Wind power from passing cars?

Clean Break points to an interesting tidbit on a study that a group of Canadian students are doing on the potential of using wind created by passing cars as an energy source...

Some students at Toronto's Centennial College are measuring wind speeds along the 401 Highway -- Canada's busiest and largest highway stretch -- to find out if the wind from passing vehicles can be harnessed to spin turbines. The students refer to it as "wind tunnel power" created by the movement of a 16-lane highway.

"Collected data will be used to determine the amount of available wind energy so that the college and its partners can put up an appropriately sized wind turbine that will feed electricity into the local power grid," the school states.

If something like this works, it seems a bit poetic that passing cars in the process of using up the world's oil supply could be used to generate more energy (even if only incrementally more). I like it.

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Comments

[JesseJenkins]

I also read about this. Did you find any specifics about how the wind was generated? Was it simply from passing cars (i.e. does this potentially work on any large highway) or is it the results of passing cars combined with some natural wind tunnel creating terrain or building features? It seemed a bit ambiguous to me.

Sounds interesting though. I can envision a string of small turbines in the medians of major highways across North America. Sounds like someone would have had this idea before though if it was really practical. My initial concern would be that the turbulence would be VERY high due to the wind suddenly kicking up after each car/truck passed and then going down for a bit. Wind turbines dont last anywhere near as long in high turbulence areas (that's one of the reasons they are set up 30 meters or higher above turbulence-creating surface features/buildings).

Cheers,
Jesse Jenkins aka WattHead (watthead.blogspot.com)

[Steve Spence]

Those wind generators will cause additional drag on the vehicles, causing additional fuel consumption.

[sticker guy]

Someone needs to make a bunch of bumper stickers, "Support Al Qaeda. Buy more gas to help finance terrorism" and find good places to put them

[tib]

* not to suck them in----sorry