Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Car-Gen

 Generate electricity by using moving cars
 
(+2, -2) 		  [vote for,
against]

I got a million stupid ideas. (my wife says)

Pass a law that requres all cars to carry belted magnets on the underside of its chassie, Then affix in the road, several sets of coiled copper wires, like a generator core laid out flat. Will the passing cars generate power?

—FreeNRG, May 01 2002

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       Magnetgo
—bristolz, May 01 2002
   

       [Darnit, UB, ya beat me to the punch. My answer was about the same as yours:]   

       Sure. And the cars will lose kinetic energy and therefore need to be a bit more powerful to maintain the same speeds as before. And all things being equal, they'll have to burn a bit more gasoline.   

       Sadly, you'd almost certainly come out ahead designing a really efficient generator to burn an equivalent amount of gasoline instead--and that's baked.   

       Whoops, here's how you could make it work: install the coils only on downgrades steep enough that cars would normally have to use their brakes. The coils + magnets will slow the car some and you'll generate some power, but the cars won't have to burn extra gasoline! (We've already seen some proposals for extracting the energy from car brakes, though.)
—Dog Ed, May 01 2002
   

      
—FreeNRG, May 01 2002
   

       You guys left him speechless.
—waugsqueke, May 01 2002
   

       <Homer Simpson> In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!</Homer Simpson>
—RayfordSteele, May 01 2002
   

       Now this wasn't shitty per se, just a tad impractical. And there was an odd bit where he posted a response below my anno indicating he didn't get the gist of our objections...by the time I finished a clarification he had erased his response, so I think our good friend FreeNRG got the picture but perhaps did not realize he could delete the entire post and merely erased his verbiage instead.   

       Don' ee be s' hard 'im, eh? It's not like he's a troll or toilet-mouth.
—Dog Ed, May 02 2002
   

       I think he's just temporarily out trying to get the sewer lids pried off the magnets under his car.
—spartanica, May 02 2002
   


 

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