More Green Power Wonderings.

Recently, I have read several articles about power-generating "ivy" and I think this idea is fascinating, and possibly brilliant.

The applications of new, greener power systems feel limitless. Reading about this, about the idea of generating power from rain and about any number of similar initiatives give me hope that we can one day have cheap, renewable energy. Cheap, at least, once economies of scale start driving down the the costs of the items required to capture this energy.

In an earlier post, I touched on piezoelectric roads, and mentioned that I was concerned about increased fuel consumption on those roads. Here is an interesting alternative - a giant network of solar panels - cleverly disguised as streets! It's amazing what advancements in areas of materials manufacture have done for green energy initiatives. Glass roads that can be driven on, and actually have even better traction than asphalt. Even in the rain! (It doesn't hurt that the Brusaws - inventors of Solar Roads have a quote from Walt Disney on the www.solarroads.com home page, either.)

It's a fascinating world we live in, and we should all be doing our part to keep it going for as long as possible. Think about it - generating power from things that are currently just contributing to universal entropy. What an amazing idea that is, and how worth striving for.

Power-Generating Roads

Okay, another try at blogging. I'm not going to promise to keep this updated as much as I would like, but I'll be trying.

Recently, I have been fascinated with piezoelectric materials (materials which generate electricity when deformed, or alternately deform when electricity is applied to them - follow the link for more detail) and with heel-strike generators (which is a broader term covering both piezoelectric and more traditional mechanical harnessing of the movement of people) as ways of harnessing the power that people naturally put out through their day. Due to this, I was fascinated when a story about Israel converting 100 meters (110 yards for those not fluent in metric) of highway to a piezoelectric generator arrived in my inbox.

This is a really fascinating possibility for harnessing existing traffic into a useful source of power, but it has a couple of downsides in my not-so-humble opinion. The first is that this could very easily increase the energy required to travel over this section of highway, which means that we are turning a relatively scarce resource (gasoline) into something that we have many other ways to generate, many of which are already clean. Sure, the idea is that it is incidentally generated, but that becomes less true if we increase gasoline consumption to generate the power. The second issue is that I think it is fundamentally irresponsible to become more dependent on people driving, at least until hybrids and electrical cars are the rule rather than the exception.

That said, the possibilities of these materials seem practically limitless, including to be used in areas of high pedestrian traffic (running a subway system from the energy of its passengers? Las Vegas casinos running from the power of all the people walking their floors? Dance clubs powering themselves with the energy of dancers?) and perhaps even to power electrical cars, or NEVs within smaller communities. In that case, where we would have electrical vehicles powering themselves, even if they get a little less mileage, it seems to be a very powerful tool. 

I know that I am looking forward to the results of this test.