On the Lighter side: Burger King Drive-Thru to Harness Power Via Kinetic Energy
August, 2009

Better known for giving strangers rude-awakenings in bed, going on morning adventures with your wife, or romping on the beach (according to its commercials), the Burger King is now looking to place his greasy hands on something new -- alternative energy.

Burger King is going to be deploying a kinetic energy harvesting speed bump at a New Jersey location in a trial deployment. Burger King will be partnering with Maryland-based New Energy Technologies.

The energy is stored and released twice a day. It will be used to power various Burger King appliances.

The drive-through may actually be the perfect deployment for kinetic-energy capturing devices. Deployment on the highway would essentially "steal" tiny fractions of kinetic energy from passing cars. However, at the drive-through drivers are (or at least should be) already braking, so the speed bump helps speed the process and capture the energy that would otherwise go to waste. For hybrids it will still "steal" a bit of their energy regained by regenerative braking, but hybrids are still a small minority on U.S. streets.

Andrew Paterno, co-owner of the Burger King test site cheers, "More than 150,000 cars drive through our Hillside store alone each year, and I think it would be great to capture the wasted kinetic energy of these hundreds of thousands of cars to generate clean electricity."