Eco shocker: Turbine Light concept uses wind to light highways
By Laura June 
posted February 6th 2010 10:13AM
posted February 6th 2010 10:13AM
posted February 6th 2010 10:13AM
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That's going to be expensive when someone hits one.
@dbw1977
Perhaps. But it looks like the windmills are mounted pretty high up. And I doubt anything less than an 18-wheeler doing 85 could down one of those poles.
It's going to be expensive at the outset too, is it really a good investment?
@dbw1977 I would think that the pile of feathers underneath each one would cushion the cars blow.
@dbw1977 A couple years ago they shut off every other streetlight in our city because it supposedly costs tens of thousands of dollars in electricity every month to run them. It would cost a bit in an initial investment, but you would save a ton of money if these were off the grid. If one got destroyed, it wouldn't be the end of the world if they couldn't afford to fix it.
We should put mini-wind turbines in all of our electronics that get cooled by fans. I could probably power my cable box with the massive amounts of air coming out of my xbox 360.
And the government rejected my unicorn fart power proposal. :(
@dbw1977
Forget the cost of someone hitting one; that can be mitigated. Look at how many light poles are required for 100' of roadway.
@engadgetcomexcludeengadget
Wouldn't that creaet a back pressure of
sorts making the fan less effective?
@Alex Light poles installed on highways are made to come down quit easy.
They are installed that way in case you run into one off them.
you would not like to hit one that is not going to to move as it would
kill more people on the highways in minor crashes.
(PS if you knock one down in NY you pay for it.)
Looks a lot more like a distraction :D i know i wouldn't be focusing on driving..
@gargle Yeah, those back-lit whirlygigs would no doubt cause a steady strobe effect along the center island. It would be like driving through a nightclub. No thanks.
@gargle
Its just a marketing demonstration. There's no way they'd put strobe lights on the highway.
It's going to work on freeways or roads that cars frequents
@Lowest Ranks
This is one time when speeding should be allowed
What happens when there's no wind for a few days? Another LED traffic light fiasco waiting to happen.
@Almo There is no LED light fiasco. Snow-accumulation incidents are rare compared to the number of deployed lights and are actually dwarfed by the number of incandescent signals that are off due to blown bulbs (and thus presenting a similar hazard). Plus, the true culprit is the persistent use of light shields on lights bright enough not to require them. There's no reason the lights couldn't be behind a clear lens that is flush with the face of the signal housing.
@Almo
I'm sure there will be a backup supply. And even when there is no wind, the idea is that the cars on the road would generate wind to help spin them even a little bit.
@Almo The concept is that the cars driving past generate the the necessary wind. There still is a weakness if you're in a situation with low natural wind and low traffic. If no cars have gone by before you in a "a little while" then you don't get any light, and if there's no cars behind you, then there's no one benefiting from the light your car generated.
Seems like piezoelectric pressure plates would work better simply because they could be powering the lights ahead of you instead of the ones behind you. Of course that may make for a bit of a bumpy ride . . .
Anyways, this whole set up might work well enough if there's a battery system backing it up . . .
@Faxmonkey
Hopefully the light wouldn't be generated directly from the turbines themselves. If the person who designed this had a brain he or she would use a battery system. One could easily charge the batteries by both solar AND the wind power. As for lonely highways, simple: add a light sensor. If there are no cars, the lights dim or turn off. If headlights can be seen from some distance, turn them on for a few minutes or until the car passes. Also a battery system means DC which means LEDs which can be far more efficient. But anyway, most highways that I've seen that have limited traffic don't have lights anyway. The cost benefit just isn't there.
@credo Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't just mean one battery per light, I meant some sort of shared battery that was shared amongst several. I'm sure each individual turbine would probably have some sort of minor battery of its own -- I was thinking a very large one with wires connecting many, many lights.
Won't the wind from the cars passing cancel each other out?
@bneff17 no it won't,if they went same direction from both sides then yes,
@bneff17
works perfectly, actually. Think of it like spinning a broom handle between your hands. One hand pulls back, the other pushes forward.
^ |
| o |
| v
@FallenArms3
I also tried it with a pen, a chopstick and a wooden spoon. It all works very well. q.e.d.
@bneff17 besides, this isn't a regular turbine design, this concept should allow for all wind from any direction to be collected and power the generator
@glenskey RIght, this kind of turbine is awesome because it can collect wind energy regardless of the direction of the wind. I think it's a good idea, especially in places like California, where a lot of our major cities have near constant winds (SF, LA, San Diego).
no.. winds create a vortex when traffic are going both ways. One side when only one way. It is ingenious concept, but just how much energy can be harvested remains unknown.
@allenade
Gotcha, little early in the morning on a saturday for me haha
@allenade
It is not ingenious, it is ill conceived. This happens repeatedly when design people don't run things by the engineering dept before they release their marvelous ideas...
There's no bulk velocity to extract outside the boundary layers on the vehicles, which are very thin. (Stand 15 ft from a freight train, do you feel anything? No) The turbines are not going to extract any energy from stray vortices either. So the turbine will just not work as envisioned. Period.
Let's talk about using them as normal wind turbines. Vertical turbines are needed for size constraints, yet they suck. Each one is powering 2x 1kw street light?. IF those turbines are to scale, they'll maybe do 200-400 W on a windy day. This low to the ground, the average output would be more like 100-200W. In other words, you'll add thousands of dollars to the infrastructure to meet 10% of the load in the best case. Maybe you could use this to meet a good fraction of the load in high, windy areas, certainly not the situation pictured.
The same money could be spent on a distant 1MW turbine to power 500 lights.
@EusebioD Well said. As an industrial design grad myself, while I can appreciate the aesthetics, even I can see the conundrum here... For the sake of lighting eco-friendliness this design is essentially dependent on us upping our carbon-emitting unfriendliness. Not so green when you think about it.
@EusebioD
Actually you are quite mistaken about the wind forces coming off of cars traveling at highway speeds. Where I drive every single work day there are 4, 6 and 8 lane sections (each direction) of highway that are seperated by nothing more that a permanent concrete wall styled after the movable barriers. The top of the wall is lined with reflective flexable strips and you can watch thembend over and snap back as cars pass them even in the second lane over from the wall. When driving along the wall I often feel my car buffeted by trucks or lines of cars on the other side of the wall as they pass me. When I feel the need to grab the wheel with both hands in my SUV then I can tell you that the wind forces are extremely strong as even in moderately strong gusting conditions the electronic steering control almost completely eliminates any gusts reaching the steering wheel.
And the freeways are almost always filled with a good amount of traffic into the 2am range. I am sure there is some sort of storage battery involved much like the solar powered light poles.
@dennisheadley
You are mistaken. The force is not from the inertia of the wind, so it cannot be used to drive a turbine. Some type of peieo electric converter may be able to do it, albeit at 1/100 the efficiency of a turbine. Back to square one.
There is no free lunch guys. That's why energy is a big problem.
@EusebioD Dude but don't you think these things would be tested up the wazoo before implementation?
And in your opinion which "green" technologies are worth the investment?
You are exactly right. There is no way this is effective. I was going to write a couple paragraphs, and try to explain it to your critics, but it's a huge waste of time. The comments reflect, IMO, the biggest downside to the absolute democratization of ideas/science. Not that I can think of any better way to do things...
Geezer and Scent (and unfortunately most people) have no idea that this contradicts simple physics. In a few rare cases the ideas in these kinds of posts might have some positive contribution, but most of them are Steorn. There is no free energy, or free lunch (and these lessons seem to go hand in hand - most people understand both or neither). At least they look cool.
@atomandroid
Oops that was @EusebioD
And I forgot to say how discouraging it is that Engadget posts this stuff - at least explain some of the physics so that the people who read and have no idea understand it a bit. I know this is supposed to be entertainment, not physics class, but really.
@EusebioD
BULL!
Have you ever broken down the the side of a highway? Obviously not.
There is wind the rushes by you every second a car flies by.. unless its a super aerodynamic lambo or something..
A Train has close cars which only really creates wind at the beginning of the train,
Cars are separated, there is wind.. plenty of it
@EusebioD
No free lunch huh? How about a free fridge for your beer?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/nanotechnology/necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention-in-nanotech
Any way, its a pretty sweet looking tech.
I'm admittedly not a physics major or a designer of wind turbines. But what you are all saying is that if I hold a kids pinwheel in my hand and then have my kids play jump-rope right in front of me, the wheel will never spin.
I don't care about no free energy. It doesn't apply here. The child swinging the jump-rope is exerting energy. It makes no difference if it inefficient or not, the kid is going to do so whether I hold the pinwheel there or not.
or you are saying that if i am floating in the pool on an innertube and my crazy neighbor Bobby Joe Elroy does a cannonball into the pool with a beer in each hand, that the ripples in the water will never move me at all. Been there and done that, and it moved me clear across the pool.
A car driving past you on the road at highway speeds will just about knock up over. I really don't understand how that is something that has no value and can not be used for anything. It isn't free energy. But the millions of cars are going to drive past if it is there or not. Even if they are gasoline or electric powered.
@dennisheadley Water and air are two very different mediums.
Traffic is not going to move a turbine that's ten feet off the ground and ~ten feet sideways from any vehicle.
@allenade No, you do not get any wind force this way. While the wind turbines are omnidirectional, they are not an efficient design, and the lights would all still have to be wired into the electrical grid as otherwise even with large (and expensive) batteries housed in each pole you could have nights with unlit roads.
If you're wiring them into the grid anyway, then you might as well power them with a more efficient wind farm, solar facility, or far more practical nuclear power plant.
Why the tree huggers oppose modern nuclear facilities is beyond me. Its so clean, compact, and self contained that submariners and aircraft carrier seamen can live right next to one for years.
@ All Yall
Stand in the center of a highway sometime, and answer the question for yourself... its really easy, pull over, get out, post.
@Ducman69
I agree with the Nuclear Power being a great choice that we never should have stopped advancing and deploying. I spent 13 years in the US Navy riding Ohio class submarines and crawling into missile tubes with D5 missiles and if I never had any health issues with close proximity to both those potential sources of radiation then I personally feel they are safe for public use. The reactors not the missiles.
@allenade - a better idea would be to ADD these vertical turbines TO CELL TOWERS. Just Sayin...
Well.. my limited physics education can't substantiate anything I say about such devices. But yah, when I pull over on the side of highway, especially highway 5 in california (the longest straight highway connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles)... you feel a hecka lota wind blowing in your face from the traffic. Granted the amount of money it'll take to setup all these may not be the most economical, but hey, if it works it could become a pretty eye candy for drivers on long roads.
@EusebioD
Judging by the height of the car, the VAWTs appear to be only 1.5m or so off the ground. I'd also guess that the lighting is only 100W or less per pole if using LEDs (and by the fact that so many poles are needed).
Of course, this is an old idea, and lamps like this that use a combination of VAWT and solar are already available.
Is it fibers? LED ligting and fibers?
Those lights don't look particularly bright to me. I'm thinking of those solar powered garden lamps that provide slightly more light than my wristwatch...
@TheFrigginBox
LED lights are pretty bright! Haven't you ever seen a car that has LED headlights or brake lights? IMHO they are too bright directed in my face and kind of piss me off. But they will be amazing for lighting up a road.
@GadgetGeezer Well, the only car I'm aware of so far that has LED headlights is the Lexus LS. Maybe you're thinking about Xenon HID lights?
@r3loaded Mitsubishi, BMW, Audi. They all make at least one car which puts LEDs to good use. Ever seen the side lights on a newer Audi? They hurt :|