John Saavedra of Look for the Power LLC writes to us as follows:
It is interesting to me that no one, anywhere in the world, is currently using intermittent, gusty winds for any purpose whatsoever. If you are familiar with the operation of gas-electric hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius, you know that they achieve high energy efficiency by capturing energy from braking / deceleration that otherwise would be (and is) lost and wasted as brake heat. By its very nature, such a power source is highly intermittent and 'gusty', with great variation in latency, duration, speed, and power. Just like the gusty winds that cover most of the Earth's surface.
Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems obviously passed the performance, efficiency, ROI, TCO, and profit / loss standards of every major car manufacturer.
Currently the world's largest wind turbine is 220 meters (722 feet) high. It is simply unthinkable to make a flat, rigid panel that big. There are no materials strong enough to keep it from self-destructing in a gusty wind. It is very hard to imagine one even one-tenth that size (22 meters, or 72 feet) high. Such is the obvious force of wind on a flat, rigid object.
This power source, completely overlooked and underutilized, can capture and harness some of the energy from vehicle turbulence, ALL currently wasted. And, it can bear advertising.
To me, it is as if the ground is covered in $20 bills, only no one else can see them - yet! - much less bend over to pick them up.
At some point in the near future, when you are driving down the road, and see a billboard sign slowly but powerfully moving in response to the intermittent gusty winds that surround it, generating electrical power, bearing advertising, night and day, rain or shine, summer or winter, making no noise, warming nothing, killing nothing, polluting nothing, with a fuel cost of zero - we will all smack ourselves on our collective foreheads and go "D'oh! Wish I'd thought of that!"
I have a sequence of 3 U.S. patents for harnessing this power source, all simple in the extreme. Here is a link to an article I wrote about this several years ago for the energy blog Cleantechnica.com: https://cleantechnica.com/2011/09/02/harvesting-the-energy-in-intermittent-gusty-winds/
Would you be interested, or know someone who would? I am seeking a research university to do the basic research leading to commercialization.
For more on high power energy harvesting see the IDTechEx report, High Power Energy Harvesting 2017-2027
Top image: Look for the Power LLC
