DATELINE–Durham, N.C.

Fitness machines to power poor neighborhoods.

At 5:45 pm, the Duke University basketball team files into its nautilus room for a daily routine of weight lifting and aerobic conditioning. Abu Nazer, a junior who plays guard for the Blue Devils, immediately steps up to a stair-climbing machine and begins a 20-minute session. Halfway through his workout, Nazer looks down at the LCD monitor to track his progress. After ten minutes at a blistering pace, Nazer has already generated enough watts to power a light bulb for several hours.

Nazer is not the only Duke student generating power these days. An average of 400 students a week participate in a pilot program run by the school’s engineering department to convert “workout’s” into energy. The program is sponsored by the Enron corporation, a young and profitable consortium of energy companies with operations around the world, and is the brainchild of Jules Howell, a physicist at Duke.

After three years, the program has generated nearly 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity by tapping into a few of the exercise machines in Duke’s fitness facilities. Currently, the program includes 22 stationary bicycles, 15 rowing machines and almost three dozen stair climbers.

Howell and his team of engineering students named the program the Kinetic-Electric Distribution System, or KEDS for short. This innovative approach to power redistribution consists of little more than standard exercise equipment and eight large batteries. A device the size of a portable radio is used to transfer the energy now in the form of electricity from each exercise machine to a battery. The electricity is then supplied via a proprietary line to the local power company.

Howell’s experiment has earned the light-hearted nickname “Watt-a-Workout” from its regular student participants. But despite this humorous moniker, the program has a serious goal. From its inception, all of the power produced by KEDS for the Durham Electric Service has been earmarked for residents of the city’s low-income neighborhoods. As a result, the KEDS program has actually provided a year’s worth of free electricity to an entire city block.

“Engineers work with basic terms,” says Howell, “waste, conservation, entropy, etc. If you look at machine-aided workouts from this angle, you see a lot of waste.”

According to Howell, the energy produced by a person on a StairMaster® greatly exceeds the amount of work required to achieve a tight stomach or lean thighs. Howell elaborates: “At the end of a typical exercise session, the person might look better or feel better, but 90% of the energy they’ve produced has been wasted.”

Using a grant from the Enron Corporation, Howell developed KEDS to demonstrate that “given the right system, the energy a person produces while exercising can actually be put to good use.” The KEDS team hopes to expand their program by bringing local fitness clubs into the picture. The team’s chief engineer, Ph.D.-candidate Francis Benjamin, thinks the project has increased energy awareness both on campus and in the city of Durham.

Increased awareness about energy is exactly what Enron spokesman Tim Holmes says his company was looking for when they sponsored the KEDS project. “Our activities transcend industries…regional boundaries and most importantly, traditional methods of thinking about the energy business,” states Holmes, who concludes, “This means looking across the world or across the street to find ways in which we can all work together to make a change.”