Doug was kind enough to point me in the direction of a wonderful-sounding but probably mostly useless proposal: replacing the concrete barriers along the interstate with little wind turbines. Those little turbines will be spun by the air generated from passing vehicles.
Honestly, I’m not exactly sure how to gauge the concept. Obviously some energy is being used to move the air. But what happens to it then? Maybe it moves the leaves of a tree by the side of the road? Would there be a difference in drag between having a tree there and a small turbine? Unfortunately, fluids and aero aren’t my thing and I just don’t know.
Nonetheless, I don’t think this is a particularly good idea. Aero drag is only about 5% of the losses incurred by a car. I’ll estimate that 20% of those losses may be what I’ll call reclaimable. Then suppose a the turbine operates at 50% efficiency.
Consider that there are 3.9 million miles of roads in this country and 47,000 miles of just interstate highway. I think there are better ways than installing millions of miles of turbines to save such a small fraction of energy.
Of course, the designer, Mark Oberholzer isn’t about good ideas. He’s about being a dickhead.
“The technical problems of tying into the grid and managing the flow made me think of putting the power to a different use,” he says. “I’m pretty excited about integrating a subway or light-rail train right where the barrier is. I love the idea of siphoning off electricity generated by private transportation to run public transportation.”
“Hey Mr. Private Citizen! I see you walking to work. Well I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to siphon off some of your energy by riding on your back!”
Everybody loves parasites!
Hey Mark, why don’t you just start sucking and siphon gas right out of the tanks of random citizens? I bet you’d love that.
But it gets better:
Using the power where it’s generated, rather than redistributing it through the grid, avoids energy losses that occur during transportation and eliminates the cost of adding extra infrastructure.
Just in case you missed it there, Mark wants to dismantle miles of concrete barriers, put in hundreds or thousands of little turbines, and wire them altogether. Then to avoid adding the “extra infrastructure” needed to just pump that energy into the grid, he wants to construct light-rail or subways along the interstate. Yes, apparently putting the power on the grid is more difficult and requires more infrastructure than the building a subway system.
Bravo, Mark, for showing us all the light of your design genius.
And on a side note, the first commenter on that article is a guy named Stefanos Horianopoulos. I’d like to meet Stefanos and kick him in the nuts. Why? Several reasons. Here’s what he says:
Your article mentioned the future of energy as being harvested from traffic. I’m proud to inform you this is happening now, our company www.kinergypower.com harvests electricity from passing traffic, trains, trams, people, drive-thru restaurants, bridges and toll booths. Our device is placed in the path of the moving objects and through a series of hydraulic micropistons harvests that kinetic energy, converts it into pressure energy, into a hydro motor and through a generator, and is converted to electricity. This alternative energy production system can produce the electricity at 2cents a kwh making it the cheapest way to produce electricity.
I’m not exactly sure how “drive-thru restaurants, bridges and toll booths” will generate electricity by passing by, but that’s not a reason to hate someone. But there are reasons.
First reason to hate him: His website sucks. Big time. No grown adult should have a website where the text is replaced by an image of the text with the full text added as the alternative text.
Second reason to hate him: He’s full of shit. Absolute, pure, 100% bullshit.
The idea for the device is certainly reasonable: they essentially put bumps in the road that can move up and down. When a car hits one, it goes down and the motion can be transferred into electrical energy.
But the claims made are shit. Why? Because pushing the bumps down is exactly the same as pushing your car up, i.e., driving uphill!
The product is called an “alternative energy source.” No. It is just a mechanical leech.
“Kinergypower harvests the energy from rolling resistance, braking, and deceleration.” Unless the system is absorbing thermal energy from the tire, or changes drastically how it deforms, then it is not harvesting energy from rolling resistance. It will, however, reduce the amount of energy you need for braking and decelerating. Why? Because the system constantly slows you down by leeching your available kinetic energy.
After I thought through my response to the two prior statements, I thought, “well if it is just an external regenerative braking system, and not applied everywhere, but only to braking zones, then maybe it is not too bad.”
Unfortunately, the site says “Kinergypower is the solution to our energy crisis.” Like the example above, maybe 5% of losses are due to braking. So a 50% conversion rate leads to a 2.5% reclamation rate. That is hardly “the solution.”
What’s more, it looks like they are trying to sell it to people who will then abuse it for profit.
Truck stops, incredible amounts of electricity can be obtained. A truck stop with daily traffic of 5000 trucks and 100m drive lane can harvest 233MWH a day this translates to over $10,000,000.00 in revenues a year.
They’re really trying to oversell themselves. 233MW-h per day translates to 8500MW-h per year. So yeah, that does translate to more than $10million in revenues per year @ 12 cents a kW-h, which seems high. But here’s the real rub, an 80,000lb truck, going at 60mph, only has 3.62kW-h of kinetic energy. Multiply by 5000 trucks, and there is only just over 18MW-h of kinetic energy to harvest. That’s only 8% of what is claimed. Thus they are “solving the energy crisis” by increasing your braking losses by a factor of 13.
Moreover, they claim that their product can absorb roughly 4.66kW-hr of energy for every 10m long section. Thus they only need 8meters (25 feet) of product to absorb the energy of an 80,000lb truck moving at 60mph. That means that your truck is either going to fall apart after going through several of these 47g decelerations, or, more likely, it is just going to skim over them and render them mostly useless.
Why am I not a paid consultant?
Doug Stewart Says:
In re: Kinergypower –
Point the First:
That is indeed one sucktastic website. Holy cow.
Point the Second:
“[...]and is virtually imperceptible to the driver.” Translation: the rattle and pitch induced by driving over this obscene idiocy is roughly equivalent to those rumble strips before the toll booths.
Point the Third:
Their energy return seems to rely upon the compressibility of fluids and mechanical springs to return the plates to their original position. Given the different responses to differing loads of both fluids and springs, would this not suggest that either truck drivers or car drivers would be likely to encounter severe tire damage, as lighter springs would compress to a degree that would cause the trucks’ tires to smack into the leading edge of the troughs and heavier springs would deflect to a smaller degree for passenger cars, meaning that cars’ tires would smack into the leading edge of the plates themselves?
In re: stupid wind power –
Any significant “reclamation” of wind power would necessitate the turbines be placed fairly close to the road. The wind generated by traffic outside of the areas in which traffic actually operates is minimal — hardly enough to turn a turbine’s blades, let alone sustain enough motion to generate any power.
The entire prospect is a giant scheme that (thankfully) will most likely never see the light of day.
nobrainer Says:
Re: Point the Third:
Although I didn’t touch on it above, I did spend some time wondering about how the system would hold up to the actual dynamics of the real world.
In the example of full speed trucks, I suggested that the trucks would just skim over the surface. The idea there is that the velocity/momentum of the truck would take it over each plate much faster than the plate/spring/pistons can fully compress.
Although if that is not the case, then the leading edge of each each plate is going to be facing pretty big lateral loads from all the oncoming tires.
Then you have to consider that the springs and moving parts have to be light enough to move easily but robust enough to handle thousands of compressions per day.
I imagine their testing is done at low speeds, less than say 10mph. So if you have to slow from 60mph to 10mph before you hit the kinergy pads, you’ve already scrubbed off 97.2% of your energy. In other words, at low speeds, where these things are really recommended, your car just doesn’t have much kinetic energy to be “harvested.”
Let’s look at another example:
They suggest that these could be great if you owned a drive thru.
Our machines are excellent for drive thru restaurants or gasoline stations. The amount of energy that can be harvested at one of these locations would not only be enough to make the establishment self sufficient, but the surplus energy could be sold for a profit to the power grid. Installing 4000 micro pistons on a 100m drive thru, with a daily traffic of 1,500 vehicles we can harvest 1,568kwh or 1,5MWH per day. This translates to over $65,000.00 per year in revenues.
For your reference, 1568kW-h is equivalent to the energy needed to lift all 1500 of those 3000 lb cars to a height of 925 feet. And that’s at perfect efficiency. That height could easily double or quadruple.
Or you can look at it like this. Take the energy output, divide it by the number of pistons (4000), the number of cars (1500), the weight of the car (3000lb), and the mechanical conversion efficiency (I’ll be nice and say 50%), then each piston has to compress 5.5 inches to generate the promised output.
In reality, the actual waste kinetic energy of a drive-thru, is probably closer to 5kW-h per day (assuming 1500, 3000 lb cars that have to slow from 5mph to 0mph 3 times (ordering, paying, picking up). Even if I double the speed assumption, the available energy for harvest is a measly 1% of what they claim.
And as Doug pointed out in his original post, you could leech energy from your customers, but you would be doing it very inefficiently! If you can get 25% (or maybe 50%) of the cars’ kinetic energy, then consider that car is only about 25% efficient to start with, your “alternative energy device” that is “the solution to our energy crisis” is really only generating electricity at a fraction of how it is done on the grid.
Way to save the planet there, Stefanos.
Wha Says:
Just be sure to put the light rails along the major road way that goes from teh Center City area out through teh heavily hispanic part of town. You knwo, the part that house virtually no-one that works down town. While we are wastinng money, let’s make sure we follow Charlotte’s leed and waste as much of it as possible on the least likely demographic to utilize if intended purpose.
Follow the link below to see the map. Dark line is what is scheduled to open in the not too distant future at a significantbudget overrun. High minority populations live from the Scaleybark station on and do not contribute to the congestion heading uptown or along the same high transportation routes of I-77 and South Boulevard.
coldboy Says:
whenever you are done jerking off over yourself, why don’t you use all that incredible mind power to do something useful or create something new instead of just rattling the bars of your cage like a good little debunker lapdog.
i honestly agree with your diagnosis, yet, you sound like an angry mall bitch delivering them. the point is to try to do something different, new, more sane, not just more profitable.
Doug Stewart Says:
Let me get this straight: you’d rather do something counter-productive and counter-intuitive simply because it’s “different” and “new”?
The laws of physics are immutable, at least while we’re traveling somewhere < 0.9c. Bad physics and bad math need to be laughed out of serious debate immediately, if not sooner, lest someone with little cognitive function (such as yourself) be led astray by such Pied Pipers of Physics Piffle.
Begone, dunce!
nobrainer Says:
I did use my mind power to do something useful. I demonstrated that the KinergyPower system is mostly a sham.
I will further use my mind power for something useful and note that lapdogs are mostly inert. They do not rattle the bars of their cages nor go around debunking things.
Also, while I agree that trying new things is great, selling them as something they are not is at least unethical if not criminal. Let me add that I will happily lend support to any new/old, different/same, sane/crazy idea that is good (and if it is good it is likely to be profitable).
john DOE Says:
HI,
HI EVRYBODY
IN THE ARICLE PUBLISHED ABOUT KINERGYPOWER EVRYBODY ISTALKING ABOUT THERE SUPER ENERGY SOURCES I THINK THERE PRODUCT COULD WORK THE ONLY THING IS IF THIS WOULD PRODUCE 1OOOOOO USD A YEAR I WANT TO INSTALL ONE
THEY DO IT FOR FREE AND ILL GIVE THEM 50 % THEN I STILL MAKE 5 MIL THATS GOOD ECONOMIE
KINERGY EXCISTS SINCE 2002 THATS WHAT THEY SAY ON THE WEBSITE I CHECKED THERE COMPANY THEY DONT EVEN HAVE AN OFFICE MAYBE THEY HAVE ONE IN A TRUCK STOP THATS ENOUGH
PS IF WE TYPE ENOUGH COULD WE HARVEST POWER OF OUR LAPTOPS
JOHN
nobrainer Says:
“Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
You’ve done a good job of branding yourself Mr. Nobrainer. I was this close to posting that article to the Yeti and requesting analysis by you. I decided against it because after a second thought the windmills seemed like a pretty dumb idea for making any actual, usable energy to me. But I’m glad you commented anyways.