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English Market Produces Energy With Kinetic Plates
Johnathan Martinez writes "Sainsbury's market in England has installed 'kinetic energy' plates in the parking lot of its store in Gloucester. The plates are an experiment with a newer energy producing technology. The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them. The weight of the cars puts pressure on the plates creating kinetic energy to run a generator. The current is used to power the store and will lower the energy consumption of the market."
This is just an gas powered electric generator, the likes of which rube goldberg would be proud of. You'd be better off siphoning a thimble of fuel from each car, selling it, and using the proceeds to buy electricity from the utility.
So when you drive in, it drains your battery to power their market. How the fuck is this 'green'?
...I could put these in my driveway, use it to charge the car and never have to buy energy again!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
is that energy extracted from the cars? then is not magically created, but just a inefficient way to suck energy from other people use of oil.
-Woof woof woof!
And the work for pressing the plates down is done by what? Maybe, that could be, uhmm... the cars driving over them, yes? So basically they are using their customers fuel to power their store and call that "green". Way to go, guys.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's theft!
By using these devices, they are stealing energy from the drivers. While one driver may not notice, as a whole, fuel usage is being diverted from all who drive over these things.
Life is not for the lazy.
"The kinetic plates are only one of many green energy projects that Sainsburyâ(TM)s hopes to incorporate in its stores". Yeah, because generating electricity from combustion engines operating in a very inefficient regime is fantastically green...
If this had been the average journalist I'd have given credit for ignorance, but this guys bio says that he's an "energy technology examiner", a "student in robotics" "working on a new process for harnessing wind energy" who hopes to make "a huge impact one day in the field of science."
I think he has a little way to go...
Greenwash
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
of the anecdote about Franklin and his entrance door. When a friend complained about how difficult was to push that door, Franklin explained that the door was connected to a ground pump and every time someone opened the door, 2 gallons of water were extracted as well...
Even it wasn't stealing energy from the cars, we are in 'drop in the ocean' territory. Nice analysis here.
England market produces green energy ... Sainsburyâ(TM)s market of England has installed âkinetic energyâ(TM) plates in the parking lot of itâ(TM)s store in Gloucester.
What atrocious writing. Sainsbury's is a supermarket.
Man, did someone beat ya'll with the stupid stick today???
Allow me to ask you the same question. If there was any free energy to be made out of 'gravity' best believe it would be harnessed one way or another. Which is not. In this occurence the energy is wasted because the plates go down. The extra energy spent by the car is in going back up/going up in the first place.
You just got troll'd!
As many other commented, the energy comes off course from the petrol engine of the cars. 1. The efficiency of this system from petrol to electricity must be really low 2. It creates pollution right where you don't want it, in the city: Exhaust fumes plus tire wear
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If the plate's placed at a point in the road where you'd have to brake anyway, the energy's essentially free. It goes from being dissipated in the brakes to collected by the plate.
(Anyone with regenerative brakes can still complain.)
It's not leeching. The cars are slowed down at the point at which the cars should be slowing down anyway - they're coming into the car park. The 'kinetic energy' device helps where the vehicle's brakes would normally be doing all the work. Bin the TFA, see this insightful article from yesterday's Guardian.
Wait, so the plate drops down and it makes some power, how does your car get out of the now slight pot-hole? Why it has to drive forward, which (considering you are driveing up a very brief and very small hill) uses a tiny amount more fuel.
There is never, and WILL never be a free ride, all power comes from somewhere.
...
TFA calls it a "green energy project". The type of people who think this is green energy are the complete f-ing morons that side track the rest of us from real viable energy advancements.
Further more, the TFA claims this will "lower the energy consumption of the market". At the inefficiency of this (which is already limited to being no more efficient than a car is itself), it will actually increase the energy consumption of the market.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Since people usually slow down anyway when they enter a parking lot, it makes more sense to convert the kinetic energy into something useful than have everybody just brake and convert it into heat.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Hey if you pave a stretch of road with that, make the energy harvested available from a rail along the road and connect the engines of electric cars to that rail, do you get cars that can travel forever without spending any energy? OMG GREEN HOLY GRAIL!!
Also, pre-emptive 'whoosh' sound for anyone who wouldn't get it.
You just got troll'd!
The car is climbing over the plate before it drops (or out of a slight dip after it does). This requires a little extra gas and therefore it's coming out of the customer's pocket.
I mean if this is "free" energy, why not pave the streets with them?
rationalized leeching is still leeching. Perhaps you own a hybrid with regenerative brakes?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Kudos for finding that link. TFA reads like a worthless press release.
Basically to generate 30KWH of power requires about 41HP. In this case, the power would come from the car pressing down on the plate, but the car must then use additional power to climb off of the plate. Cars are far less efficient at generating power than a dedicated power plant (ICE is at best around 24% efficient not counting losses due to the drive train, a power plant is typically over 40% efficient).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
For those who are rightly saying this energy isn't free...
If the plates are positioned at the bottom of a downhill exit ramp, they will aid drivers braking, prividing kinetic energy without "stealing" drivers fuel. Somehow, I doubt this is where they will be positioned though
(Incidentally... a similar idea was to build tram / light-rail stations on the top of small hills. Thus gravity assists the train in braking and accelerating away from teh station)
Oh and Sainsburys is a British Supermarket, not an English Market..... Big difference !
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I suppose as long as they install it only in the parking spaces where the cars are coming to a stop anyway, then it wouldn't really be stealing from the drivers/cars. It'd also help them save on their brakes as well.
Then again, this is Slashdot, so someone's going to point out that people may not park right the first time, or that they may be driving across parking spaces to get to the other side instead of on the designated driving lanes, etc...I guess I'll shut up now.
Don't want to bitch or moan. But isn't that just stealing energy from cars?
There's no such thing as free energy. It probably will cost cars extra to drive over the plates. That is, the 30 kWh come from fossil fuel. Way to go!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Bin the TFA
Is the bin next to the ATM machine?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
This reminds me a story where the guy stole fractions of cents from each Bank Account. Nobody noticed !
Who is going to stop going to that market because of this highly imperceptible extra charge ? In this perspective it is ingenious. But can you imagine cities going this route in low speed limit zones ? Where will it stop ?
Energy saving wise, it is no good, gas motor would use that energy more efficiently, there is always a lost when you transfer one form of energy to another.
As for the guy who stole fractions of cents from the bank he was working at, he got caught by making to many expensive purchases, buying expensive cars to his family members, etc. so they finally investigated him because he was working at a bank. If I recall right, this story was borrowed by one of the Superman movies, but it occurred for real before that. It was then double fun to see it in Superman.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Totally wrong.
The obtains energy from dropping heavy vehicles a very small distance, driving a plate as falling water drives a water wheel. Water is recycled to above the wheel by evaporation (solar power, of a sort), while the vehicles use engine power to climb back to their previous level.
This system steals a small amount of motor fuel from each passing vehicle.
30 kWh is something, but how long does it take to collect that? 30 kWh for each car hardly succeeds!
It could be calculated for each year, maybe..
Anyway kWh is a measure of amount of energy, not power. If the plates power would be 30 kW, it would take one hour to collect 30 kWh. But 30 kW is way more than the car normally uses.
But seriously, to what extent is this a gain, given that the energy "produced" must all originate in the petrol tanks of the cars visiting the supermarket. I suppose that it is a double gain for the supermarket in that they get some free electricity and also get to sell a bit more of the petrol that makes it. Or can it be shown that the power generated would otherwise have all been lost in braking for the speed-bumps in the car park?
Probably 2/3 of the comments so far seem to think this is some kind of perpetual motion machine con. Those people should be embarrassed.
It's not. It's simple. It's just slowing cars by converting kinetic energy into electrical, instead of dissipating it as heat in the brakes or converting it to potential energy like a speed bump.
There was a discussion a while back, I think here on Slashdot, about a device that used a revolving door to generate energy. It prompted exactly the same comments. What these people didn't seem to realize is, revolving doors have brakes, and that device replaces the brakes. Same damn thing.
Do you really think the engineers who designed this device didn't think it through? This reminds me why it's never a good idea to discuss physics on Slashdot. I leave it to psychologists to explain why there are so many kneejerk contrarians.
Wouldn't it be more useful to integrate such plates (smaller versions of course) in the stairs of your nearest subway station? Or any other public building? In cities like London, Berlin, Tokio, Paris, New York etc., etc. literally millions of people are using the subway. If you shut down the escalators you could even improve customer health) and generate even more energy! (just kidding :-)) Seriously though: At the core of the "smart", bidirectional and decnetralized energy grid of the future lies the idea, that every little watt counts and should be consumed where it is produced (and vice versa) and you produce energy form renewable sources in any way possible. TFA says it is a test and as such it should be welcomed as good and creative thinking to be judged based on results (which are not yet available, I presume).
Are you alluding to RAS syndrome, perchance?
or perhaps you can use the slope you climbed to pick back some free speed when going away from the store after your visit?
Yep, very small perhaps, but leech anyway. I don't know how you feel, but do not like leech, especially when it is a corporation/company leeching from individuals.
Using green arguments does not make it more acceptable to my eyes, on the contrary, I become slowly but surely allergic to green arguments
Are you alluding to RAS syndrome, perchance?
It's called PNS Syndrome in my neck of the woods, but yes.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Traffic signals use active induction loops to detect ferrous objects above them. If you move a magnet through a magnetic field so that it crosses field lines energy can be recovered from the motion. Thats how generators work of course. But then you may as well use trains with linear motors instead of cars.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Newsflash! Supermarket requires customers to pay for electricity that the supermarket uses!
Next you'll be telling me that shop assistant's wages are paid by a small portion of the money that we hand over at the till.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
You can put it in much simpler than that:
:-)
1. Steal energy from your customers
2. Pretend it is green, it is a very small amount of energy, and it would have been wasted anyway.
3. Profit.
If this fly, does it means that i can steal anything that is not used by its owner, provided it is small and that I am caring about "saving the planet"? Nice
And if that negligible amount "leeched" from your vehicle, so small that you'd never notice, meant that the Super Market didn't have the expense of paying for power, could mean you as the consumer may pay less for your groceries.
Can't believe the arguments against this today, shows a total lack of understanding in regards to physics.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/15/sainsburys-kinetic-plates-speed-bumps
This makes it clear the plates are supposed to generate 30kWh per hour, rather than per car (but I can't help thinking, whats wrong with simply saying 30kW?) This version of the article also points out that the energy is not free and does in fact come from the cars.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Hey babe, come back to my place and let's generate some electricity."
Once EVs with regenerative braking become common, it will be leeching.
I once measured my cars efficiency (an old Renault 5).
I drove 100 kph (28m/s) on a flat freeway, with no wind, and set the gears in neutral. It took the car about 30 seconds to slow down to 90kph (25m/s). The car weighs about 900kg.
So we have E0=0.5*m*v*v = 353kJ and E1=281kJ. The car lost 717kJ in 30 seconds or 2.4kW
So it takes just 2.4kW to keep a small car cruising at 100kph on a freeway. The stated gas consumption of that car is about 1 liter/18 km at 90 kph so 1.3 ml/second of gasoline. Gasoline has ca 32MJ/l energy content, so 1.3ml/s is equivalent to 44kW.
The system efficiency of a car cruising on a flat freeway is about 5%!
Do the experiment yourself and see what numbers you come up with. It's also a really good highschool experiment.
Forget cars. We should line playgrounds with these plates and force kids to "have recess."
They might be coasting to the other side of the carpark or leaving it altogether , in which case if this slows them down too much they'll hit the throttle before they brake again.
This wasn't designed by engineers to be green , it was designed as greenwash with the supermarket saving a few quid off their electricity bills in the process.
> The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them
That should read 'The plates steal up to 30kWh of energy that their own customers have paid for'.
Whats the next business plan? Tapping into the huge reserves of free hubcaps?
I'm paying 10 cents per kWh. So at my rates, that's a whopping $3.00 per month they're saving.
How much did all that equipment cost? How long will it take to pay it off at that rate?
I'm thinking someone failed to do the cost/benefit analysis.
Pay less? suuuuuuure. That beeing said, you can consider that this amount of energy is small, it is...
But if you are thinking people mentioning that the energy does not comes out of nowhere and is leeched from vehicles show a lack of understanding of physics...Nope, not even close, it just show that YOU have to re-read some physics books...and try to undestand them this time.
Everyone's bitching about "stealing energy". But this is England. Gloucester, England, a fairly provincial sort of place (incidentally, my American readers, it's pronounced 'Gloster') - I actually know this supermarket. After a few weeks, the mechanism will break down. I might get repaired once or twice, but it will break down again. The management will stick a sign on it saying "out of order". Then after a while that'll be removed and the plate will be permanently fixed in position or removed and tarmaced over. Don't worry about stealing energy, this is how all low-cost, locally engineered, locally paid for schemes on this scale pan out in the UK.
built into the road network, could save on lighting it! put tax back in our pockets?
Why not people? I've been skeptical of this technology for a while, because I can't see it producing a useful amount of energy. I'm not an engineer though. I do wonder, however, why they don't put these into sports arenas. If you put them under the fans seats, every time the fans started to move while cheering, you'd harvest the energy they produce. Even here, though, I wonder if the amount of energy produced would be enough to offset the creation energy.
At the Sainsbury supermarket in Dartmouth, Devon, near where I live, they have put a wind turbine in the car park 'to power the tills'. I have never seen it rotate. At each new store they are doing some faux 'green' initiative, ideally as headline grabbing as possible to gain green cred. I should be interested to know the balance between electricity produced and the cost of production and laying in of the equipment.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not true.
Or, here's a thought: stop putting parking lot ring-roads next to the building. Instead put them around the outside of the parking lot. Put some big potted plants in so you can only continue to the next row when you're close to the building.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Did the OA really say the system would generate 30 kWh / year? (It did not.) So without more information I don't think anyone can pull a real cost/benefit analysis out of their ass.
This is not a self-referential sig.
My text says 717kJ delta, but that is 71.7 kJ. I used the correct number to reach 2.4kW.
I stand by my conclusion that if we could apply 2.4kW with 100% efficiency to the wheels, we could keep this car going steady at 100kph on a flat road with no wind.
Major losses are: 1) the engine itself, at best some 25%, when running at optimal load, 2) the gearbox and stuff, 3) auxiliary loads (alternator, airco).
You can see from this whole calculation that air drag and such are hardly important.
they should do something similar with free ways, or at least off ramps.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Didn't they do something like this in Superman 3?
Good God, if you haven't already, don't read any more of these comments. All they will teach you is that the average slashdotter either fails to read TFA, mistakenly believes they understand thermodynamics better than anyone else, or both.
Good point. If only we had some kind of modern, technologically advanced machine capable of converting horizontal forces into vertical ones!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I read TFA, for what little info it provided. I've read many of the comments, too. More smoke and heat than light in them.
So is this energy generation parasitic? In practice (not in theory), is it increasing the fuel consumption of the cars? Many of the comments tacitly assume that it is.
Or is this energy being recovered from what would otherwise be wasted as heat in braking? If the plates are positioned in places where cars would have to slow down anyway, the system is not only recovering energy, it is also reducing wear on brake pads: a direct benefit to the driver. This is especially the case if the plates are installed on downward ramps, where the car is converting potential to kinetic energy that has to be shed somehow.
An interesting example of recoverable energy is the transport of grain from the intermountain plateau of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon to Portland, Oregon, where it is loaded on ships. There is an average drop of elevation of at least 2,000 feet, most of the transport is done by trains with diesel electric locomotives. Each grain car weighs 125 tons or more when loaded; there are at least 100 cars in a train. So that is dropping more than 12,500 tons off a small mountain with every train coming into Portland.
Here's what's neat: diesel electric locomotives use regenerative braking to slow these trains. Currently the electricity recovered is sent to resistance heaters and disposed as hot air. But it could be sent to flywheel storage units mounted on gimbals on special rail cars behind the engines (typically at least 4 engines, not needed to pull, but necessary for applying sufficient braking).
So here's a question for the reader to consider: assuming a perfect (non loss) system for transferring braking energy from the wheels to the flywheel batteries, how much energy could one of these trains deliver to the Portland power grid? This isn't a piece of blue sky by the way: New York City subways have been using flywheel batteries as load balancers for many years now.
For bonus points: Coal is mined in the Rocky Mountains and shipped by rail to Chicago. If the electricity now wasted as heat by the locomotives' regenerative braking could be stored in flywheel batteries, how much additional power would be extracted from each ton of coal as it is moved down hill?
Will
Another way to calculate this:
I lost 3 m/s in 30 seconds, so my deceleration is 0.1m/s^2. The car weighs 900kg, so F= 90N. If I had applied 90N, the car would have stayed at speed. 90N * 28m/s = 2.5kW. Same figure.
Actually he's right - the plate leeches energy from the car but so do your brakes. The difference is that your brakes don't capture that energy to make electricity (unless you have regenerative brakes) but the plate does. The trick is to make sure that they only put the plates in places where everyone wants to slow down anyway, so the plate will simultaneously help them slow down (less energy wasted as heat in the brakes) and generate a little electricity.
it's purely a gimmick... making them seem green using energy from the cars that are entering their road.
The device is positioned right at the entrance to the complex and it's NOT in a position where you would be naturally slowing down, it's precisely where you would be accelerating after having turned into their road off the traffic lights at the junction.
If they were serious about using this energy source, then there'd be lots more of them, each situated immediately before a corner in the road where you would have to brake anyway. And there's plenty of corners in the maze leading into the car park...
Everything about this smacks of gimmicky green initiatives that make the company appear green...
Our local Tesco is also trying to appear "green" by installing a wind turbine and solar arrays... they're having a problem getting the wind turbine approved as the nimbys are objecting to it on grounds of noise, interference with TV signals, being obtrusive...
Sainsbury went for the gimmicky plate idea as it is very visible when entering their store and also couldn't be blocked by the nimbys either.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Just to clarification:
DO you consider the friction on the road to be leeching?
Under that strict definition sure it's leeching; however since it's energy your using anyways, I would cal it leaching.
And calling regenerative breaking leeching is very obtuse. I mean, really leeching from yourself?
When most people hear leeching they think it's a bad thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All the doors in our house have 'kinetic energy' hinges. I gradually increased the tension and you should see the arms we all have around here now.
Seriously the stupidest thing I have ever seen. As all the above posts have already stated: the energy will come from the car, and thus form fuel. If you take it away from people (by putting the plate at the store entrance) I would consider that a nice experiment. This, however, is just plain stupid.
They may as well have customers park their cars in break-test rollers!
They "might be"? Sure, they might walk or bike to the store too, which is pretty damn energy efficient... but most don't. If a substantial portion of the population were coasting, they would not need speed bumps to begin with. The fact that the speed bumps ARE necessary means most people don't coast and there is a net gain of energy efficiency here assuming the kinetic plate liberates more energy than it consumes during its creation, installation and maintenance. Granted, the gain in efficiency is that the store is using some of the energy the cars needlessly generated, but people do lots of stupid things they shouldn't while driving their cars. Think of it as trying to salvage an inherently flawed system to make it more efficient.
The GP is right, slashdot is full of contrarians sometimes.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Not in the UK. Hybrids are way more expensive in maintenance and are less economical than a large amount of the diesel cars there.
you always have to pay for it man, one way or another.
We should make a new rule: all slashdot users have to give me $0.10. It's a negligible amount to be "leeched" from your pockets, so small that you'd never notice. This way I get free groceries. Now if we all did this for each other, all slashdot users would get free groceries. Bonus!
For the record, I am a physicist, and there is much that I don't understand. I think I've got my head around this one though.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
you misunderstand my post.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Agree: it's theft, AND a very inefficient way of generating electricity. We should be moving away from biofuel generation (and this is yet more inefficiency).
Put a dymnamo on a pair of lifts on a multi-storey car park, for the cars GOING DOWN :o)
It doesn't seem likely that this thing could recoup the cost of installing it in any reasonable timeframe.
If you want to save energy and the planet, don't install a traffic light at all. I have never seen traffic queues at broken traffic lights as long as the queues at working traffic lights.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.