Catch the “dirty wind” and turn it into clean power. The dirty wind is the wind that cars and trucks create whizzing down the highway. Gene S. Fein and Edward Merritt of Genedics LLC (Lenox, MA) have a vision to turn freeways into gigawatt power plants by lining them with both solar power panels with nano-sized windmills and five foot helix shaped wind turbines, which are also coated with thin film solar collectors. Using a highway or other roadway allows for the installation of over 500 wind generating devices per mile. Freeway guardrails would also be transformed into solar power collectors. They also plan to turn cars into dynamos by installing solar panel “sheets” embedded with a million micro-electromechanical-windmills affixed to the car’s roof and undercarriage. Vehicle-based wind energy generating devices can generate energy while a vehicle is parked or moving. Their ideas were good enough to earn U.S. Patent 7,501,713, in which they layout a roadway system that can provide the basis for a national or global clean or renewable energy infrastructure.

The power generated and collected by an expressway power system would be delivered to the power grid to power homes or businesses. The system would also provide power to service stations and the power could be used to split water into hydrogen by electrolysis for use in a fuel cell to generate power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind, dirty or atmospheric, is not blowing or as fuel in a fuel cell vehicle.

The use of public and private highways via median and outside of breakdown lane installations of small wind generating devices offers numerous advantages. First, private highways and municipalities have existing maintenance crew as well as existing relationships with contracted infrastructure building providers who can be trained to install the wind generation systems along specified parts of roadways. Second, the wind power generation systems can be small and noiseless, small enough to fit on a median between opposite sides of a divided highway with existing median. These infrastructures benefit the wind power generator companies; the roadway owners via lease or easement revenue, and provide a stable and consistent infrastructure project generating a service provider economy for clean energy production as well as the environment.

These wind energy generating devices attached to vehicles include nano- or micrometer scale wires that gather wind energy and generate electricity, thus, substituting the function of the turbines and generators. It is believed, that each wire mechanically deforms, for example, bends in response to wind, thereby converting some of the wind energy into electrical energy via a piezoelectric effect.

Wind energy generating sheets (called “wind turbine installation sheets” or “wind turbine installation placards”) are wind energy generating devices that employ up to millions of nano- and/or micrometer scale wind energy generating devices on a sheet with a density of, typically, about 1500 to about a million wind energy generating devices per square meter of sheet. Sheets may be rigid or flexible and also provide the housing and infrastructure for wiring of the wind energy generating devices and for connective wiring to other wind energy generating sheets, to an inverter or battery system.

Nano- and/or micrometer scale wind energy generating devices on wind energy generating sheets can be manufactured directly on a given sheet and/or the wind energy generating devices can be, independently, manufactured and then attached to a given sheet. Wiring that may be used to electrically interconnect the wind energy generating devices and/or the wind energy generating devices with electric circuitry on a given sheet includes, for example, nano- and micrometer scale wiring such as gold, silicon, copper and silver nano- and micrometer scale wires.

Large fleets of motor vehicles driving along available public and private roadways may each be affixed with wind power gathering devices and the energy derived from these devices may be used to power elements of the vehicle directly, or may be used to gain credits for fuel, goods, or sold for currency. Rest areas and service stations along with all retail outlets can make these vehicle wind generating systems available for easy purchase and installation for the motor vehicle owner. Power depots where energy is deposited from fixed and vehicle deployments, installation areas and billing systems can be combined to service both fixed and vehicle deployment installations to gain efficiency and save on infrastructure cost.

New advances in solar energy gathering techniques allow for this kind of power gathering line system to be deployed in a more flexible, multi-form and cost efficient manner for power generation resulting in the development of a solar energy distributed power network with multi-gigawatt potential which may power entities directly or via interconnection with existing grid power systems. This roadway solar “line array” deployed in the median, on the side or breakdown lane or as lane dividers creates a system that produces DC current that is then passed through inverter, which converts to AC current and voltage. Power is also fed to the system by a network of vehicles deployed and installed with portable or permanent solar power gathering devices seamlessly mounted to their vehicles and containing linked battery packs that can be stored either in the trunk, inside the vehicle or attached to the exterior of the vehicle.

Small noiseless to low noise wind turbines are configured to utilizing large stretches of continuous available public and private roadways via easements, leases or the purchase specified rights to create thousands of miles of contiguous and semi-contiguous networks of interconnected wind turbine power generation. The wind turbines may be mounted in the median, breakdown lanes or just off of the highway or major roadway. This deployment may run with a complimentary set of installations that uses small noiseless to low noise wind turbines to generate wind power by affixing those wind power generating devices to motor vehicles.

The power generated by the solar and/or wind energy gathering systems can be used to both connect to a grid or to power homes businesses or systems without connecting to existing grid systems. Power generated and stored in the portable battery system can be transferred into the network power system at Power Depots which can be designed and installed at the same or different points of interconnection and direct distribution as the line array panel outputs. Power is logged by the electricity meters and is either consumed immediately by home or business loads, or is sent out to the general utility grid network. The utility meter spins backwards, or two meters are used to record incoming and outgoing power. The inverter shuts down automatically in case of utility power failure for safety, and reconnects automatically when utility power resumes. Solar power arrays or/and fixed wind turbines can be situated on a median, breakdown lane or nearby running contiguous with major roadways and offer numerous conveniences such as easy access to the grid, easy maintenance access and direct powering opportunities to homes and businesses with a potential installation footprint of hundreds of thousands of miles of available roadways.

Wind energy generating devices of very small geometrical dimensions and wind energy generating sheets employing wind energy generating devices of very small geometrical dimensions, for example, on the nanometer and micrometer scale, may be manufactured using microfabrication methods. Microfabrication methods for three-dimensional structure creation are well known in the art and include, for example, photolithography such as two-photon 3D lithography, etching such as RIE (Reactive-ion etching) or DRIE (Deep reactive-ion etching), thin film deposition, such as sputtering, CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition), evaporation, epitaxy, thermal oxidation, doping using, for example, thermal diffusion or ion implantation, wafer-scale integration techniques, wafer bonding, CMP (Chemical-Mechanical Planarization), wafer cleaning, nano- and micrometer scale wiring fabrication.

Materials suitable for microfabrication methods include, for example, silicon (e.g., single crystal silicon), silicon carbide and silicon/silicon carbide hybrid structures. Materials for nano- and micrometer scale wiring fabrication include, for example, gold, silicon, copper, silver and zinc oxide. Parts of wind energy generating devices with dimensions of about 1/8th of an inch and up can be manufactured using molding technology. All of the wind energy generating devices, but, in particular, the ones of dimensions of about 1/8th of an inch and up may replicate the well known designs of larger, that is, 5 feet to several hundred feet wind energy generating devices, for example, helical wind turbines.

Source : emergency home generators