Transforming
kinetic energy into electricity doesn't often get
taken seriously, but at least one Burger King joint has been hooked on to the idea. The New Jersey-based outlet is set to give the first roadtest to MotionPower strips produced by New Energy, which harness energy from vehicles passing over them. Based on the thinking behind
regenerative braking in hybrids, the energy absorbers are made up of small plates moving up and down. UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's recently introduced similar "kinetic road plates" in its car parks, and hopes are they'll generate 30 kW per hour from the energy and weight of cars overhead. Sainsbury's plans to power store checkouts through the scheme, whereas Burger King will just exploit your energy to power various appliances. Provided someone doesn't sue for unlawful energy appropriation and the roadtest is successful, New Energy hopes to expand the use of its power strips to other high-traffic, low-speed locations like toll booths and intersections. Video after the break.
[Via
Jalopnik]
Read - New Energy PR
Read - Sainsbury's PR
posted July 15th 2009 6:12AM
This will sap power from the vehicles themselves, thus creating an invisible carbon footprint, while being considered "clean".
It's just like a fuel tax.
The energy created will be a lot more efficiently used than the energy from the car's engine. Also bear in mind they might use these to replace speed humps, which sap power from the vehicle without generating anything.
I was just thinking that. You still need the car power. Sure, the car weighs a lot, but it still needs to push down those little metal plates, thus work harder. It's minimal, but it's there. All energy gained by BK will be paid by their consumers gasoline...
If you actually cared, you'd live at sea level and never visit anything on top of hills. People building stuff on hills is just another form of fuel tax.
So if I'm getting this right from the video, these are probably providing less resitance to your car than a speed bump, and either way, the fuel cost to ride over a speed bump or these kinetic plates is probably too small to even be noticable in terms of fuel economy in normal driving conditions. Essentially it detracts from the operating of your vehicle in no greater way than any other minor hump, bump or minor obstacle in the road.
What appears to be the problem here is that the (kinda overstated) negative perception is greater than the reality in that this will suck up more of the money you earn (FUD) and that you'll see no benefit (mostly true).
@Orinjz
No matter how you look at it, they are taking energy from one source(ie their customers) and using it for themselves. The energy may be small on a car by car basis but overall they are increasing one carbon footprint to reduce their own! Also as some energy will obviously be lost in the transfer it is not an efficient way of doing it either. It is like taking 1p from many people to make a lot of money although in the process some money is lost so the thief makes less than the population looses. If some one was found to be making thousands out of a scam like that then they would be prosecuted but burger king will get away with this no problem as people will not understand or even notice.
You're all forgetting one key point: asphalt pavement is a flexible pavement. In other words, when you drive over an asphalt surface, it absorbs energy already. This type of technology is not so much sapping extra energy from your car's engine as it is taking advantage of energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat.
@Jorvay
However this system will have to absorb more energy per meter than asphalt otherwise it would not be worth installing. I would also bet that even the energy wasted by the system will be greater than the total energy absorbed by the equivalent area of asphalt.
No matter how you look at it, they are taking energy from one source(ie their customers) and using it for themselves. The energy may be small on a car by car basis but overall they are increasing one carbon footprint to reduce their own! Also as some energy will obviously be lost in the transfer it is not an efficient way of doing it either. It is like taking 1p from many people to make a lot of money although in the process some money is lost so the thief makes less than the population looses. If some one was found to be making thousands out of a scam like that then they would be prosecuted but burger king will get away with this no problem as people will not understand or even notice.
@coolblue
I'm not disputing that energy is being transferred from one source to another, my major gripe is that people are getting angry and accusatory because the energy is being used to power the business.
The penny analogy doesn't even ring true because its not a naturally occuring byproduct that can't otherwise be utilised in another manner, and furthermore its a choice for people to discard that penny rather than use it themselves. You, yourself cannot save up the "waste" energy that your car transfers onto the road surface, unlike a penny which you can put to better use through saving.
There's nothing to "get away with", there's no reason for anyone to be concerned or aggreived because there is next to nothing that's being lost or taken away...this is no more of a scam than Burger King deciding to use the wind power that comes from all of the meat farts that their fat-arsed customers generate.
@ Orinjz: you bring me to another approach: why really winning energy out of the fat arses? just install the generators under the seats, end everytime a fatass sits down he pushes the seat down, say one inch and electrical energy is created! *runs to the patent office*
If i go by what the video shows me they put them at the intersections, thus mean YOU ARE GOING TO STOP ANYWAYS to look for on coming traffic so the energy taken is only when you are going to waste gas by stopping anyways....
Putting aside the increased expenditure of fuel and increased emissions from it... what about the energy needed to build, ship, install, and maintain these? I could certainly be wrong, but find it hard to believe this device could realistically produce 30kWh, or that that quantity of energy is enough to break even in terms of its total energy cost.
@Luke: surely these 'bumps' will slow cars, meaning rather than braking and converting kinetic energy to heat it'll convert kinetic energy to electricity. If installed before a bend into the car park then they'd reduce the amount the driver would break and recoup some of the energy lost as heat on entering the car park........
these things would sap little amounts of energy from the cars going over them because they make the road more flexible and reduce fuel economy. the key to using these things is good placement: before turns like you said, or going downhill.
Placing them where you have to brake will reduce total pollution ONLY when you drive older car. If you drive a car with regenerative breaking total amount of pollution will rise because you have to burn fuel when you begin to move.
Someone should back up and snap off the plates.
just what I was thinking... but it would be easy to make them bi-directional
Why do all you people think there is some conspiracy going on at every possible chance ????
this is a great idea!!! , if you are so worried about the extra fuel your 8liter SUV will spend going over the plate, why even bother going to Burger King at all you are probably over weight anyway and could do with some exercise instead
stingy = overweight?
So I pay BK both ways? Food and electricity? I feel robbed in a way. My car has to work harder to go over that stuff which wastes more gas and then pay BK for my food...good thing McDonald's hasn't heard this yet
I agree brother!
If I see one of these plates I'm just gonna drive over the curb and bypass it completely.
Has the recession hit the USA so hard that you can't afford to drive your car over a stupid bump WHILE BUYING A WHOPPER?
So you avoid speedbumps too? It takes the same amount of energy that speedbumps rob you of.
Who currently pays for BK's electricity?
a) Their customers
b) Some other mystery fund
You have no chance to survive, make your burger.
Can you guys please stop saying kW per hour? Watts are equivalent to joules (energy) per second. Joules per second per second doesn't make any sense.
Cheers :)
Hi wingphil
Watts are not equivalent to joules
Kilo Watt hours are equivalent to joules
so all the above comments are correct
Cheers :)
@davidfarrell116
quote from wikipedia:
"One watt is equivalent to 1 joule (J) of energy per second."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
@wingphil
i understand your confusion, but kWh is used to measure energy, not power.
1 Kilo Watt hour = 1000 watt x 3600 seconds = 3.600.000 Joule.
so the plates generate 30 kWh = 30000 w/h -> 30000/3600 = 8.33 watt. which basically means they'll be better off just installing solar panels.
they should install these things in gyms, THATS the place where energy gets wasted. don't steal it from my car. "you don't need to brake as much so it uses otherwise wasted energy" true. unless your car has a regenerative braking system, then it's just stealing energy.
@davidfarrell116
wingphil is correct. A Watt is a Joule per second (as wingphil said). So wattage is a rate of energy consumption, not actual energy used (which is measured in Joules). So saying "30kW per hour" means that the rate of energy is changing, not the TOTAL energy. The correct term would either be "it generates energy at a rate of 30kW" or "it generates 30kJ per hour" (which is what I suspect it means - these two are NOT equivalent as 1 kW = 3.6 mJ per hour")
Thanks :)
Alex
So, to sum up:
The first guy said that kW per hour is not the same as kW hours. (kWh kW/h)
Then a bunch of other people didn't reread the article to see that the notation in the article says the former, and then they spouted off about the latter.
Outside of all of that...I could see a use for this at toll booth / iPass areas, where it's one way, and you know people will be slowing down.
I think what they mean is that it will be generating 30kW at the end of the first hour, 60kW after the second, 90kW after the third and so on until it is generating enough power to halt the country's dependancy on foreign oil.
And after we hit that point, it dumps the surplus into Skynet development?
PS your car won't lose any more energy going over these than it would over a regular speedbump.
I hate speedbumps.
Speedbumps was create for irate drivers.
Actually, these kinds of devices *will* extract more energy from the car than an ordinary speedbump. It is the same principle as dropping a rubber ball on a hard surface (elastic collision), vs dropping it on a soft clay (inelastic collision). On the hard surface it will bounce back, since the energy is not absorbed by the surface, but on soft clay, the ball does not bounce back because the clay absorbs the energy. In the case of speed bumps, the energy goes back into the bouncing of the car. In the BK case, the car won't bounce as much after hitting the bumps.
Some people may consider this a good thing, since the energy is being used by BK instead of being dissipated in brakes and shock absorbers. On the other hand, if there were no speed bumps or BK bumps, then the car wouldn't bounce at all, and if the car had regenerative braking (as most will, eventually), the energy lost in braking could be recovered and stored in batteries and later reused to accelerate the car.
In the big picture, the energy BK is using has to come from somewhere. It is coming from the kinetic energy of the car, which was obtained from the gas burned by the car. I have to believe that it is orders of magnitude less efficient to obtain energy this way than simply using a wall outlet. The difference is that BK is getting it for free this way, so they are saving money at the cost of a much greater impact on the environment, and by distributing these much greater costs to the car drivers.
It is sort of like BK stealing a penny from every customer's pocket. Customers might not notice it, but it is still stealing. And in this case, the theft has a much greater detrimental environmental impact than just using normally obtained electricity.
Who said there would have been a speedbump there? There are no speedbumps at the drive-through windows I've seen.
As heard from BK drive through:
"Sir, if you would not mind, would you please do the following about 5 times quickly:
backup about 5 feet, then pull forward. I have to get the total for your order on my register."
Can this not be done with Piezo electric methods, that way you wont get people moaning thinking that their petrol bill will be skyrocketing at the benefit of BK.
Or does peizo only work well for high volume roads?
You can't get energy from nothing. Any energy that they get from this, regardless of the method, is coming out of your gas tank.
Its energy that would be absorbed by the road anyway, you don't lose out on anything.
With these flappy things your car loses energy pushing them down.
Do you realize how horribly inefficient your car is anyway?
you won't lose out on much, but you will lose some energy through any of these systems. Whatever losses driving over asphalt amounts to would not likely be significantly more than this surface, so the addition of whatever means to generate electricity this system uses would be an even less efficient tax on your gas tank than regular driving. It will benefit BK, but not net useful energy. Many systems can efficiently generate voltages, but none so far can recover current any better than a car's engine.
I can't believe how many people are crying about how much harder the car has to work for this. Are you serious? Are you going to notice it? Is your car going to notice it? No. Even if it is there, it is so ridiculously minuscule that it will not matter. I'd like for someone to show me some figures otherwise.
And if you're really concerned about your car having to work harder and waste that preciously tiny bit of fuel, maybe your fat ass should skip the Burger King drive through altogether and save some weight?
The fatties could jog on the plates - win win!
Hell yes. You pseudo scientists should just stfu.
I can't think of a better comeback right now.
If only this made up for all the cars idling in the drive-thru lane ...
Yes the car will have to work harder to go through those plates, therefore use more gas. Just think of how much gas you have to give the car to go over a speed bump from a standstill, versus rolling over a flat surface.
If they are meant to replace speed bumps, then yes, I'm all for them, but when was the last time you went over speed bumps while in a drive-thru?
If you are looking for a smaller carbon footprint, eliminate the drive thru! No more cars idling = less gas used = smaller carbon footprint.
@davidfarrell116
I didn't say watts were equivalent to joules, i said watts = joules per second.
@ultimatepwnage
The article doesn't mention kWh, and if it did it would still be wrong. 30kWh is a measure of energy, not power.
alexchilcott is correct, the article should state kW, or kJ per hour if they wanted to be a bit weird.
If you guys are so worried about wasting the gas while you're driving through BK you could, you know, coast over these little strips. Cars have inertia too. That way you can be a bad ass rebel and not give the evil corporate restaurant any more of your money.
You can't coast over these as they will slow you down. It's like driving into mud.