Hazard Wrote:Not the point actually. It's more that creating enough copper cable for the entire road network would break the copper market entirely.It would be foolish to install roadbed piezoelectric generators in the entire road network, just as it would be foolish to install waterwheels on rooftop downspouts. Install them only where the electricity generated pays for the hardware, maintenance, and installation and end-of-life recovery costs.
Which leads to the next question: where in the road network is it economically feasible to install such systems? (How much do they cost, how efficient are they, how many vehicles need to drive over them to generate enough power to pay for the hardware?) I would expect that we shouldn't bother with residential side-streets that see maybe two or three vehicles per hour and we should try it on always-extremely-busy roads (e.g. the Brooklyn Bridge or the 401 through Toronto), but where's the cutoff between feasible and not-feasible?
Hazard Wrote:And frankly, all photovoltaics do is cut down on the energy needed from any other sources; simple fact is that even with 100% efficiency in renewable energy generation and distribution the entire Earth can't generate enough solar power or any other combination of renewable energy based energy sources to match the energy demand of the Earth.There's nothing wrong with reducing the reliance on non-renewables, even if they can't be eliminated altogether. Also, the efficiency of photovoltaics has increased remarkably recently (a full order of magnitude over the last decade, IIRC), so the newer hardware will reduce the reliance on non-renewables even more than it would have in the mid-2000s.
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Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012