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New Jersey Turnpike As a Power Source?
New Jersites writes "New Jersey, home of the eponymous Jersey barrier, is considering wind turbines powered by the breeze generated from traffic on the Jersey Turnpike. The wind turbines won't be built on the side of the highway. They will be built inside — what else? — the Jersey barriers. By replacing sections of solid concrete with Darius turbines, they might be able to harvest enough energy to power a light-rail line."
I'm not a physicist, but won't the turbines cause a drag effect on the cars, resulting in the cars burning more fuel? Is so, aren't they just moving the problem from one place to another? There's no such thing as free energy, right?
Truly curious - I'd love an explanation if someone knows why this isn't the case.
Finally something I have to be proud about in NJ besides the Devils....
y replacing sections of solid concrete with Darius turbines, they might be able to harvest enough energy to power a light-rail line.
That's boring. Wake me up when they can power a light rail gun.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Oh wait, there's a traffic jam!
This might work until somebody decides to use the barriers for their original purpose(separating traffic). When the Powers That Be realize that the only thing separating two lanes of traffic moving at each other at 140 mph is a few turbines they may decide that this is a Bad Idea.
Why not just sink some turbines in the larger rivers near the turnpike and get the juice from there?
If you put a light rail right in the middle of a high traffic freeway how do people get on or off? Fly?
**Life is too short to be serious**
...this will create a good excuse when pullled over for speeding . You were only trying to do your part to power the light-rail line.
In other words, if the car drag is causing a wind of sorts, that wind would normally dissipate its energy as friction against the surfaces it blows along - causing the energy top be lost as heat. Now we're just providing an alternative energy soak that extracts the useful enrgy.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How outlandish would it be to embed efficient magnets within Interstate roadways while installing similar magnets within cars and trucks? This is just a late-night idea but couldn't that generate a sizable amount of electricity? Perhaps it could be realistically considered once cars are fitted with a workable system for auto-navigation, a system that might require the installation of specialized equipment in existing roadways and therefore offer a justifiable economic solution (as well as an opportunity); one of those kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach.
Before everyone decides to start bashing good ole NJ. I would like to point out that the actual article says nothing about the NJ Turnpike. The current concrete barriers are called Jersey barriers, and all we have here is a new barrier with turbines...thus the name "NEW" Jersey Barrier.
Wrong answer. Too many little turbines not generating enough energy each. Worse, gearing a number of turbines together when they don't get uniform wind pressure means some of them are just sources of drag.
Progress in wind turbines has been through scaling them up. The 50KW - 100 KW machines of the 1970s never paid for themselves. Somewhere above 500KW, the economics start to work, and farms of megawatt and up machines are quite profitable. Here's General Electric's 2.5 megawatt wind turbine, which is typical of current large wind turbines. Total worldwide wind generation capacity is about 75 gigawatts. Wind power is now a serious energy source because, at last, the units are big enough to generate serious power.
Traffic never moves fast enough. A mosquito will generate more wind. If anything, find a way to conduct all that waste heat away from the car into the some hot water system or a way to melt the ice in winter.
What?
Dear ghod people, this isn't to do with New Jersey. It's a modification to the Jersey Barrier which just so happens to be named after the place of origin. Absolutely nothing to do with the New Jersey Turnpike in particular at all.
This is a serious question: since virtually all energy comes from the sun, and we have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity as well as extensive technology for storing electricity, why are we wasting time on road-side turbines and hydrogen fuel? Obviously, you make adjustments for average cloud cover, available real estate, etc. But it seems silly to me to research hydrogen or whatever scheme Shell and BP (who are completely unbiased research firms) propose rather than leverage existing technology until they provide a real solution.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels? This would not only add juice to the grid but help reduce the local heating problem with asphalt, reduce temperatures inside cars (thus reducing energy used to cool them), and provide a convenient place to plug them in.
Would it cause to much pollution to make that many panels? Are electric cars truly that much more expensive? Or are lobbyists once again trying to ruin our chances of survival so we are nearly forced to keep spending money at their gas/hydrogen/soybean oil stations?
If they charged a real toll instead and then bought electricity made from the same fossil fuels the cars would be wasting, it would probably be more efficient.
But the cars are the wind generators, not the turbines. If a turbine generated any significant wind itself, then it wouldn't be a very effective generator, would it?
The stream of cars generates an air motion along their path. Like geese (though through a different mechanism) the leading cars reduce the amount of air drag experienced by following cars. This improves their fuel economy. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced with semi-trucks. "Drafting": following another truck closely to save even more fuel, is a common practice.
A smooth central barrier separating the two directions of traffic improves the situation by letting the two sides of the freeway have separate airstreams traveling in opposite directions. The barrier reduces energy lost to turbulence, improving the airflow.
Replacing the barrier with turbines will suck energy out of the air streams on both sides to generate electricity. The result will be to decelerate the airstreams that had been giving following vehicles an advantage.
While some of the power comes from captured crosswinds and some from capturing energy that would have been lost to turbulence anyhow, a large portion of it comes from increasing the drag on following vehicles by putting friction on the "following wind": Fuel economy for the trailing vehicles in a bunch is reduced to something near that of lone or leading vehicles.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IAAASNAP
(I am an art student not a physicist)
But, as I recall, Internal Combustion is a notoriously inefficient method compared to other forms of energy generation. Generally, we would want to offload any energy production from low efficiency models to high efficiency models. Assuming the ICE is a very low efficiency method, we would want to harvest the least amount of energy through it as possible. A better solution, rather than putting more strain on the ICEs in the cars of today, would be to make cars vastly more efficient in the drive train and any other place where energy is transfered and used, while harvesting electricity for other purposes from greatly more efficient sources.
So my guess is even if you could do it, you wouldn't want to.
By the way:
There's PLENTY of power to be had WITHOUT disrupting the traffic airflow and canabalizing the fuel of the cars.
A freeway or toll road is a clear area and there will be plenty of winds ABOVE it that are essentially unrelated to the airflow near the ground. They're also faster - with energy going up with the CUBE of the airspeed.
By building a wind turbine that starts significantly above the ground the turbines can avoid disturbing the flow at traffic level while collecting plenty of energy.
Also: A Darrieus wants linear airflow THROUGH it. It would be great for salvaging power from crosswind, but rotten for snagging power from opposing winds on the two sides of its axes.
And they're a major hazard: Darrieus turbines fly at tip speeds of about 7 times the wind speed and their narrow blades experience drag loads about equivalent to a wind barrier with a cross-section the size of the swept area - reversing twice per rotation. This has tended to produce fatigue in their materials, sometimes ending with the mill coming apart in high winds some years after construction, with massive pieces flying around at a goodly fraction of the speed of sound.
A savonius-derived design (like the Sandia configuration) would be a better choice. Though it only collects about 2/3s as much power for a given swept area, it rotates at about an eighth the speed and has broad blades that can be much more solidly constructed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Solar panels get hot too. Besides, where do you think all the energy they collect in a addition to being hot is going to go?
All energy breaks down (breaks down? maybe degenerates...) into heat.
Reminds me of a scifi book I read about how we got really efficient solar cells and then were screwed when all the energy broke down and entered the environment. They solved it by setting up fast swathes of mirrors to reflect the sun's rays rather than collect them.
It would also reduce the amount of parking lots, how convienent. As a property owner, you're incentive to have a parking lot would go down. Either they force you invest in your own solar energy company, or you get you property rights encumbered in red tape. I think I'd find another use for my property.
Duh. The plugin hybrid has been around for a number of years now.
Take a regular hybrid vehicle. Plug the batteries into the wall.
Amazing, you can now charge the batteries at home, and when you go for a drive you can opt not to turn on the petrol engine.
If you need to go a long way, you turn on the petrol engine.
Cheaper than petrol and less polluting to our cities, and you still have all the range of a petrol vehicle.
So how much do these hybrids cost? About the same as a regular vehicle.
Great, where do I buy a plugin hybrid? Oh, you can't. The car manufacturers will sell you a hybrid but you have to go get it modded yourself to charge it at home. Why? Gee, I don't know.. maybe because they sell a whole bunch of vehicles that are not hybrids and they don't want to kill their entire product line by selling something that obsoletes it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My main man, Darius Turbines? Shit, that dude was one crazy motherfucker! This one time, he was all up on the Jersey Turnpike and shit! And I was all, and he was all, and we were all!
"andwecanrunitalloffaninevoltbattery" ...dude
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
This week I noticed a set of four more conventional wind turbines had appeared on a new building on the A406 North Circular Road opposite Ikea. If the intention is to use the breeze generated by cars to power them then they are doomed as the traffic generally crawls past there. Given all the stuff I've read about the viability of wind turbines in built-up areas I wonder how much good they will do anyway, but it's still a very visible bit of greenwashing.
My first thought on seeing a picture of the NJ turbines was that they would have to be increasing the fuel consumption of passing cars, if only marginally. Perhaps they could be placed where people should be slowing down, e.g. off ramps and junctions, to actually slow the cars a little. I had a thought ages ago that junctions should be on raised ground so that cars are naturally slowed as they approach uphill and gain easier acceleration as they leave downhill.
As has been pointed out already this is a stupid idea. It would make much more sense to put the turbine on the train so it's forward motion can generate electricity. That way the train is self powering. Much greener.
Just a basic question: Will this system ever save the world any energy?
Energy_to_install = installation_transport_energy + manufacturing_energy
My suspicion is that far more fossil fuel will be burned building and installing this system than it will ever generate for running a light railway.
This same systems analysis makes a hummer look competitive with a prius in terms of total energy consumption during its lifetime.
What really would have been innovative is a way to make the average American car more efficient
-bms20
I've often wondered whether it would be worth putting wind turbines on the underside of bridges which pass over waterways. I would imagine that there should be a quite constant flow of air under them. I guess you might have some trouble with aerodynamics of the bridge.
Due do you think this is a good idea in a situation where we already are often on the edge of power outtakes. I do not think so, the only way I see is to prevent this is to only allow special connectors and special voltage degrees to get the average people away from the power grid, those connectors can be plugged into solar panels or alternative "fuel" stations. In the end I do not think hypbrids have any viable long term future.
It's a "Darrieus" turbine, and has nothing to do with the ancient Persian king.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
WTF is a power outtake? What are you talking about?
Are you honestly trying to suggest that the western world doesn't have a sufficient power grid to support electric cars?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Lay off the crack.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's not and either-or kind of thing. While Shell and BP researches whatever they want to do, other researchers working for other (private or governmental) institutions are free to research whatever they want.
In one word: no!
Exactly why you think this makes sense at all, is beyond me, but here are some counterarguments:
Yes, producing solar panels produces a fair amount of pollution. There are other less polluting ways of harvesting solar energy on a larger scale, such as mirrors reflecting sunlight from a large area into a single very hot spot, which is used to run the equivalent of a steam-engine (in simplified terms). Or indirectly, such as damming up rivers and using turbines (the water was transported up above the dam by the sun)
At the market today, they are. I looked at buying a used electric car myself, and found that after replacing the batteries (which would be needed soon anyway), I could probably just as well have bought a new normal car. And I would still live with the inconveniences of an electric car (small, slow, can't drive for long, takes long time to charge, needs place to charge, still needs fossil fuels for heater in winter). Electric cars are best used for profiling companies as "environmentally aware", their practical use is still limited, and certainly not competitive.
Both the oil companies and environmental organizations keep lobbyists.
of people falling after being on a trip through John Malkovich's head
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 !
Yes, this would cause drag, however if these turbines were placed in areas where cars needed to brake (i.e. on a downfacing slope, or a tight turn), this could be a win-win situation.
I've had another idea like this for a while... what if you had a cable that went along bike paths and outfitted bicycles with strong magnets? The bicyclist would have to push a little harder, but it could help power the city. Then there's the propeller hats...
Lewis Black recently suggested a novel approach on The Daily Show - power cars on cognitive dissonance. Celebrities weren't using those brain cells anyway, so any extra drag you put on 'em won't slow their hypocrisy down one bit. A win-win solution for everyone, actually...
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Face it, hybrid cars are expensive and impractical. They take too long to charge up, and they don't last long enough. For people without garages/driveways, there is no way to charge them up either.
Batteries are big, run out quickly and take hours to charge up. Solar panels are inefficient and expensive. Electricity storage technology isn't very mature.
Maintenance.
these are reinforced concrete (in the north) or even filled with water (in the south). they are supposed to be massive and resist a car crossing between direction lanes. these won't.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Cunning plan that: if this generates enough power to drive a light rail, then the light rail becomes a viable alternative for travel and there are fewer cars to drive the turbines. I presume it achieves an equilibrium at some point. Otherwise you'd be in the daft position of encouraging car transport in order to drive the electric train...
Surely a slightly more practical approach to green energy would be to bar the New Jersey Turnpike to cars that do less than the average mpg? (Note this cunningly moves the figure upwards as people are persuaded into sensible cars.)
I'm posting anonymously, for obvious reasons. Check out those turbines a little more closely someday, notice anything . . . strange.
I think he's talking about power outages - and as for the "Western world" about some brownouts that have occurred in the past few years.
Oh, and for what it's worth, this wouldn't be installed, anyway. Given the state's current budget woes, I doubt the perpetually corrupt/in-power Democrats have the chutzpah to pass it.
Except, for , y'know, DRIVING THEM AROUND.
Idiot.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels?
:)
Probably not - as other posters have pointed out. But since that tarmac gets extremely hot, you might as well run a load of pipes underneath it and make some nice scalding hot water.
You'd at least get enough for the parking attendant's cup of tea
Give each lane a short ramp (if you know what a wah pedal is, you'll see what I'm talking about,) that has a shaft with teeth and springs. Attach a generator to that shaft (or a huge ass alternator.) Have this ramp on sturdy springs that can lift the ramp back up after a car drives over it. Gear the shaft/generator so that as the ramp goes down, it puts torque on the generator and makes it spin, and as the car leaves the ramp, it springs back up without affecting the generator's spin, minus the sudden lack of torque, like most multi-speed bicycles do.
I'd like to think with wind turbines and ICE's rolling over these generator ramps (and that turnpike is busy!) there could be some potential. The only thing is maintaining the traffic flow of the turnpike to make my idea work to it's maximum potential. Get rid of the tollbooths, use that saved money for fixing the roads, and your population helps generate electricity to power street lights or something in lieu of being charged money. Everyone seems to win, except the toolbooth operators, who would likely be either out of a job, or working in a subway station.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
New Jersey actually lost money on EZPass, the rfid-based toll collection system... Even New York makes money on that.
So I imagine that any NJ-based generation system will either use more energy than it produces.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Or three-screen arcade shooters for that matter.
Say, if they build a few Darrieus turbines and promote them with Darius arcade machines powered by them, will kids appreciate the power of wind? Will they simply be nonchalant about it? Will our heads explode from all the homophones? In the words of Lex Luger, I dunno!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
So ok - my taxes and tolls go up so I can spend more money on fuel to drive windmills in new, hyperexpensive road barriers (that will be less effective anyway) to generate just barely enough energy to power another tax-funded boondoggle of a light rail that we'll have to shell out two bits to ride anyway?
And this is to what - save the planet or something?
What they should do is simply make all alternative energy expenses 100% tax-deductible. This, alas, will never happen - because A) it would work B) it doesn't give the government pigs a cut.
I had an idea very close to this when I was 12 years old! Nice to see someone somewhere is actually implementing it.
as anyone whose spent any amount of time on any jersey road can tell you, a bunch of cars sitting at a dead stop don't generate much wind.
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
I don't know if you've spent much time observing semi-trucks... they don't stop 'real-damn-quick'. Besides they tend to employ this practice on the long, straight, sparse portions of the road... think Kansas... or Wyoming... not Chicago.
The air blows because cars push the air out and forward as they go. Block the air as in a tunnel, and cars have to burn slightly more gas to push the slightly resistant air.
So instead of something so elaborate, just charge a toll of 5 cents or something for the cars. Same effect, much less complex.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
1) Cheap rail system is powered by cars on turnpike -- part of what makes rail system cheap is there are little to no power costs.
2) More people start taking rail line and fewer people drive on turnpike.
3) Prices of rail line go up because they can no longer use the 'free' power from the turnpike wind turbines.
4) More people drive on turnpike.
5) Repeat.
The question becomes, will this reach an equilibrium or oscillate out of control? This is kind of like using lottery profits to fund education.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
"Tonight at 11. Commuters leave roadways to ride new rail. Not enough power to run the rail."
If they banned television remotes and wired everyones couch to the grid, then every time someone got up to change the channel they would generate power.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Driven in boston? Are you really trying to tell me you like 95 through the middle of boston? The big dig maybe a lot of things but in the end it does solve some of the major issues.
....
Minus the giant concrete slabs that seem to fall every now and again
Since the purpose of the barriers is to improve safety and inexpensively, it seems that replacing the barriers with something flimsy enough for good wind transparency will greatly compromise either safety or cost.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads.
Its free to enter NJ, but you have to pay to get out.
But on a more serious note, Jersey has the cheapest gas rates compared to PA and NY. (Sometimes up to $0.25 difference per gallon if you find the right spot) They subsidize this by interstate tolls on people traveling between NY, DE, and PA so that residents don't have to foot the bill while out of state people who use their roads do.
But doesn't make up for the fact that most of NJ isn't that great of a place to live so I'm not moving across the border any time soon.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Maybe the super-capacitors will somehow work out; if not, put your hope in fuel cells: when they finally get the storage worked out, whatever that turns out to be, you will be able to refuel in a jiffy.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I bet they are really looking forward to the when the green power light rail system becomes so popular that everyone uses it instead and they can just move the wind turbines to barriers around the rail line instead.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Have you seen that particular "systems analysis"? I have. It's so blatantly flawed that the flaws are almost certainly intentional.
Hybrid cars aren't that expensive, and they're as practical as any other compact car.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads. If the power gathered is then invested into a public transport system, then you'll end up having drivers subsidise public transport. The fuel savings with public transport may well offset the extra fuel burnt through the turbine induced drag.
Socialism: Punishing that which makes sense [and which people desire] in order to subsidize that which is nonsense [and which people loathe].
BTW, just in case you weren't aware, the NJ Turnpike is already a toll road, so you're talking about a "virtual" toll on top of an actual toll.
[Not that you'd care...]
Anyone who drives on the turnpike knows it's a virtual standstill 90% of the day, those turbines won't be spinning.
Now, back to being serious....
I drive the Garden State Parkway daily. It has taken workers at least 3 weeks to replace a 16' section of concrete barrier between the northbound and southbound lanes. So how long will this project take to implement exactly? Not to mention, what's the up front cost of such a thing? And at what point does the cost savings of the light rail energy actually outweigh the cost of this implementation. I'm guessing it's probably around 30 years. So why bother? I'm sure there will be plenty of other *better* solutions for free energy within the next 30 years. Oh wait, there already are. Like putting windmills off the shore of NJ and NY... except all the rich liberals keep complaining about how their views are being ruined.
Sigh... another waste of *my* taxpayer dollars.
There was that one problem, where mob bosses were thinking "hey what can we do to make more money" . . . that problem was solved pretty well I think.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm mystified. How is it that someone can conceive such an elaborate plan only to power 19th century technology?
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
That's a great idea and all, but how do they hold up to the Governor's SUV plowing into them at 91 MPH?
Oh wait... that was the Parkway.
The northwest part of the state -- near High Point/Port Jervis, NY is really pretty IMHO. It's not all ugly development, provided you stay away from the major highways.
Also, Hoboken is nice in its way -- most of the conveniences of NYC without the high city taxes (though I still prefer Brooklyn since you can bike across to Manhattan rather than taking the PATH).
-b.
They don't necessarily stop 'real-damn-quick' but if they aren't fully loaded, they can stop 'quite-a-bit-faster-than-you.' The distinction to a car attempting to draft is purely academic.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Look!! I caught a greenie..!!
Semi-trucks have air brakes. You don't.
That sucks.
During rush hour, the average car speed is what, 5 or 10 mph? Might be able to power a few hundred LEDs.
I'm glad I moved to PA.
mod me funny
What happens when the Mexican immigrant crosses the road? Getting sucked into a hiway turbine is only slightly less romantic than getting sucked into an airplane jet engine. Anyone considered the safety of these things to (granted, illegal) pedestrians?
Near the Mexican border they have yellow road warning signs depicting a migrant family (father, mother, child) holding hands and running across the road. While the signs are humorous they were also an excellent warning for drivers unfamiliar to those parts.
Perhaps for New Jersey a yellow road warning sign depicting a giant meat grinder with two legs dangling out of the top?
I had seen this plan in popular mechanics years ago. Either most traffic planners are slow to implement it(very possible), or its not practical.
i wonder how little resistance these turbines will have? surely, something that is incredibly light would have no measurable impact on the wind?
I'm guessing those people never saw the Turnpike during rush hour or high volume. If anything, we'd need those turbines to act as fans instead to help push traffic along =P
I love how everyone views NJ as Newark and Jersey City, boned on their experiences trying to get in/out/across via the Tunpike. Nobody seems to realize close to half of NJ is still forrested. NJ is kind of funny that it ranges for inner city, to suburbs, to abosulute hicks-ville. Of course most people I know out of state think it's all pavement jungle until they come to visit.
And TFA isn't about building anything up above the roadway, it's about using the air movement created by the cars themselves.
Which is the point of my followup.
There's much more to be had by going just a few feet higher, capturing ambient wind rather than stealing energy from the already-inefficient automobile power plants. Given the costs of constructing the bases, building a little higher give far more bang per buck.
So the scheme as contemplated is hair-brained, but a slight variant might be terrific. Enough to power the cars and trucks on the road with surplus to sell to the grid for stationary structures.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By replacing sections of solid concrete with Darius turbines, they might be able to harvest enough energy to power a light-rail line
Thereby reducing traffic, thereby reducing power, thereby bringing the light rail line to a stop...
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
"Drafting": following another truck closely to save even more fuel, is a common practice.
I've always heard it referred to as "slipstreaming." But be careful about using it, I've done it in my car behind a semi, and they can feel the drag and may very well get pissed off about it, as it reduces their gas mileage.
At this present time, the answers to your questions are: yes. yes. maybe, but not necessarily.
I believe that this will not always be so, but for now it is. We can get a far better net environmental benefit by not driving as much, eliminating the older cars that account for disproportionate amounts of air pollution, and exploring organic fuels. For the foreseeable future, combustion just is so much more efficient (in the macro scheme of things) than any other form of energy production. Electricity is a great medium to use to transmit this energy. But currently solar panels have a high environmental cost, most of which is not in the end product or the disposal. Disposal we can deal with. Solar panels, batteries, etc. But it's the cost of manufacturing that's the issue. Fossil fuels drive the inputs (think mines, etc). I hope this changes. I think we've figured out how to best transmit electricity once it is generated, although batteries still leave a lot to be desired.
As for organic fuels, we always have to look at the wholistic cost. Corn ethanol, for example, is still carbon-positive, by the time you account for the planting, tillage, fertilizer, irrigation, etc. Maybe algae will work out better.
In the meantime, we need to better manage what we already have. Develop and attitude of conservation that dislikes waste. We can avoid driving our cars as much as possible. We can take public transportation. We can Recycle, etc. We can reduce our waste and encourage policies that do so. I wonder how much environmental damage is caused by our current packaging industry because we can't easily recycle. I'm not talking about Mcdonalds serving on styrofoam, but rather the stupid packaging that encases everything we buy in non-cut-able, unbreakable, anti-theft plastic.
Anyway, we can take little steps that, if done by millions, just might make a difference. In the meantime I think we should examine every idea that comes along, even it sounds a little strange, like this turbine idea.
I grew up in south Jersey, and you still have the same oppressive, corrupt government there. At least the schools used to be okay, although recent reports say that is no longer the case.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
They can just hook up the turbines to the end of the tunnel at the NJ Turnpike and exploit the powerful draft that flows through it. Off course, the side effect is cleaning up the chopped up parts of those ending up through the turbines.
Riiight...
It's an absurd lack of faith in structural engineering to claim that NOTHING could be as impact resistant as a solid piece of concrete or tub of water.
Where's the expectation that rigid bodies can be designed to be both strong and not fill all internal space?
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
If the air flow is fast and smooth, adding a wind generator will certainly slow it down and increase drag on the vehicles. If as some have suggested, there is an area where the wind is already getting blocked by shrubs or some such, we should not put an equally disruptive turbine there, but instead replace the shrub with something to smooth the airflow thus improving the efficiency of the cars. The ICE is a terrible way to generate electricity - if you can do it without reducing the mileage, you should instead improve the roads to increase the mileage.
You'd need more exact calculations to find out the exact effect on the vehicles. Since the air is a fluid, additional drag placed on air molecules at any distance from the car will not be transmitted 100% back to the car. In fact, the transmission is actually minimal unless the turbine actually compresses the air mass against the vehicle. Think for example of the breeze behind a truck. If you are far enough away, the main blast hits you well after the truck has gone by, so the turbine could actually decrease drag by forcing air back into low pressure zone behind the truck. Also, the original jersey barrier dissipated much of the baseline wind energy as friction of the air against its surface. This energy could be harnessed without increasing drag on the car.
There will likely be little or no effect on the fuel consumption overall. If you think of the problem in 3 dimensions, you can see that the proportion of wind directed to the area of the jersey barrier is relatively small, compared with the wind directed above the barrier and to other sides of the vehicle. The most likely effect will be on trailing vehicles in a line. The turbine could reduce the benefit of "drafting" behind a tractor-trailer by causing the air to fill in more rapidly behind the leader.
We are the 198 proof..
I wonder how delicate these things are? In Germany, if you damage a piece of guardrail (Armco), you are required to pay to replace it--and if you don't report it, the penalties are stiff. Seems fair enough, but I'm not sure law enforcement in the US has the manpower or the backbone to enforce such a system.
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I say harvest the kinetic energy of all the people falling out of John Malkovich's head.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
NIMBY: not in my back yard.
everyone screams when people talk about wind farms.
But there are literally tens of thousands of miles of highways, most of the length of which have wide margins of land sequestered around them. These buffer strips in my local area are some 40 yards on either side of the highway in suburban areas, and much wider as you move to rural.
use these strips of land to put up large wind turbines. after all there is already a noisy interstate there, and it's not in anyone's backyard.
I'm interested in an engineer's rough calculations on what circa 50,000 miles of highway median would allow in wind power production.
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Only problem here is with highway expansion. In my neck of the woods the highway is 2 lanes, hit the city and it grows, 3 to 4 to 5 lanes. The grass buffer gets eaten up with each additional lane. So what happens 20, 50 years down the road when traffic is jammed into oblivion (worse than it is at times already) and the turbines are sucking up the only expansion space? They get axed.
No words of wisedom here.
"Replacing the barrier with turbines will suck energy out of the air streams on both sides to generate electricity."
Morbo:"Windmills do not work that way!"
and either to turbines.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think the cost of turbine repair or replacement after the inevitable accidents would be enough to make this proposal uneconomical.
Okay, but if I hit something with my car, my insurance company is liable to pay for the damages. Even if it's public property. Now, if we add expensive turbines along the length of the roadway, the insurance companies will be on the hook for repair costs, which will inevitably be passed on to motorists.
Never mind the physics - which will cause anyone with more than two IQ points to rub together to immediately dismiss such a folly - this simply becomes another hidden tax on driving.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This is a serious question: since virtually all energy comes from the sun, and we have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity as well as extensive technology for storing electricity,
We don't have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity. The grid is already stressed quite badly - witness the California electricity crisis a few years ago. Power lines are running at nearly peak capacity, as are distribution transformers, etc. Add more? Not going to be easy, since there's that whole "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome affecting everything from transmission lines to substations to generating plants.
Storing electricity? No. Not alternating current. AC cannot be stored. DC would be great in some ways, but because of voltage drop caused by the resistance of power lines, electricity really needs to be transmitted at high voltages... turning that high voltage into something useful to the consumer requires a transformer, which only operates on AC. This is all high school science stuff.
Until the superconductor becomes a practical reality, DC power distribution is a pipe dream, except for very specialized applications. (ie. Vancouver Island gets its power as DC, because an inverter turning DC to AC wastes less power than the capacitive reactance of an underwater cable carrying AC.)
why are we wasting time on road-side turbines and hydrogen fuel?
Hydrogen is silly. It's not a fuel, it's an energy storage device like a battery. If you get 1kW of energy from burning hydrogen, it's because you expended 1kW (plus inefficiencies) somehow separating those little hydrogen atoms from the molecules which they were a part of. Now, where did you get that 1kW of energy? Not from hydrogen.
Never mind what a car accident involving a hydrogen-powered car is going to look like, but that's another story.
it seems silly to me to research hydrogen or whatever scheme Shell and BP (who are completely unbiased research firms) propose rather than leverage existing technology until they provide a real solution.
Shell and BP and whatever are not in the oil business. They're in the profit business. And no matter what new energy sources are devised, they will be involved. They're looking at alternative fuels that they can profitably provide. No one is interested in selling a fuel which isn't profitable; if cars which ran on compressed air were practical, they'd put in compressors. If cars which run on batteries were practical, they'd put in charging stations. Both exist, of course, but neither technology is sufficiently practical to encourage mass adoption.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels? This would not only add juice to the grid but help reduce the local heating problem with asphalt, reduce temperatures inside cars (thus reducing energy used to cool them), and provide a convenient place to plug them in.
A car parked atop such a parking lot would still get warm, as this magical electricity-generating asphalt you've discovered probably isn't capable of enveloping the car and dissuading the sun's rays from penetrating the glass... is it?
IFF* such a technology as photovoltaic asphalt were invented, was economical feasible, and wasn't fraught with liabilities like toxic chemicals, you'd be onto something. Power back onto the grid? Sure, through an inverter. Convenient electrical recharging points? Absolutely.
Oh, wait... Your idea was to build a structure over the parking lot and adorn said structure with solar cells. Okay. Economic feasibility of said structure? Non-infinite lifespan of solar cells? Cloudy days? All that taken into account? I'm sure if it made sense to use the real estate that way, Wal*Mart would already be doing it to reduce the electric bills their stores pay - and as a PR move.
Would it cause to much pollution to make that many panels? Are electric cars truly that much more expensive? Or are lobbyists once
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Wouldn't the cost of installing and maintaining all of those turbines far exceed the cost savings of the electricity generated?
... we all watched the piece of what was essentially beer cooler foam blow the daylights out of something structurally engineered to survive launch and reentry.
F=ma. The barriers have no "a", the 40-ton semis do, so they need "m" or else they're "F"d.
You want your "m" by tying to the earth's, give it a go. I never said "nothing". Look at their rendering. As designed, it wouldn't take a hit from a Yugo.
It's likely that concrete is simply cheaper than than engineered metal structures and that's the status quo. You can certainly do the math on the engineering needed to make let the all that wind thru to the windmills *AND* able to stop 40 tons at 70 mph, but since we've never built a car that can withstand a hit from another car at that speed, make sure you do the dollar-math, too.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."