City Power: Can We Generate Energy While Just Getting Around? (VIDEO)

UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's is about to try something new and cool -- people power:

Energy will be captured every time a vehicle drives over "kinetic road plates" in the car park and then channeled back into the store.

The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30 kWh of green energy every hour -- more than enough energy to power the store's checkouts. The system, pioneered for Sainsbury's by Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems, does not affect the car or fuel efficiency, and drivers feel no disturbance as they drive over the plates.

There have been other projects like this, but they seem to have mostly been experimental. MIT researchers talked about how much energy could be generated by people walking in New York's Penn Station -- and then there's also this little project in Japan:

Producing energy by walking on Shibuya station. Tokyo, Japan. 歩いて献電しよう！ from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

Comments

[SteveMI]

I think a possible idea might be wind turbines that mount onto cars to send power to the battery
made to fit the styling/color of individual cars

I'm thinking about a kit that you could sell to hybrid owners etc that could be easily installed?

Trying to guage interest/price point for something like this?

Steve

[netzwerg]

wind turbines that mount onto cars to send power to the battery...

LOL, you failed science class, didnt you?

[SteveMI]

That made me LOL out loud

Well I did OK Nutzwag, how about you- any qualifications there?
Marketing would be a plus :)

[KillTheMessenger]

This thing will only sell in conjunction with the WunderKarburator. You know, the one that extracts CO2 from the air and puts gas back in your tank!

[netzwerg]

"Can We Generate Energy While Just Getting Around?"

Of course! Its already been done in Germany and Japan on big scale: http://www.romow.com/tech-blog/japanese-train-station-powered-by-kinetic-energy/

The US is a little late again...

[SteveMI]

Great link
http://www.romow.com/tech-blog/japanese-train-station-powered-by-kinetic-energy/
WELL WORTH A READ

'2.4 million commuters on a daily basis.........

.......can generate enough energy to power the station’s LED display boards, as well as lights along the stations inner walls'

Yeah- you're right that's really impressive large scale, LEDs take a whack of power, well worth the investment to save a thimble of cheap fuel! I can't believe they don't hook this up to the actual trains- but they'd probably go way too fast ,or like spontaneously combust with all that energy right?

[KillTheMessenger]

You don't know how large those LED display boards are. It hey are the ones that show the next train, they could be using no more than something like 10kW in total. Let's see... 10kWh = 3.6e7J, divided by 2.4e6 makes 15J per person. That's less energy than you need to lift your hand to hour head.

So this is efficient, why? And can you even imagine 2.4 million people????

[lmvd3]

Of course. We should be moving towards harnessing energy from plates under our streets and sidewalks, that run streetlights, etc.

[Semaj51]

My view point of this idea is not from the energy side but from the side of the poor old mechanics who will be consistently repairing these parts from the wear and tear and the inclusion of debris into the mechanisms. The costs of maintaining these units will most likely doom them.

[ginxy]

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
-Frank Zappa

Even if this kinetic energy collector idea isn't the most productive, maybe it will lead to something that is.

[MaximMaximus]

An incomplete, logically flawed and stupid statement by Mr. Zappa. Diseases are deviations from teh norm and do not result in progress. Duh! That statement is so flawed that I won't even bother. The electromechanical device used to "harvest" energy is based on an old idea which has been pursued in the 90s which didn't produce any tangible technology. It's not being recycled in the civilian sector which, again won't result in much technological progress.

[NeverRepublican]

You drink oil from texaco for breakfast, right?

[KillTheMessenger]

The one thing that came to my mind after writing my first post was that this is actually a case of theft. The energy to power the device comes from the cars that drive over it. The owners of those cars pay for the extra fuel that has to be burned in the engine to generate it. So in essence, while the device only steals small amounts of energy from each car individually, the total amount stolen is worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per year, if the idea would work as advertised.

Theft is hardly progress, is it?

[MaximMaximus]

Kill-Please shut up on this particular topic. You have no idea about what you're talking. You're embarrassing yourself. What's being done here is called "energy scavenging". If it is not scavenged it is wasted anyway. The useful form of the energy is used by the person who paid for it and the rest is dumped into what is called the surroundings in thermodynamics as per the second law of thermodynamics. Nobody is ripping anybody off. Understood? In fact somebody is spending some money to develop a device to recover some of the otherwise wasted energy so as to create additional use.

[Caffein]

This is nonsense, just like cars that run on water and skyscrapers that have two tiny turbines on top that are claimed to power the entire building.

I wish people would stop talking about the "crowd farming" story from MIT. Yes, it was from MIT; but it was from the school of Architecture and has not amounted to anything.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/crowdfarm-0725.html

Kill the Messenger has it right, basic back of the envelope calculations can separate good ideas from bad and this one doesn't stand up to back of the envelope calcs.

[Yves Papa]

We actually do, WHILE going around. These gadgets are just sucking up what we made. Any one, remember that "perpetual motion" boondoggle?

[sympathyforthedevil]

As Bill Maher would say: "New Rule: people writing articles about energy have to get a degree in science or engineering."
Maybe I'm getting worked up over semantics but energy cannot, repeat cannot, be "produced". Can only be converted from another form of energy or from mass. No free lunch. The energy the devices harvests is converted from fuel by a combustion engine (or by the human body from food), both basically oxidizing organic fuel with oxygen in a pretty inefficient way.
That said, some of the energy that would be otherwise wasted on the road could *in principle* be harvested... If I believe Wikipedia the coefficient of rolling resistance of regular tires on asphalt is 0.03, i.e. the rolling drag is 3% of the weight of the car. So if the car is 2000Kg, the weight is ~20kN and the rolling drag is 600N. If the car is going 30kph that's about 8m/s, and the power dissipated by the rolling drag is the 4.8kW. If I didn't mess up, this means that *in principle*, if the rolling resistance coefficient of the plate is 50% less than that of asphalt, 2.4KW per car on the plate could potentially be harvested at no extra gas cost. I doubt the plate things actually does that though. Of course if you have a safe way to reduce rolling resistance you're probably better off just doing that.

[Naithom]

I'm stickin' with you Sym. Show me the numbers and I'm liable to learn something.

[sympathyforthedevil]

Sorry but I'm not entirely sure: are you asking for more numbers or are you opposing what I wrote? If you are (opposing), I'm happy to have a respectful discussion. I have *some* engineering background but if I'm wrong, I would like t know about it so that I could revisit my opinion.
For all others out there: did I get my data or logic wrong? let me know!

[MaximMaximus]

Your estimate has so many flaws in that it's not even funny. I hope you do not hold an engineering degree.

[sympathyforthedevil]

Thanks for the constructive argument. The numbers you provided are a unvaluable contribution to the discussion we're having.

[KillTheMessenger]

I would think the problem is that the rolling drag is not caused primarily by the asphalt but by the car's tires which are much more compressible than the surface they move on. That's why tire pressure plays such a large role in fuel efficiency. So if you extract 2.4kW from the surface, that's in addition to the 4kW or so that heat the tires and compress air under the tire which then leads to tire noise.

[sympathyforthedevil]

On this one I'm not going to be sarcastic since KillTheMessnger seems to know something about physics. Unless I'm wrong, it seems the coefficient of rolling resistance can only be measured for a given tire on a given surface. If that's true then we should talk about the Crr of a given type of tire on a given surface.

[SteveMI]

I guess it's more about trying to capture otherwise wasted energy, say where cars were slowing down
and wasting considerable amounts of energy to braking, maybe stop lights/ steep hills might be possible locations?

But like a lot of these alternative energy ideas- it comes down to the cost per unit of energy, inc. manufacture and the efficency (or lack thereof) of converting/storing and transmission? Usually when you do the math you end up with a new found respect for the increadible scale and efficiency of energy from fossil fuels.

[KillTheMessenger]

"I guess it's more about trying to capture otherwise wasted energy, say where cars were slowing down"

And that is simply called "regenerative breaking". My Prius comes with it built in. Works like a charm and saves break pads, too.

:-)

[KillTheMessenger]

"The system, pioneered for Sainsbury's by Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems, does not affect the car or fuel efficiency"

Oh, my, who turned the law of energy conservation off? Will that person please stand up and go turn it back on, again? Thank you.

"30 kWh of green energy every hour"

So that's 30 kW of power output. Assuming 100% efficiency and 5 cars per second passing by(that's one busy road!), that's 30*3.6MJ/(­5*3600)=6k­J per car. Based on the formula for potential energy E_pot=m*g*h=6kJ, your car of 2000kg will have to drop into a 0.3m hole and then climb out again, to make that work. These tiles will distribute that "drop" along the road, of course, but while you are driving over this thing, your engine will have to work significantly harder to keep the speed constant, or your car will just slow down.

Where I come from they call that a Rube Goldberg machine. And where you come from they probably call it simply "nonsense".

[jsarets]

The flaw in your logic is that, while it's true that the plates may cause a very slight increase in vibrational energy transfer to the road, most of the energy generated by the plates comes from damping vibrations that already exist.

You made the false assumption that the road didn't vibrate at all until the plates were installed. Real roads are already wasting plenty of energy that we can harness. We don't need traffic to do any more unproductive work than it already does.

[KillTheMessenger]

The "very slight increase" in vibrational energy would have to be equivalent to 30kW! That's about the power of a vibrating plate compactor. I challenge you to show up on a perfectly good road with such a machine and to drive it around for a whole day on a, let's say, 30 foot long section. If there will be any road left worth mentioning, you can call me back and I will buy a beer for you.

[Yves Papa]

Right. That's another "scientific" gimmick. I'm an engineer and I find your logic correct. Also what about the cost of building and maintaining that thing?