Using highways to generate electricity
by admin on May.08, 2007, under General
Engadget had an article recently on something that seemed liked a really awesome idea: using wind turbines to generate electricity from the wind generated by passing vehciles (i.e. semi-rigs). It seems like such a brilliantly simple, basic idea, and pretty easy to implement. In other words, a "DOH! Should have done this earlier!" kinda idea. It'll be interesting to see how the technology plays out, how easy this is to implement, how much power is actually generated for the cost, etc. but overall it sounds like an idea we definitely need to explore and should have thought about earlier.
May 8th, 2007 on 10:18 am
I saw this recently too. It looks to be a very cool idea, especially on roads with lots of truck traffic.
There was another cool idea recently about generating energy from ocean waves. Floating tubes float just below the surface, generating energy at the pivot points where they are joined. There seems to be quite a lot of wasted energy in the form of movement – it will be cool if we can capture it.