Now this is a damm good idea!. Also when I was in India, I read an article about a way to generate electricity from the motion of cars on a road!.
Source: http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2466
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.
His research is aptly timed—wind is rapidly gaining attention as a sustainable power source with serious potential to feed America’s insatiable appetite for energy. General Electric, a leader in the industry, is experiencing unprecedented demand for its turbines, and although North America has been slower to adopt the technology than Europe, its wind industry is growing at an average rate of about 17 percent each year. “The United States is catching up very quickly,” GE Energy’s Robert Gleitz says. “I think if the country continues to install around the rate of three or three-and-a-half gigawatts per year, it will become one of the leading countries in wind.” In response to the corresponding need for trained professionals, the School of Engineering Technology and Applied Science in Toronto’s Centennial College launched the Centennial Energy Institute last October to educate students in developing and maintaining systems for power generation using the resources of the landscape.
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