We are all in favor of coming up with innovated ways to produce energy, we just have "green" fatigue, so when we heard all this chatter about Burger King going green we lost enthusiasm.
But we took a second look and realized this Burger King thing was a smart technology to create energy, it's the brainchild of a company called New Energy Technologies.
The firm has developed a prototype device it’s now testing at a Burger King in Hillside, New Jersey.
The “Motion Power Energy Harvester” is designed to capture kinetic energy from vehicles that would otherwise be lost when drivers hit the brakes going through the drive-through.
It looks like a flat speed bump with long pedals across the top that press down when tires roll over them. That force turns gears inside, generating 2000 watts of electricity.
The goal is to collect enough energy and distributing it in a cost-effective way.
The forces behid this project say, “If this is multiplied by ten times the length and we have 100,000 or 150,000 cars a year the device will pay back in less than two years.”
Company President Meetesh Patel says Motion Power devices could be effectively used in any number of high traffic areas including shopping centers, intersections, rest areas, border crossings, and toll plazas but admits any use on public roads would require negotiations with local governments and highway departments.
“We’re creating a new industry and if we’re first to market with this thing we definitely will be at the top of the wave,” Patel says.
No one is suggesting the device in the drive-thru lane would provide enough power to run the restaurant, including franchise owner Drew Paterno, but he jumped at the offer to install the prototype at his location on Route 22, and says he’d consider placing an order for a dozen of them.
“If the thing works and it does what we think it will do," Drew says, “we’d be interested in installing it in all our locations.”
That won’t be possible until the Motion Power device is ready for market, which Patel says could happen sometime next year.
