I did a baseline CFD analysis on this back in the college days. The turbines are an overall loss of efficiancy on the system by stripping off the draft created by passing cars, forcing each vehicle to drive through a dead air mass. Since air resistance increases with the square of velocity, every knot of wind speed bled into these turbines causes an exponential increase in fuel consumption. In effect, you're building a gasoline powered generator, except there are 3 energy transfers (gas to vehicle speed, vehicle to wind speed, wind to elec.) each with efficiancies on the order of 30%.
A better idea would be to construct curved walls to contain and funnel the draft along the highway, not strip it off. This idea is proposed every decade or so and the analysis is prety much always the same.
@cdgent yea, what year was that? EACH year traditional turbines become better at producing electricity based on tech. advancements that didn't exist then. plus your missing the natural wind effect and the reduced roughness class ratio that highways have. therby increasiing the overall efficiency of the turbine. the cars are only 1/3 of the equation. A better understanding of the entire picture and potential should be studied before shot down by "blog" experts.
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I did a baseline CFD analysis on this back in the college days. The turbines are an overall loss of efficiancy on the system by stripping off the draft created by passing cars, forcing each vehicle to drive through a dead air mass. Since air resistance increases with the square of velocity, every knot of wind speed bled into these turbines causes an exponential increase in fuel consumption. In effect, you're building a gasoline powered generator, except there are 3 energy transfers (gas to vehicle speed, vehicle to wind speed, wind to elec.) each with efficiancies on the order of 30%.
A better idea would be to construct curved walls to contain and funnel the draft along the highway, not strip it off. This idea is proposed every decade or so and the analysis is prety much always the same.
@cdgent
yea, what year was that?
EACH year traditional turbines become better at producing electricity based on tech. advancements that didn't exist then. plus your missing the natural wind effect and the reduced roughness class ratio that highways have. therby increasiing the overall efficiency of the turbine. the cars are only 1/3 of the equation. A better understanding of the entire picture and potential should be studied before shot down by "blog" experts.