this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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It depends. Is this energy the same energy that is already being burned?
Looking at an extremely simple example: Solar powered calculators (the real ones). They harness light from the light bulbs in a room which would be otherwise dark. The only time they are harnessing that power, is when the light is on. They add no extra draw to the light, they are 100% passive. The only time you’d really have to take into consideration how green that power is (explicitly for the calculator) is if you are turning on that light explicitly to power the calculator.
If the tech being talked about is just harnessing the “junk energy” of the vehicles in their normal operation, this would be 100% green energy. If it is adding a load, it is 100% dirty when powered by an ICE. If it’s somewhere in the middle… I hope you get my point.
You’re also ignoring the fact that not all vehicles are ICE.
Ehh it's still a rubbish idea, that money would be much better spent going after primary producers of energy, like solar, wind, geothermal, or nuclear.
Some napkin math and an equivalent area of solar, say over a road or parking lot would produce 3.5 million kwh in a year.
Those aren’t always a fit for everywhere. And getting energy from one place to another is an unsolved issue. Just because one option is cheaper than others doesn’t mean that particular option is the better choice. Diversity is very important.
Diversity is important, but it's still better to go after larger sources of energy first. There's just not much energy to be recovered from falling rain or waste from cars.
Make the cars waste less energy, or the transit system in general is much easier and will actually save money long term.
What kind of junk energy is there to harvest from a car (in meaningful amounts)? I guess breaking is the obvious answer, but that's already covered by regenerative breaking. Most car-based energy harvesting systems seem to employ speedbumps that clearly take useful (kinetic) energy away from the car (probably at a very poor efficiency).
That's a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.
However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.
Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you're just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.
I mean, I can think of many ideal places for such things. Intersections for instance, where cars will be wanting to slow down or come to a stop regardless. Speed limit changes, where you want cars to slow down. Even in place of speed bumps, assuming you can get enough of a drag on the car to effect a slow down.
Now that's an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.