AutoblogGreen

What an awesome idea! I wish I would have thought of that. I'm being serious by the way--not sarcastic. How many of us have stood next to a busy highway at some point, and nearly get blown over by a passing truck? We should tap energy wherever we can.

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Yes, this is a cool idea, and I think they're trying it in Canada too. Overall I think it could work. The only drawback I could it could reduce some of the drafting effect (especially on a busy highway), thereby reducing MPG of the cars. However, I would expect this effect to be very minor.

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The question I have is whether this thing would essentially be a pigeon blender.

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Well - anything to reduce pigeon population is good in my opinion.

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I am so totally on board with this idea, and in passing I note that the turbine is quite attractive, too! If you've ever ridden a motorcycle on the freeway, you have certainly witnessed up close and personal the immense blowback created by trucks, cars and your own velocity. So, right on!

(BTW it is true that the turbines in Altamont Pass, Calif., in the area where I live, have killed a bunch o' birds. Pace the pigeon-haters above, I hope that doesn't happen with this one!

Janis Mara
www.ecotality.com

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they should install some in canada (toronto/montreal). because in winter the wind is just too powerful.

http://mininova.wordpress.com/

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I would call that "hobby" windpower and simply not making any practical sense.

Bigger the windmill is, better the overall efficiency and of course it should be located on good windy place. In the USA you have plenty of excellent places to install massive mills worth of several megawats, no need to waste time and money on peanuts seen in that news picture.

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Sorry, you don't get something for nothing! Remember the law of conservation of matter and energy? Yeah, the one we all learned in school? The energy produced by those wind turbines will be at the expense of increased drag for the cars. We're talking reduced fuel economy. Who wants that?

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This is an awesome idea! There are lots of instances where a simple turbine could be used to generate a lot of renuable power.

#8 Installing one of these above the road will not increase the drag experienced by cars. The displaced air is already moving as a result of the car moving through it. Its simply a matter of turning that moving air's energy into something we can use.

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The problem is that the irregular gusts produced by traffic are not efficiently used by wind turbines. Windmills work best with constant winds. At most sites the energy recovered may not be worth the cost of the windmill installation.

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I've heard the complaint over and over again that the turbines would create extra drag on the traffic below. How would that happen? The idea is to recapture the energy that is already being expended, like the brakes on hybrid vehicles. The other argument I've heard that it wouldn't generate enough energy. In the business world, if there is a net gain, you do it. Especially if it can be repeated over and over again. Fortunes have been made on transactions that only net a few cents.

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What if we put strips at points along the road that span the width of the roadway and have these plungers in them with magnetic coils that are pushed down when a vehicle drives over them and thus harness the energy available on our roads from all our vehicles? If we need more energy, we could put in more of these strips at increasing points along the roadway...Then all this gathered energy could be fed back into the grid, reducing it's dependence on fossil fuels to supply electricity to our homes... As our fossil fuel using vehicles get replaced over time with cleaner vehicles, we will have a perfect clean energy oop going...Our clean cars would use our highways, our highways would harness the massive energy potential, feed it to our power plants which will provide clean electricity for our homes...???

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Highway wind turbines are a fantastic way of supplementing our energy needs, but as always, as with any great idea, the devil is in the details. For instance, these turbines would have to be serviced periodically. How do you do that without disrupting traffic? How about putting two or three turbines on a swivel arm, and when it comes time for maintenance, swing the arm to the side of the road where the turbines can be serviced in safety, without disruption to traffic?

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I like this concept/I designed a system that uses kinetic energy from moving vehicles,to produce power/using hydrolic fluid and turbines/

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if you coupled this system with a mod of wirless enrgy transmission the cars could potentialy power themselves also if you have the new paper thin solar cells on the vehicles it would be possible to get a net gain of enegy enough to power both the cars themselves and the surrounding area

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