Great Idea: Wind Turbines in Highway Barriers
This is the coolest, most original idea I’ve read in months:
How many speeding cars does it take to power a lightbulb? For Mark Oberholzer, a runner-up in the 2006 Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition, this might not be such an absurd question. His project proposed integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes that would harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy. “Opposing streams of traffic create really incredible potential in terms of a guaranteed wind source,” Oberholzer says.
Isn’t that ingenious? The article has some illustrations showing how it might work. Confronted with the problem of feeding the electricity back into the grid, Oberholzer proposes putting a raised light rapid transit (like our SkyTrain) above the barrier, to use the generated juice.
January 16th, 2007 at 10:57 am
I have been waiting for twenty years to see Skytrain extended to the Fraser Valley. It’s simple (to me–with my comprehensive ignorance of engineering and possibly basic math and physics, anyway).
Run a line down that enormous highway median that was designed to create expansion room that they’re clearly never going to use.
Adding these turbines to power it would just be icing on the cake. Now all we need is a GVRD with some intestinal fortitude and vision …
Here’s to another twenty years, eh?