Submitted by senormoll t3_yru597 in Futurology
Krumtralla t1_iw8mgm8 wrote
This is a gimmick.
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That's all that really needs to be said, however the last time I said this my comment was auto-rejected for being too short, so now I am forced to elaborate why this is a gimmick.
- The amount of harvested power is trivially small. Even if this was a busy walkway, constantly filled with people walking over it, best you could do is keep an LED light bulb lit.
- You can't really scale this up. You're stealing mechanical energy from traffic and pushing it through an inefficient conversion process to electricity, then charging a battery with losses, etc. The energy is not free.
- On a walking path you are making the path more difficult to walk on. On a bike path it's more difficult to bike on. On a road it's more difficult to drive on. Doing this for any long distance will be a terrible user experience and lead to a lot of wear and tear on both the harvesting device as well as the users/vehicles. You're better off putting a person on a bicycle generator, but that wouldn't be as gimmicky.
- This is not fighting climate change. There is a non-trivial amount of energy and materials embedded in the whole system. Given the super-small amounts of energy harvested, you will likely forever be energy-negative with your investment. It will break down and be junked before it ever comes close to paying back its energy debt.
- It's a gimmick.
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