An Israeli energy startup wants to turn irritating rush hour traffic into electricity.

Innowattech, an energy company affiliated with Israel's Technion Institute of Technology, said generators placed under roads, railways and runways can harvest enough energy from passing vehicles to mass-produce electricity.

The generators produce electricity when mechanical force is applied, such as the pressure from a passing car's tires. The process, known as piezoelectricity, has been used for years on a smaller scale, including in barbecue lighters and a dance club where the pounding feet of dancers light the floor.

Uri Amit, chairman of Innowattech, said the technology will be the largest application of piezoelectrics to date, with a single one-kilometre lane of highway providing up to 100 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power about 40 houses.

It has its limitations since it can collect a steady flow of electricity only from busy roads and rails. But Amit said that peak-hour morning and evening demand for power coincides with heavy traffic at the start and end of the business day.

"We can produce electricity anywhere there is a busy road using energy that normally goes to waste," Amit said.

He said the first pilot program would begin in the coming months on a 30-metre strip of highway outside Tel Aviv and that similar projects could start internationally in 2010.

Efstathios Meletis, chairman of the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington, said the Innowattech technology was a "sound idea that theoretically could be done."

But problems, he said, could arise in the implementation and the co-ordination needed to bury the generators over vast amounts of highways and train tracks.

One of the hurdles was finding a way to package the generators so they are effective when buried in the road.

The company's chief scientist, Eugeny Harash, developed a casing that acts like asphalt. The generators are then put in the road during scheduled maintenance in 30-centimetre squares.

"The asphalt is elastic and the pressure of each tire that passes is picked up by the generator, which is buried about three centimetres below the road's surface," Harash said. "The drivers won't even feel a difference."