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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Crowd Farm

New twist on collecting waste energy. Clicky.

posted by Churt(Elfkind) at 14:27

2 Comments:

Blogger Jar(egg)head said...

Interesting idea, but I can't help thinking that the application engineering and maintenance would be a nightmare. And return on investment would be slow at best.

A railway-type application might be a more suitable proof-of-concept test.

14:40  
Blogger Churt(Elfkind) said...

If you design it into a tile system where individual segments can be stocked and easily replaced it wouldn't be to bad. With the new nanotech vibration to electric materials it should be fairly cheep as well.

The biggest hold up on the idea at the moment is the amount of wattage generated. It's very small at the moment, about 46 microwatts I believe, but they are working on increasing it to a more usable level. Out of the micro watts and into the milliwatts. If they can accomplish that it becomes much more useful.

Of course the real key to environment powered buildings and such is a combination of systems including solar, wind, vibration, thermal and on skyscrapers at least the flex of the building. As the technology on these systems advances and the electric yield gets better it closes in on economically viable. The other factor that helps is technology that takes less energy. I'm not sure what the break over point will be but I do think it will happen eventually.

I don't think this technology will ever power large motors or anything like that. Lights, computers and small office building systems is possible though. It's all about recovering waste energy.

15:49  

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