One day, your office windows will be harvesting energy from the sun, while the lamp-post down in the street is storing energy in its concrete.Vertical wind turbines will spin as traffic whooshes past, and pavements and roads will generate small amounts of energy from all those commuter feet and heavy buses and lorries pounding down them. Fleets of driverless taxis will give back surplus energy to the grid, and cities generally will make much more efficient use of the energy they consume.
That, at least, is the vision of many technologists, environmentalists and city planners. But how realistic is it?
New materials certainly show promise. Cement mixtures made from power station waste could turn buildings in to batteries, for example. These potassium-geopolymetric (KGP) composites are cheaper than ordinary cement, and can store up to 500 watts of electricity per square metre.
That makes literally no sense. You can store energy, not power. And per square metre ? So it's area of the concrete that matters, not volume... ?
A typical street lamp uses 700 watts each night, but a six-metre tall lamp-post made from KGP and equipped with a small solar panel could hold enough energy to power itself throughout the evening, researchers say.
Whut ? The units don't make sense !
Solar is the most common renewable energy source in cities as costs have continued to tumble - from about £3 a watt a decade ago to 40p a watt now.
That doesn't make any sense either. You can't charge for flow rate, only for total amount consumed. By those prices, it costs you £40 every time you turn on a bulb. I guess they're considering how much it costs to produce the panels that generate that much power, but they could easily have made that clearer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46064166
I should say that price per Watt (your last paragraph) is a fairly well-known term (people just leave off "of generating capacity" for brevity).
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