, for one, could not read or study under those low-light conditions, but it would be preferable to stumbling around in my shack-like home in the evening. We have spent many an evening sitting at a simple table under candle-light or kerosene lamp light eating dinner with families that could not really afford to feed us. (Most husbands never knew that I slipped their wives a $20 bill after the meal to make up for my offense.)
However, the clockwork mechanism of this little clock is a real engineering workhorse, and suffices to take energy stored by raised weights, and allowing that energy to do work over a period of time.
Apply this to the village water-well by building a water tank tower — tank on top — over the hand-pump well. Extend the output pipe of the well up to the tank. Install the clockwork under the tank, operating an oscillating arm that moves up and down three feet at each stroke, operating the pump. The clockwork is run by a 55 gallon drum filled with rocks or sand that is raised to the top each morning and evening by the cooperative effort of all the healthy adults pulling on a rope tug-a-war style. The resulting system provides running, pressurized water to the entire village in a low-tech, locally build-able, locally repairable system.
Simple generators (using ubiquitous 12 VDC car generators) could power automotive light-bulbs (also ubiquitous) in every home of the village….with proper gearing … easily providing all the homes
with light and cell-phone charging for four or five hours each evening — and the weights could be raised again in the morning providing another period of power.
Simple, time-tested OLD technologies, that rely on locally available resources, including human strength, can be used to bring modern advantages to rural locations.
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These over-engineered solutions — like the panel-battery-LED give-aways — are solving the wrong problem. The people need electricity to run refrigeration and the machines that make micro-businesses possible, Such power needs to be at the very least dependable — even if just 8 hours a day — so that food can be preserved and safe and businesses can operate and produce needed things and services for sale.
All of the thought, effort, and money being put into these “neat-but-silly” solutions, which their inventors and promoters would never consider suitable for their own homes in a million years, ought to be going towards the construction of locally-feasible and maintainable electrical grids, powered by whatever the locals have to offer — micro- and small-hydro, small steam-generation burning waste, human-power, mini-solar-farms. In all the areas I have worked, the locals people would gladly have exchanged an hour’s work a day for dependable electrical power.
Few people are aware of the power of cheap power.
A machine which is about 75% efficient produces one horsepower for each kilowatt of input. One horsepower equals 550 pounds of weight lifted one foot every second. Or more than 3 of those 60 pound bales lifted 3 feet every second, 180 per minute, about 11,000 per hour. Cheap electricity is an amazing productivity multiplier.
A small coal fired plant would provide a lot of villages with all the power they need to actually live, AND supply jobs mining the coal AND supply energy for small factories, thus creating a cash flow into the area…Oh wait..that is Capitalism, the “Watermelons” will have none of that ! The liberal left KNOWS what is best for the poor of Africa and the world, just like they do in Detroit…
Marcus ==> Unfortunately, coal is not available everywhere — but most places do have unwanted things that can be burned to run a steam-engine powered 120 VAC gen set that would electrify a small village.
“Marcus ==> Unfortunately, coal is not available everywhere — ”
Kip, this a lie exaggerated by the liberal left that DOES NOT want Africans to advance into the real world.. That is proven by the fact that Africa is a major supplier of diamonds.. ( Please note that I am not claiming that diamonds come from coal, as some people wrongly think, but that the same geological area produces both). I have never looked deeply into it ( as dear Janice would), so If I am wrong, please correct me..I hate to be wrong, so a long explanation would be appreciated !! Thank you for your time….
https://www.mbendi.com/indy/ming/coal/af/p0005.htm
North Africa is full of natural gas.
It could be transported south and open up new areas.
http://www.naturalgasworld.com/strategic-importance-of-algerian-natural-gas-for-europe
Marcus ==> Only South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria are known to have coal reserves….South Africa actually produces lots of coal and is the 7th world-wide producer. In the United States, some states have coal, some don’t.
see
“Kip Hansen November 26, 2016 at 6:55 pm
Marcus ==> Only South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria are known to have coal reserves….”
Known reserves. Yes, without exploration you won’t find a thing. I know the Chinese are exploring Ethiopia for coal etc for export while Ethiopians are building the biggest hydro plant in Africa.
I’ll be the goat to say I think this is a pretty good idea. I don’t understand all the sneering.
There’s plenty of silliness that comes out of the AGW crowd, and Worrell does a great job of exposing it. This time however (and it’s the first time in my reading) Eric swung and missed.
Indeed, this idea should be developed further so that the system runs for hours rather than 20 minutes between need for lifting, and is much brighter. While to a modern western person it seems rather silly to have to lift 100-200kg of rocks/bricks/whatever every few hours to have lighting, it would be miraculous to people without lights at all.
..Dave, why take option D, when option A is available ?
DaveW wrote, ” … it would be miraculous to people without lights at all.”
This device is designed to replace kerosene lights.
@rovingbroker good point, although I still think a gravity light has some attraction over kerosene lamps (nothing to do with AGW idiocy, rather simply the stuffs nasty and messy).
Why is this a questionable idea? Because there have to be better ways, even in Africa, to make electricity than pulling a heavy bag of rocks up every 20 minutes to get light. It’s a cutesy, not well-thought-out idea that I cannot see selling to the African people. I’m sure they have better things to do than lift rocks every 20 minutes. They might even be insulted.
I love it that their energy source is the same as the one that traditionally runs cuckoo clocks.
..Ooh, that was brilliant ! Are you related to Janice ? 100 gold Stars for you !
i’m sure Bill Gates has them all over his mansion
..Just think, if YOU or anyone else here, had the money that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros have , how much good could you actually do for ALL the poor, not just in the U.S., but in the world…As the great man said…”It’s jobs stupid” …OK, I am giving myself a time out ! This silly crap gets me angry…They are simply hypocrites !… IMHO…
Whoa, Marcus, take a breath and go lift a bag of rocks or two. You’ll feel better soon! 🙂
Fox News … “This Day in History: Albert Einstein designs a refrigerator”
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5206907666001/?#sp=show-clips
My grandfather used to have a magnificent gravity clock, although it was never called that way. It was a pendulum clock and it enthralled me. It only needed to be winded up once a week, the weight was much lighter than 27 lbs.
That said, this gravity light has a 15 lm luminous flux, basically the same as a candle has. A kerosene lamp has much higher light output. And you have to lift the weight about three hundred times to get the same amount of light as by burning a liter of kerosene.
What is more, price of GravityLight is $70, while you can get a kerosene lamp for ten bucks. A liter of kerosene is about 75 ¢ and the thing is up to 8 times brighter, than this gravity hack.
Eight GravityLight costs $560 and you have to lift weight for them 24 times in an hour. That’s a full time job, so you need a slave to keep wages down. But that’s illegal and rightly so.
Awful deal.
For $70 in Zambia (~700 kwacha), unfortunately, the best use of these gravity lamps would be as paperweights for the Lungu administration’s bureaucrats. I hadn’t realized they were so expensive. At $7, they might have made sense as freebies from the West. A poor person might have been able to purchase one at 70 cents (competing with food and clothes for priority).
Yes. And you’ll have to lift your ass three times in an hour, which weighs considerably more than 27.5 pounds, to have your candle light running. Energy is kinda conserved, so you can never get it for free. You need to purchase, eat and burn some extra food to be able to do that exercise, which costs money and is associated with carbon dioxide emissions much higher than burning kerosene due to the extremely low energy efficiency of processes involved.
Silly idea, anyway.
This reminds me of the history channel series on the men who built America with electricity, steel , railroads, and petroleum fuels.
Absent the contribution of these titans it is speculation as to where we would be today. This is an excellent documentary of how these men (Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan) in competition moved the US and ultimately from the darkness of candles and whale oil into the modern age we enjoy today. Part of the story includes how Rockefeller dominated and distributed kerosene to the masses who could not afford whale oil for lighting. Later upon the advent of electricity, Rockefeller saw the demise of his kerosene business developed gasoline as a fuel revolutionizing auto transportation.
The average person has no idea where we might be absent a system that allowed these titans to make the world a better place to live, while they became rich and wealthy themselves.
http://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america
..Most College graduates today have no idea what surviving in the “Real World” means, never mind surviving in the depths of Africa…Why not ASK the Africans what they need or require ? Show them the options and then let THEM decide ? Isn’t that called …FREEDOM ?
Excellent idea. Take in a bunch of options and see what the actual users like. Kind of like a focus group here……Not really. Just wanted to see if you were paying attention! Still, marketing research does have it’s place.
Now we have the family that tries to destroy America.
Think the media will expose the hyprocisy?
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-26/clinton-campaign-will-participate-in-stein-s-state-recounts
..Hey, it only cost $5.000,000, so far, of her supporters money, for her GREEN stupidity !! Liberals and Greens have no problem spending OPM ! ( I assume I do not have to define OPM to most commenters… here)…IMHO….
You know that a BOT filled her coffer to the tune of a steady $160k per hour, including the wee hours of the night? This money mostly came from a source other than her supporters. Think in the direction of the Soros “family”.
You realize that her coffer was filled by a BOT at a rate of $160k per hour, including the wee hours of the night so as to meet the Wisconsin deadline? This was mostly not her supporters, but a organization. Likely with a puppet master such as Soros at the end of the string.
Great post. Hilarious. About as practical as solar cells in roads.
Give them a couple of these babies, and they are all set for their next party!
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7152/6434194825_3a97799e2d.jpg
Actually, run the electric output from one of those into a set of batteries then draw current for use from them. Almost like something that has already been done, only it has been! 😉
I think that I would quickly supersede this invention and replace it with a treadmill wheel powered by a flock of white mice pursued by a trained cat. Even a battery linked exercise bicycle would be more fun.
Don’t knock it, Scaled up and adapted it could be really useful.
There are far better and cheaper alternative lighting sources available.
Think of all that energy packed in a 28 lb bag of rocks at 5 feet above the floor.
It is 0.18 BTU’s, WOW.
Now a gallon of Kerosene has 134,000 BUT of energy and weighs 6.75 Lbs.
So 1 gallon of Kerosene has 744817.6809 times as much energy, or put another way the a child would have to winch up the bag of rocks 744,817 times to get the same amount of energy as from a kerosene lantern with one gallon. (not including any relative inefficiencies)
Wouldn’t the child be better off spending the time reading rather than winching up a bag of rocks?
Please somebody tell me I made a math error somewhere?
Besides one cannot easily hang 28 lbs from a wall?
Amazing how far technology can march forward in a mere century. We’ve come all the way from Faraday to Freddie Flintstone.
It seem as though the Progressive elites are so guilty about letting the developing nations use fossil fuels, they become irrational about understanding how degrading it is to deny others access to useful energy while they jetset around the world wily nilly keeping multiple mansions wasting energy.
I always say you go first, the elites should get off the grid and read with the “rock” powered generator getting up and winching the rock bag themselves for a few years
Now, really want to help people in under-developed counties, really? http://oxgvt.com/ Transport AND a source of electricity for charging electric storage/use type devices. Oop, there it is.
We seem to have lost focus, in all this argy-bargy, on the stark split between producing energy by anthropogenic means (including trained mice, horses, buffaloes, etc.,) and that produced by perhaps the greatest breakthrough of all — the harnessing of fuel to create heat-engines and Power.
The advance of less-developed tribes/nations/cultures is axiomatically circumscribed by the limitations of “Horse-power”, “Man-Power”, “Child-Power”, etc. PERIOD!
The impoverished billions of less-developed peoples need CHEAP SOURCES OF ENERGY to lift themselves from poverty … just as we did in the Industrial Revolution. For anyone to argue that THIS IS NOT THEIR RIGHT is beyond my comprehension of civilized, empathetic, progressive thinking.
So, if Kenya is sitting on a pile of coal, and if coal is the lowest-cost source of energy, let ’em go to it, exploit it, advance their economy, and advance (and welcome) their progress, bringing all the fruits to them that we have taken for granted for the last 2 generations (e.g., laundry & dish-washing-machines ; refrigeration, etc.)