To everyone who is considering more innovative, novel, never-been-thought-about-much-less-entered-in-a-design-competition, IDEAS - read this first.
"You can’t generate a meaningful amount of electricity with a bicycle, and it won’t save any money, either, because bike power generates such a tiny amount of electricity versus the cost of the setup. And it might not even be green energy, once you consider the energy that’s used to produce your fuel (food).
If you cycle with a power meter, you know that a fairly strenuous ride yields an average of about 140 watts for an hour. Mount your bike to a generator, slice off 30 percent for mechanical and electrical losses, and you’ve put out a measly 100-watt average during your sweaty hour. It amounts to around a penny’s worth of electricity, one three-hundredth of a typical home’s daily use—not enough juice to run the PlayStation for 15 minutes.
If you pedal for an hour a day, 30 days a month, that’s (30 x 100=) 3000 watt-hours, or 3 kWh. That’s less than 1% of what a typical family uses in a month (920 kWH). You generated 0.3% of your energy, and continue to get 99.7% from the grid. Good job.
But how much money did you save? Well, since the average cost of U.S. electricity is 12¢/kWh, that one month of pedaling saved you $0.36. Congratulations. If the system cost $400, it would take only 93 years to pay for itself."
You might be better off just saying “magic”, instead.