Ingenious way to generate electricity

[Preacherman]

This tickled my fancy - a novel way to generate electricity for local use.

From the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/4535408.stm):

Last Updated: Friday, 16 December 2005, 14:48 GMT

Ramp creates power as cars pass

A road ramp that uses passing cars to generate power has been developed.

Dorset inventor Peter Hughes' Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp creates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates.

More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the £25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said.

Around 300 jobs are due to be created in Somerset for a production run of 2,000 ramps next year.

Plates in the ramp move up and down as vehicles pass over them, driving a generator.

"The ramp is silent, comfortable and safe for vehicles," Mr Hughes said.

Depending on the weight of the vehicle passing overhead, between five and 50kW can be generated.

The prototype was created and tested at Hughes Research unit at the Westland Helicopter base in Somerset, at a cost of £1m.

The concept has been developed by Dorset-based Mr Hughes over the past 12 years. He recently approached councils across the country with the final patented project.

[Strings]

Preacherman: do you just sit around surfing for news of the weird, or something? ANY weird thread, you're usually the original poster...

[Warren]

Sounds good.

Nothing is free however. Does it cost even a teeny-tiny bit of extra energy for the car to push it self over this plate as opposed to normal roadway? If so then the road users are paying for the electricity generated at the gaspump instead of through taxes, which probably won't go down. So this might cause a slight decrease in the amount of money each road user has. Thus reducing their standard of living.
 

But I could be wrong.

[brimic]

here2learn said exactly what I was thinking.

[matis]

Nothing is free however. Does it cost even a teeny-tiny bit of extra energy for the car to push it self over this plate as opposed to normal roadway? If so then the road users are paying for the electricity generated at the gaspump instead of through taxes, which probably won't go down. So this might cause a slight decrease in the amount of money each road user has. Thus reducing their standard of living.

Yep. There's absolutely no such thing as a FREE free lunch!




matis

[Justin]

Nothing is free however. Does it cost even a teeny-tiny bit of extra energy for the car to push it self over this plate as opposed to normal roadway? If so then the road users are paying for the electricity generated at the gaspump instead of through taxes, which probably won't go down. So this might cause a slight decrease in the amount of money each road user has. Thus reducing their standard of living.

What if it doesn't?

A mechanism that takes advantage of a previously-wasted opportunity to generate power is hardly a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

The big question to be answered is how long does it take the energy savings from these ramps to pay for themselves vs. feeding them power from a traditional power plant?

[Warren]

I hope it works out. It would great if this did what the inventor says it would. And pays for itself in a reasonable amount of time.

If it does, then there would no reason not to install these things everywhere. whole roadways of nothing but  piezo-electric generators. A lot of wasted energy could be captured that way.

I once read in a science rag about a fellow who had plans to install windmills along roadways to be driven by the wind of passing cars.

Have not heard of it since, probably to complicated to make profitable.

Not to the curious: these windmills would not be the traditional sort but rather would be a five or six armed star about four feet high.

[brimic]

A mechanism that takes advantage of a previously-wasted opportunity to generate power is hardly a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

You have a really good point, if these devices were installed on roads approaching stopsigns or on exit ramps from freeways.

The big question to be answered is how long does it take the energy savings from these ramps to pay for themselves vs. feeding them power from a traditional power plant?

The big question in my neck of the woods is how long does it take ice and salt to destroy the generators.

[brimic]

I once read in a science rag about a fellow who had plans to install windmills along roadways to be driven by the wind of passing cars.

That's an intersting thought.  

Windmills anywhere in the US seem to come under fire from people who live in prime locations for them- coastlines. The don't like the way they look. Another stupid argument against them is that they kill birds. Yeah, as if the cell tower that a person uses every time the make a phone call wouldn't kill any birds. Or trees, There have to be birds dying by flying into trees every day if they aren't smart enough to avoid the few windmills in the country.

[Art Eatman]

brimic, it's the height above the trees that contributes to bird deaths.  A daily chore at one TV station I know of was to clean up the dead birds which had flown into the transmitter tower during the night.  Figure the number of tall towers, nationwide.  When you start adding up tower-kills and feral-cat kills, that's a lot of dead bug-eaters.  A person might not care all that much about birds, but bugs bug people.  And hawks eat the mice that eat the wheat that makes the bread...

Over the last few years, some 500 wind generators have been built along and north of I-10, east of Ft. Stockton, Texas.  The countryside there is desolate enough that the visual pollution is not all that horrible.  Still, I'd rather see one 100-acre area with a nuke plant than 20,000 acres with wind generators.

Art