Energy Ownership
A recent post on Treehugger, Further Thoughts on Turning Road Traffic into Electricity, got me thinking. The article revists another Treehugger post on harnessing truck traffic to generate electricity by capturing kinetic energy of truck traffic through “special plates” set in the road:
as big trucks drive over them (about 2,500 of them per day at the port), they compress a tank of hydraulic fluid under the road, which in turn creates a series of pumping actions that turns a generator to produce electricity.
The more recent post rightly brings up issues that people brought up in comments: the energy generation would be unclean (the energy coming indirectly from diesel) and inefficient (energy being lost in the transfer and having the effect of slowing down the trucks, thus requiring more diesel to be used overall).
It’s suggested that they might make sense in very specific situations, though, such as “a downhill lane with a stop sign at the bottom where vehicles need to slow down”. This might be true, but I started to wonder about the rights involved here. Is there any legal precedent regarding who owns the energy of an object? Such an in-ground plate system would take the energy I’ve turned into motion and prevent me from using it to recharge my hybrid’s battery. Shouldn’t I “own” the energy my car (and fuel) have created?