In terms of direct environmental advantages, it is for everybody clear that this will not be an advantage.

I think that this could be interesting as a practical issue, as for example providing electric power to devices that request a relatively small amounts of electricity, such as traffic lights, without connecting it to the electric grid. This could probably enable infra-structures that usually require connection to power line to become stand-alone from that point of view, located in a remote site, instead of laying a long cable to point where electric power can be acquired, therefore reducing costs and environmental impact.

Note that the net environmental impact of a facility must also take into account the construction phase.

Of course the energy is being taken from the car and therefore the fuel that it has just burnt, where else can it come from? As pointed out above if the car would have been braking at the time then its energy that would have been wasted so a good thing.

I would like to see more details on the actual amount of electricity being generated. 30KW per hour, what kind of a unit is that? 30KW, or 30KWHr (over what time period?).

I have a 10KW generator that uses the full output of a 2.2 litre diesel engine (running on vegetable oil) and will produce 30KWHr in 3 hours, I doubt these plates will generate that in a week or a month even.

I think that generating electricity from otherwise wasted energy is a great idea but we all over-estimate how much can be produced. 1KWHr is actually a lot of energy when you are trying to generate it from something in the environment and it costs less than 15p to buy so the savings in cost and for the environment are generally very small, especially when you consider the energy put into making the equipment.

Even if it does cost a micro amount to get a customer's car to "climb" up the speed bump doesn't that same car get a free ride down the back side of the speed bump??? Kind of like rolling down a tiny hill...

I'd love to see us place some of these kenetic speed converters at stop signs to help power street lights and such... Cars are coming to a full stop anyway so might as well use their kinetic energy before it's all gone.

Good to see people are finally getting the point of this device.

Normal speed bumps, a cars kinetic energy is converted to heating breaks.

This "speed bump", cars kinetic energy converted (at a low efficiency but much better than wasted heat) to electricity for use. No need to break

Great idea for select applications. Having this all over would be a ridiculously stupid idea but locating them before corners, school zones, stop signs, or actuated by a light turning red would be great ways to turn wasted breaking into electricity.

Of course this is true as long as building, installing and maintaining one of these don't consume more energy than is gained by one of these systems.

OMG - So many folks don't get it.
The plates ARE the speed bumps.

1 - You can have dumb old speed bumps that only slow you down

OR

2 - You can have speed bumps that also make electricity.

Option 2 seems more logical and that is what they are doing.

as i understand it, the car drives over a plate that is about a cm high. the plate pushes down, turning a cog under the plate, cog turns generator...

If this is the case, there is a negligible effect on fuel economy, because these are put at places in the parking lot where people decelerate... turning wasted energy into useful energy. Seems pretty simple to me.

That being said, the real innovation will come when there are more bike racks than parking spaces in front of the store.

"Silly Columbus, you'll sail right off the edge of the Earth! Ha ha!!"

The human capacity to nay-say never ceases to amaze me. As long as these plates are placed where cars would normally slow down anyway, then the only thing "stolen" is energy that would normally be wasted by the friction and heat of braking. It's exactly like a hybrid drive regenerating energy from the force of braking. Heck, if enough of these were around, everyone would save money on the cost of brakes.

but they should be placed on inclined planes, for instance on a ramp going down between levels.

That way it truly would be the car's momentum powering the plates and no extra gas would be needed to overcome the plate as its downhill...

PS: Damn Captcha image is hard to read...

Clearly.

This is not some perpetual motion car bouncy castle.

And 'negligible' doesn't fit into physics arguments.

@ Mon, 06/15/2009 - 19:07 — Anonymous
Funny stuff

You instantly contradict yourself. 'The plates are flat', then next sentence 'The plates are raised'.

These ARE in place of speed bumps and so ARE capturing energy which would otherwise be lost to solid asphalt bumps.

^ The only needed explanation of this.

Is it green? No. Not until customers cars are powered by water.

I think this is a good idea...all you people who are saying that it is taking energy away from the car are ridiculous. I think you would have an argument if every single driving surface on the face of the earth had no inclines, no debris on the road, no bumps ect... This is such an insignificant loss to the driver.

I was under the impression that the energy would be derived from placing these plates underneath a speedbump, which would seem like a much more useful way of getting the energy, considering the car would be just wasting the energy here anyway.

They also have a SolarWall solar air heating system (www.solarwall.com - read the case study on the Sainsbury distribution center here http://solarwall.com/modules/download_gallery/dlc.php?file=70 , they won an award for it too ) So I think this is just more innovation from them. And I think its great! More companies need to incorporate green technologies into their stores and buildings! Excellent job, keep these stories coming!

If the car hits this plate and slows down slightly, it will have to speed up again anyways and to do that it will use up more energy than it was using just coasting along before it hit this "bump".

IMHO, if they want to solve energy problems, they should look at ways to people drive more efficiently. I'm not talking about proper tire pressure and keeping it under 60mph or whatever crap they are selling these days. I'm talking about how people are always speeding up and slowing down. So much energy is wasted in brakes, in the form of heat, noise, etc, as was said, not to mention additional wear and tear on the vehicles causing vehicles to be more expensive and needing more maintenance and oil and things like that. I'm certain the way we drive wastes way more than what some of the small improvements being invented to make vehicles more efficient. The Prius with the brake-electric generator approach is a really nice idea. It won't save a grocery store money though. Perhaps an idea for a grocer would be something which can take the heat off the brakes - or more realistically, take the heat off the hot asphalt parking lot and harness that to help power their checkout machines. Or maybe they should do the math in their head for a change - excercise their brain and save some electricity that way.

Everyone is always so quick to lay blame while others are so quick to say they've solved all of our problems just to look cool, be popular, or make money.

Q1. Doesn’t the ramp just steal pennies from our petrol tanks?

A1. The ramp is designed to be situated in parts of the roadway where vehicles are having to slow down, for example on downhill gradients, when approaching traffic lights or roundabouts as well as replacing sleeping policemen and traditional traffic calming measures.
In the these situations, the kinetic energy of the car is being dissipated into heat (i.e. through the braking system) anyway; the ramp at this point scavenges a degree of kinetic energy as the car passes over it, but this is far less than is lost through other mechanisms.

http://www.hughesresearch.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=catego...

While Anonymous@19:11 (Energy Source) and "Funny Stuff" seem to state things as though they know what they're talking about, they are plain wrong.

In fact, the plates DO use gravity to convert the kinetic (car falling) energy to electricity by turning a cog underneath the plate as the plate moves slightly down as it's driven over. Someone earlier correctly tried to point out that the car's momentum would easily carry it over the slight bump of the plate. The opposing force of a round tire rolling over this bump would do practically nothing to the forward momentum of the car (or its gas consumption).

"Funny Stuff" states that there is no free energy. This is true. However, there is conversion of wasted energy into useful energy. Since gravity pushes the plate down, it is free. I would assume that the depression of the plate also compresses some form of spring to push the plate back up. This stored potential energy in the spring is also free (the car is being pushed down by gravity the same whether it is on the plate or not).

People seem to be ignoring the context of the problem (a parking lot) for a theoretical problem (the impact of a continuous road of these on gas consumption). The fact is that in a parking lot, cars are coasting, breaking, stopping and turning. In this particular application, there is no additional cost to the drivers, even on an aggregate scale.

Even if it were true that these plates opposed forward motion, don't people brake when going over speed bumps? In that case, they are not only powering the store, they're saving your brake pads by a completely negligible amount as well :)

The energy is most certainly not coming from the pressure of the car on the plate. If that were the case the car could rest motionless on the plate permanently and generate power non stop. That would be harnessing the power of gravity. These plates derive their power from the forward momentum of the car. Since the car is powered by gasoline, the energy's source is a fossil fuel. You must not forget however, that the car would be decelerating as it approaches the speed bump regardless of the presence of the plate. The car's energy would then be radiated as sound, heat, light, and pressure, pushing forward on the pavement as it slows. If the plate harnesses power from this "natural" deceleration, one that would occur anyway, then a portion of the diffused energy from the deceleration is what is harnessed, and that is free. Free in the sense that it would be otherwise wasted. If the plates were in a place where the car was attempting to maintain speed, or accelerate, then the car's engine would have to generate enough power to overcome the car's inertia with the added requirement that it power the plate. That would then be robbing the car of power it could use elsewhere. Physics 101 :)

All the people 'whining' here are completely correct; this isn't green at all, and it's just moving the cost of the electricity to the customers directly.

I do like it, it's a cool idea and as a purely cost-saving measure it's something that all stores with parking lots should do. But it's not green, not in the slightest:

- The plates are flat, it's not a speed bump that the car would have gone over anyway. The plates are raised a few mm above the road, and the car has to push itself higher to get on them. Then the plates lower, creating the energy. The car then needs to push itself over the small bump from the lowered plate onto the road again. This probably costs the customer a fraction of a penny worth of gasoline per visit, so it's not a terrible crime, but it important to understand it's *not* free energy.

- Because you are essentially converting gasoline to electricity, you are using a very inefficient system. The large-scale power stations and the transmission lines, while not perfect, are considerably more efficient that the process of refining oil into gasoline and then burning it to run a combustion engine, then using that to create motion that is converted again back to electricity. It's not green, not even close. If this was implemented every few meters on every highway, our gasoline usage would skyrocket.

When you look at things like this, the first rule is to remember that there is NO FREE ENERGY. You can't get something for nothing, otherwise we would all have perpetual motion machines powering everything we do.

Then the second rule is to remember the entire cost of producing the energy - i.e. if it's from gasoline then you have to factor in the full cost of extracting the oil and refining it, then transporting it to the outlet and pumping it into your car.

So - it will save the store a decent sum in electricity, which is commendable from the shareholders point of view.

But from an environmental point of view, it's considerably worse. And that's not debatable, it's a plain fact.

Put the piezo tech in the asphalt!

Momentum should carry any car over that huge hill of a hump. Even with the, what, 1" height?

And honestly - has any one ever driven in an occupied parking lot that and didn't actually need to hit the breaks or gas?

One last poke at the whiners - really, this is alternative. Would you prefer they put down an asphalt or concrete bump? Cause, those don't produce any electricity at all.

And this is incredibly useful to alternative energy sources. You have to start big (and easily placed/replaced) locations before you can get it smaller, more efficient, covering larger areas.

This gives at least one company more money for research. It gives everyone a glimpse into whether this pans out in real use or not.

And to the developers/company: Good job! Just make sure to pass on what you knowledge you gain so /everyone/ can benefit. Even if by nothing than costs (a lot can be derived from that).

- rake

Wow, what an amazing breakthrough. I like it dude!@

R
www.absolute-anonymity.us.tc

Its amazing how many whiny people they are on this site.
Yes this is not perfect but its a start.

The green movement needs to be less puritanical, talibanesque, and evangelical if it is to win converts.

Jeesh

to Quote many an angry troll: RTFM
They are speed bumps, like every parking lot has, while yes, they are technically stealing energy, it would have been wasted on a bump that would have been there anyways. The energy wasted on that bump, in theory, would be no more or less then on a normal speed bump. green or not, it is a good idea for saving money, if it does pan out, though something like this would not be the main source of energy, I could see it effectively being implemented in school zones and such as a way to slow down motorists, and maybe power one thing or another nearby.
Also: who says that the electricity has to all come from one source? in theory, you could set it up, fairly easily, to come from a variety of places, help with redundancy to avoid dependency on one miracle idea or another, and maybe come up with new, useful products.

Even if it is only a "slightly raised" plate it will still cost he car energy to lift its mass a slight height. This would be taken directly from the car's kinetic energy, thus the need to burn more fuel.

If the plates are extracting any sort of usable energy then it would have to come from car, requiring it to burn more fuel to make up for the loss. Though it wouldn't me much it would be coming from the car.

Why not install these all over the store and get the energy from the people walking around...

It seems to me like it's a slightly raised plate that the car pushes down the plate and transfers the kinetic energy from that to a generator. There's no stealing of forward movement, just using the energy of the car pushing down on the plate. And It IS an "alternative" source of energy because they aren't using "harvested" energy, they're capturing their own. Sustainable could be debated.

Harness energy? More like steal energy, straight from the customers' cars. That's right, everyone driving over these road plates will be giving up a little gas to Sainsbury. Really, they are trying to save costs by taking energy from cars, which cost customers money.

Also, this isn't any more green than using electricity from the grid. Every time energy is transferred from one form to another, some of it is lost due to inefficiencies. Getting electricity by these kinetic plates from moving cars powered by combustion engines is just wasteful. Getting a generator powered by gas will be greener than this since the energy is transferred less. Or use electricity from a power plant, which due to its large size, is more efficient.

Overall, this sounds greener, but really, it is moving the costs to the consumers, while being worse for the environment at the same time. Either stick with electricity from the power grid or choose a real green solution.

I thought the same thing for a few seconds, but then you have to remember that the car would be spending that energy on the asphalt anyway. We would need to learn more about the plates in order to tell if they cause any more opposing energy to the car than a regular asphalt driveway would. Otherwise this would be a plus!

Maybe there is something I'm missing here, but aren't you just transferring the energy from the car to the plate and then back to the plate owner in the form of electricity? If so, the energy is actually derived from gasoline (or electricity, in the case of electric vehicles) thus not really qualifying it as an "alternative" or "sustainable" energy source. If the forward momentum is absorbed by the plate, then the car has to work harder (burn more fuel) to keep moving forward. Obviously this is minimal, but still the energy is coming from the car's fuel and needs to be replaced with more fuel-derived energy.