Outwell grandfather is hoping people power will help with his innovative green energy project

An Outwell man believes he has created a renewable energy source using passing traffic - all he needs to test out his theory is around £65,0000 and he is hoping the public will help with that.

Dallas Twyman, a grandfather who describes himself as a creative thinker, has come up with a road side generator that harnesses energy created by traffic passing by and believes it could be a source of renewable energy for generations to come.

And he says he is not in it for the money, the majority of profits will be ploughed back into the local community to help fund social care and he hopes the energy itself could be used to power electric recharging stations for cars.

Dallas, 58, has patented his idea and has now set up a crowdfunding page with the hope of raising at least a quarter of the £65,000 needed to build a prototype of the generator. The rest he says can raised in grants from organisations like Innovation UK - who offer up to 70 per cent grants for this type of scheme.

He is confident the theory can be put into practice having recruited Northampton University to look at the best designs for a roadside post that will gather energy from passing vehicles which sets a series of gears into motion driving the generator to create electricity.

The posts could be installed along the country’s busiest A and B roads and energy collected stored ready for use in power points for charging electric cars.

Dallas said: “So how is the electricity generated? Imagine sitting in a car in traffic, along comes a car/van/lorry in the opposite direction, as it passes your car it moves from side to side. That movement is the energy we want to harness as currently it is wasted energy. Our project will not only collect the energy, but store it to be used locally or fed back into the grid.

“We are looking at promoting this to councils and the government to ensure we are generating energy from our ever-increasing traffic.

“Social Electric Enterprise Ltd is also a community company, which means that the majority of profits made from our product, will be invested back into the community into programmes like social care housing, by creating quality care with supervised action.

“This will help reduce the cost of community care by the local authorities and will also aid the NHS by relieving the pressure of the social care housing. The profits would also be invested into many other community and local projects as well to benefits all the community.

“As you can see this project is not just to help provide green, safe and clean energy but to also benefit our society in general. Once the prototype has been produced we are looking to set up premises, creating jobs and then creating a big social impact, so we need your help to make this happen.”

Dallas put his appeal for funding on http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk just over a week ago and has already attracted a few contributions. He is hoping by spreading the word more widely that more will follow.