Eco Factor: Piezoelectric devices to harness the motion of passengers passing through ticket gates.
A couple of days ago we told you how piezoelectric devices could be the key to speech powered mobile phones. While those piezoelectric devices were built to be as small as possible, East Japan Railway Company has bigger plans in their mind. They have announced the deployment of piezoelectric devices in the floors at ticket gates and other areas of Tokyo railway station. The system is intended to generate power as passengers walk through these gates.
Experiments on the setup will commence on December 10, 2008 and will continue until the early part of February. The electricity-generating piezoelectric devices will cover the area of 25-square meters in total and will be installed at seven ticket gates and seven steps of a staircase inside the gate on the railway station. JR East is expecting that the setup would be able to generate 1400KW/sec of electricity each day and could potentially be used to power the electronic displays of the railway station in the future.
The Dark Side:
The number of passengers crossing these gates will vary drastically during the passage of a day. This means that the system would generate more energy during some parts of the day and maybe even no energy at all during the other parts. Moreover, piezoelectric devices are not as efficient to provide continuous power to the all important electronic displays at a railway station, which would actually need a bunch of high capacity batteries as a backup.
Via: TechOn
Comments
Leave it to the Japanese to implement completely insane sounding technological advances. Their train technology has always been leaps and bounds beyond what we have in the United States. I really hope that this works out for them, and they are able to reduce the amount of energy needed to run their railway system by a significant amount.
I wanted to share a response to this technology that I posted on my blog thinksketch.wordpress.com
“In reality this technology is not about energy generation - it is about infrastructure. Like a battery, the technology doesn’t create energy but makes it efficient to transport energy. So it could be a great technology in roads if it saves us infrastructure costs like installing electric cables for lighting….[but] don’t be greenwashed into thinking this is some magic paint you can spread on every surface to power your life.
read the whole article here:
http://thinksketch.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/piezoelectrics-cool-useful-but-not-an-energy-solution/