UK Store Uses Parking Lot as a Power Plant

How’s this for clever: Using a parking lot to generate power.

Sainsbury, a supermarket in Gloucester, England, has installed kinetic plates in the parking lot that use the low-speed travel of vehicles to pump a series of hydraulic pipes. Those pipes drive a generator. For those of you who slept through physics class, this is called piezoelectric power.

It’s the same technology Formula One cars use to convert the kinetic energy gathered when braking into power later. If used on a wider scale, like in a theme park, the system could even power roller coasters. After all, more cars means more kinetic plates means more power generation.

The Gloucester supermarket’s system supposedly generates enough power to run the store’s checkout aisles — up to 30kw of energy per hour. The store is also looking at harvesting rainwater and heating it with solar panels during the summer.

Vehicles Run Over Road Plates to Power Sainsbury’s Supermarket (GreenLaunches via Engadget)

Comments

law of conservation of energy implies that basically the store is using a tiny bit extra gas, paid by the driver of the car, to provide electricity.

to overcome the little extra resistance to forward motion by the plates, a tiny bit of extra fuel needs to be expended. no system is 100% efficient, so you actually get some loss as heat etc when generating the electricity. similarly, if you put the car on a declining slope, the car arguably can use its potential energy to push down the plates as it travels downhill. well, guess what, it'll have to use extra gas later to get back up to where he started. dumbest idea ever.

on the other hand, previously reported efforts to use the similar system for PEDESTRIAN traffic is great because the few extra calories (not KCals) we use to generate electricity will help us lose that extra few miligrams of fat weight.

Used as an alternative to a lump-o'-asphalt speed bump, this would indeed provide a net gain, as the cars would have to be slowing anyway.

Or if put on a decline, the energy would come from kinetic energy rather than that energy going into heat of the brakes.

Dan,

a decline uses potential energy, not kinetic. like i said, you would then have to use extra gas later on to climb back up.

i guess a viable scenario would be if you have an underground parking garage that you have to descend into anyway, these things will recapture some of the energy and reduce the need for braking.

Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when stressed. This is not piezeoelectric, as the electricity is an indirect result of the force, not a direct result.

DL-
That's what I said.

Works for any parking garage that is more than one story, whether up or down, really. Unless the decline is so small that you never need to use your brakes to control your speed.

Dan,

kinetic energy does not equal potential energy.

if you implied the use of a decline already existing in a parking structure, as opposed to putting in a decline even if the parking area actually exists on the same level as the store (which is what you actually seemed to say), then i'm sorry.