Rumble strips wake you up before you drive off the highway. Speed bumps get you to slow down in places like a parking lot. In Roanoke, Virginia, the first working model of a New Energy MotionPower system recently collected power from cars leaving a civic center during a weekend that saw the circus and a gun show come to town. Clowns and guns make energy? In this case, yes.
The demonstration by New Energy Technologies Inc., done in partnership with the City of Roanoke, marked the first time a working model of the MotionPower system was used. Lloyd wrote about this system back in 2009, when it was being tested at a Burger King in North Carolina.
The same company is still perfecting the device, which helps a vehicle slow when the driver needs to, and can be seen as a form of regenerative braking technology. New Energy thinks its rumble strips are a perfect fit for the microgrid, helping power something near and dear, like street or traffic lights.
The working model here was used during a high-volume traffic period, with about 600 vehicles over a six-hour period, which doesn’t come along every day. But in a busy city, it could come along often enough to make these devices useful.
Read the entire article at: Treehugger
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