Electric Bikes : Think Green
In today's world we all have to consider the impact of our actions whether that is through household waste, the businesses we run, the food we buy and most importantly the way we travel. Electric and Hybrid technology is certainly one of the many ways you can help to protect the environment and an electric bike provides you with a practical solution to carrying out many localised journeys.
Why use a car to run local errands?
Why not travel to work or school on an electric bike?
Why travel to the gym to keep fit?
Clean and Green
Electric bikes obviously consume energy, where a conventional bike does not. However the amount of energy used is very small compared to a moped, motorcycle or car. Besides fuel, the only consumables are the batteries, and these can normally be recycled when life-expired. As for the energy use, electric bikes typically consume fuel at an average rate of 100 to 150 watts of electrical energy, against 15,000 or so for a car. In terms of fuel consumption, an electric bike achieves about 800-2,000 mpg. No other commercially available vehicle can match figures of this kind. If it's hard to place these numbers in your own lifestyle, think of a 100 watt electric light bulb burning for an evening - that's enough energy to propel an electrically assisted bike for 20 to 40 miles....
Genuinely Sustainable
There's a lot of nonsense talked about sustainability in transport, but an electric bicycle can be made genuinely sustainable. Purchase electricity from a 'green' supplier, or generate your own with a roof-mounted windmill or solar panel array, and the vehicle's fossil fuel consumption will be zero. Surely a conventional bike does that already? Only if you grow the food you consume whilst riding it. Unfortunately most modern food production and distribution is so fuel-intensive that the consumption of a typical cyclist is not terribly good.