Portland’s New Pipes Harvest Power From Drinking Water
26th January 2016
If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city’s pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.
Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.
This is more accurately an ‘energy recovery system’ than a power generation system, since the move of the the water is the result of it being under pressure from municipal pumps, who I suspect use electricity.
January 26th, 2016 at 13:05
This project is like aiming a solar powered fan and a wind powered light at each other, sounds great unless you passed physics.