| human: 1.2 (0.9) kcal/floor ascending (descending) [0, 1]
elevator: 2.5 W•h/floor [2, 3] Let's assume 15 floors since otherwise you'd probably save time walking. The article suggests a grid efficiency of 50% and a motor efficiency of electric e-bike motors as 75%. It looks like elevator motors are actually more efficient (increasingly so as more people are loaded) [4]. It's only about 5 percentage points higher, so for simplicity let's keep 75%. Ignoring the transportation and manufacture cost of the elevator assembly (not totally unreasonable since it has a long lifetime), elevators have an energy ratio of 2.5:6.7 or 1:2.7, which looks far better than the 1:28 that the article quotes for humans. Gee, that kind of upends my worldview... I guess I'll just wait until bodies are deprecated in favor of high-efficiency cybernetics. [0] https://captaincalculator.com/health/calorie/calories-burned... [1] https://www.livestrong.com/article/301539-calories-burned-cl... [2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-electricity-does-an-elevator-... [3] https://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much-energy-do... [4] https://www.me.ua.edu/me416/LECTURE%20MATERIALS/MotorEffic&P... |
Not many people would consider walking 15 floors either up or downstairs. Actually many people pant heavily when climbing (from their point of view) 3 floors to my place.