September 8th, 2009
Burger King cooking up renewable energy
Drive up to Burger King, stop your car, generate electricity. That’s the plan being tested right now at the Burger King in Hillside, New Jersey. The tech being used is called MotionPower™ Kinetic Energy Harvesting System. It is made by New Energy Technologies, Inc. They used the Hillside BK for real-life field tests.
Here’s how New Energy explains their system, “New Energy’s MotionPower™ technology is designed to be installed in locations where hybrid, next-generation electrical, and conventional fuels-driven vehicles decelerate or stop, thus ensuring that vehicles are not ‘robbed’ of energy they would otherwise use to accelerate. Instead, MotionPower™ devices actually assist vehicles in slowing down, and in the process of doing so, capture the vehicles’ motion energy before it is lost as brake heat, and creatively convert that energy into clean ‘green’ electricity…As millions of vehicles slow or come to a stop at toll plazas, rest areas, traffic calming areas, drive-thrus, and countless other roadway points, their motion energy, derived from the burning of fossil fuels, is dissipated in brakes and lost as heat to the environment. New Energy’s MotionPower™ devices use this lost energy to generate electricity.
“MotionPower™ devices make use of the energy wasted by these millions of cars, trucks, and heavy vehicles when they slow down or come to a full stop countless times throughout the day, and convert this otherwise wasted energy into valuable, clean electricity.”
New Energy is fairly mum on their actual kinetic energy harvesting device, patents are pending. With a quarter-billion vehicles on the roads of America that is a huge potential source of otherwise wasted energy. This video shows how it works: weight of car pushes down spring-loaded bumps that drive gears and thus generate electricity.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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