This is theft of power, pure and simple.

Theft of Power? Surely you're joking! I think this idea sound awesome.

The stuff that made Mad Cows and Englishmen possible.

So I eat the food that I buy in their store and now I walk in their store and use up what is now my food energy to power their store, This is like bar nuts that make you want to drink more.

Energy theft?

My thoughts exactly! But worse...

Every Watt of electricity extracted from a car driving over one of these kinetic energy capturing plate devices comes at the expense of the person who paid for the fuel to propel the vehicle forward, and which, having pushed the plate downward, must then expend additional energy to pull itself back uphill again, each time having a small amount of energy extracted that should, by all rights, be going toward the purpose to move the vehicle forward, now being stolen and re-routed instead to profit whoever owns and controls the energy pirating plate system.

But the larger question is this:

WHO exactly has the right to mine and extract energy from another human being, without their consent, whether it be from a vehicle in which the driver paid their own hard earned money to put the fuel in, or, even worse, from a human body moving freely on foot, and completely within their rights to do so?

WHO has the RIGHT to hijack and steal the energy of another human being as they move about?

Think about it. If this kind of thing becomes commonplace, what other methods might be developed for those with access to the capital and technology to extract energy from YOU, JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN?

WHO would establish the limits? What might those limits be? wOULD THERE BE ANY AT ALL? Until you can't walk anymore? Stand anymore? Breath anymore? How much energy would be permissible to steal from any individual?

Somehow "disgusting" is not nearly strong enough a word to describe it. This is the root beginning of a crime against humanity.

Like the income tax, if "they" have the right to take 1% of your energy, they have the right to take ALL of your energy, and leave you with NONE. At that point you are no longer a human being, but just another non-renewable energy resource to be pirated and plundered.

RJB you wouldn't be a lawyer per chance.

I hope you're joking. If they could install these on highways so much the better.

Here, you just might find this next argument a little bit interesting.

Do you know why every patent office in the world does not, by principle, accept any application for a perpetual-motion machine of any kind whatsoever?

It's basic physics. Whenever you expend energy, you actually don't use all of it. A lot of it is actually just wasted. You throw a punch, some of the calories you burned just dissipated as body heat. You push something, some of your energy end up pushing on the air around your palms. Meaning, no motion is ever perpetual, because there is always energy wasted.

So technically, this system doesn't steal energy - it uses energy you've actually (and literally) thrown away. Nobody's going to sue you if you "steal" my garbage for example.

Besides, if you really want to be exact about it, it's not the energy made by the car that's being "stolen". Actually, it's the *weight* of the car that's providing the energy, meaning it's actually energy from gravity. It just so happens that the car was moving over the plates. I mean, you can drive your car anywhere you want, but if it was weightless, then the plates aren't going to work, right?

I think you need a physics (and logic) refresher course - It is the other commenters who are correct and YOU are wrong. The energy being stolen is that needed to pull the car up off the pressure plate against the force of gravity. If you can't see that simple fact then you are as stupid as you are obviously smug.

Not only is this blatant theft by the supermarket, it isn't "green" either since its traditional power source, the National electricity grid, is far more energy efficient and less polluting than the customers' cars.

So now we can call the Sun stupid for powering solar panels and enabling photosynthesis because it's giving away it's energy for free?

Or calling humans and plant life thieves for harnessing it?

Someone needs to get their logic rearranged.

Now, now, I wasn't intending on sounding smug or flamebaiting with that comment - that was an honest opinion. :)

But hey, speaking of basic physics, you're right with the fact that a car IS pulling against gravity. After all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction right? So, there actually IS a pull. BUT there also is a PUSH.

The thing is, I don't think you actually *pulled* on your fingers to type in that last comment of yours. In the same manner that a car doesn't PULL on gravity to PUSH down metal plates.

While there actually are two opposing forces at work here, pardon me when I say that you're wrong about which one is doing the energy we're talking about here. A car "pulls itself away" from gravity to keep its shape - when objects can't do that enough, that's when they get crushed by their own weight. However, the metal plates get pressed because the car is pushing on them - which is due to gravity's pull.

Humans and plant life take energy from the sun like this supermarket is taking energy generated from the gas in its customers' vehicles. No one would call the former example a case of theft because the sun is an inanimate object and doesn't own, in any meaningful sense, the energy that it radiates to earth. In the second case, however, the energy being taken by the supermarket unquestionably belongs to the customers. Whether or not the supermarket is comitting an act of theft when it takes the energy is down to if it has first obtained the informed consent of the customers to do it. Gven that there is NO "green" advantage to this arrangement, I can't imagine many customers who would give that consent just in order to increase the supermarket's profits at their expense.

Has anyone looked at the energy cost of manufacturing these things in the first place? They are probably nowhere near as efficient as claimed.
And yes, the system certainly does "steal" energy because shoppers fall a short distance and then have to climb up again. In the process the system gains some energy and the shopper loses some.
It would be insanity to install these things on roads, because the net result would be a greater consumption of fuel by vehicles to supply energy that that could be much more efficiently produced directly from a power station. No energy at all would be saved, on the contrary, a huge amount of additional energy would be wasted.