Solar Powered Roadways

[Thomas Promise]

This may no longer be a pipedream. Solar powered roadways may become a reality.

 

[tsap seui]

Freakin' cool, Dude. I can't wait to have my own freakin' solar driveway....

 

tsap seui

[credzba]

I was thinking of putting solar cells on our house, but this would be WAY better.

They need to get past all the hype and sell me some cells !!

[ameriken]

They've raised over $1m on indiegogo.

 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways

[danb]

Interesting. This Indiegogo site. It seems like it is a vehicle to channel donations and is not a vehicle to buy stocks in this venture. On the surface the project sounds like a great idea. I wonder how technically and fiscally sound it is. Are there solar cells and batteries/energy storage devices that are cost effective? Indiegogo has now helped that couple raise over 1.3 millions dollars. Wow. Danb

Edited May 27, 2014 by danb (see edit history)

[ameriken]

I wonder how technically and fiscally sound it is.

 

 

Fiscally it's gotta be a astronomical....I'm thinking to entirely re-do our infrastructure, which includes redoing all our roadways in solar panels and rewiring the electrical grid to power communities has gotta run into the trillions. According to an Ohio DOT link, just repaving a road with cheap asphalt is

 

$120,000 per lane mile for 2 lane roads

$502,000 per lane mile for 4 lane roads

https://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Finance/GASB%2034%20Documents/PavingCostpermile.pdf

So simply repaving just 1000 miles of one four lane hwy is $502,000,000.

I'm guessing if successful, their initial sales would come piecemeal from well to do homeowners and businesses (and perhaps local govt offices) who want to redo their driveways, sidewalks, parking lots, etc. As the technology gets better (and cheaper) then maybe governments on the fed and state level may jump on board. Who knows how long that might take. Great idea though, I hope it takes off.

[ameriken]

 

Solar Roadways passes $1.4 million in crowdfunding: Just short of the $56 trillion required, but not bad for a crazy idea

• By Sebastian Anthony on May 27, 2014 at 1:45 pm

Over the weekend, the Solar Roadways project on Indiegogo reached its target of $1 million. At the time of publishing, that figure is now north of $1.4 million, with five days left to go. The concept is verging on utopian: By replacing the USA’s concrete and asphalt roads with solar panels, we could produce three times more electricity than we consume, instantly solving just about every energy problem we have (geopolitical stuff, reliance on fossil fuels, CO2 production, etc.) It’s not hard to see why Solar Roadways has attracted so much attention and money: On paper, it really does sound like one of the greatest inventions ever. In reality, though, where, you know, real-world factors come into play, it will probably never make the jump from drawing board to large-scale deployment.

Solar Roadways, the brainchild of Julie and Scott Brusaw of Idaho, have been in development since at least the mid-2000s. The concept, as described by dozens of videos and blog posts over the years, is pretty simple: We replace roads with hard-wearing solar cells. By adding other electronics, such as LEDs and touch sensors, additional functionality has also been mooted: Illuminated road markings (and animals crossing the road), roads that melt snow and ice, and so on. Electrified/networked roads could also be a key step towards self-driving cars and wide-scale EV adoption.

To be fair to the Brusaws, they’re not exactly scammers — Scott is an electrical engineer, and most of the science checks out — but so far, despite $850,000 in grants from the Department of Transport, the couple have only built a small prototype parking lot. TheIndiegogo page doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, either. Right at the bottom of the page, there’s a single line describing what the $1 million (and counting) will be spent on: “We asked for $1 million to hire an initial team of engineers to help us make a few needed tweaks in our product and streamline our process so that we could go from prototype to production.”

These engineers will be tasked with the rather difficult task of turning Solar Roadways from a utopian concept into a real-world product. I do not envy them. While no one is arguing that it would be great to turn our road system into a massive solar farm, there are simply way too many obstacles that need to be traversed — much like fusion power, cold fusion, or heck, building a frickin’ star-encompassing Dyson sphere. Chief among these obstacles is cost. While exact figures are hard to come by, there’s roughly 29,000 square miles (75,000 sq km) of paved road in the lower 48 US states. As you can probably imagine, asphalt is pretty cheap (on the order of a few dollars per square foot) — and Solar Roadways, which are essentially solar cells wedged between thick slabs of ultra-tough glass, are not cheap. Back in 2010, Scott Brusaw estimated a cost of $10,000 for a 12-foot-by-12-foot segment of Solar Roadway, or around $70 per square foot; asphalt, on the other hand, is somewhere around $3 to $15, depending on the quality and strength of the road. According to some maths done by Aaron Saenz, the total cost to redo America’s roadways with Solar Roadways would be $56 trillion — or about four times the country’s national debt.

Beyond cost, there are other factors like strength and durability, how to store the power, how to wire remote stretches of road into the grid, and, perhaps most importantly, how to keep the roads clean.

The Brusaws say the glass tiles can support 250,000 pounds (113,000 kilos), which is certainly enough for any vehicle that might use the US road system — but what about withstanding piercing impacts? What about chemical spills and fires? If a glass tile breaks, is it easy to fix? Will the shards puncture tires?

To get around the roads-get-rather-dirty issue, Solar Roadways proposes using self-cleaning glass — but in a kind of hand-waving way that conveniently forgets that self-cleaning materials, by virtue of being oleo- and hydrophobic, are incredibly slippery. Sounds like the perfect way to make the morning commute a bit more exciting. Suffice it to say, dirty roads, broken roads, and roads that are too far away from civilization to be useful might as well make no power at all.

With all that said, there’s still no denying that Solar Roadways are cool — but why not just, I don’t know, put solar panels along the side of the road? Or on the roof of your house? Or in the desert? Having built-in ice and snow melting is pretty neat, and lighting up when an animal steps on the road is cute, but neither are worth $56 trillion. Rooftop solar arrays are reaching the point where they’re actuallyquite cost effective in certain parts of the world — and they’re much, much cheaper than building a Solar Roadway — but adoption is still very low. As much as I’d love the US to be blanketed in green, fossil fuel-replacing electrified Solar Roadways, it just isn’t feasible. On the small scale, there could well be some companies that roll out Solar Roadway parking lots — but I think that’s about it, for the foreseeable future.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/183130-solar-roadways-passes-1-4-million-in-crowdfunding-just-short-of-the-56-trillion-required-but-not-bad-for-a-crazy-idea

 

[Joecy]

love this video, freakin' fun and exciting!

[dnoblett]

This from Dr. Roy Spencer...

 

Why Are Solar Freakin Roadways So Freakin Popular?

May 31st, 2014 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

My blog traffic has been unexpectedly blowing up with visitors to my post, Solar Roadways Project: A Really Bad Idea.

 

The comments posted there suggest the Solar Roadways project remains very popular….it has now generated over $1.7 Million in Indiegogo.com crowd funding donations.

Now, I can only ask: Why the hell would any sane person take perfectly good solar collectors and try to embed them in roads and run over them repeatedly with heavy, dirty vehicles?

 

Do we take airplanes and drive them down roads? We could if we really wanted, I suppose.

I’m not the only one who sees the stupidity of the idea. Here’s a very critical post at ExtremeTech.com, and another at Jalopnik.com. And another at Equities.com.

 

The question that fascinates me is, why does this idea have such popular support? Here’s my theory.

 

We all have the experience of driving down, and walking on, roads. They are typically dirty, and hot. They represent sources of both eye pollution and real pollution.

The Solar Freakin’ Roadways project has cleverly suggested, why not replace those dirty awful road surfaces with nice, clean, hi-tech surfaces that do something useful (generate electricity)? Look how pretty it would be!:

 

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Downtown-Sandpoint-2-small.jpg

 

I know I’ve wondered about all of that solar energy collected by the road, generating all that heat. But I also know that a solar heated surface does not mean you can generate much electricity. Solar domestic hot waters systems are over 90% efficient, but solar PV electricity generation is more like 15% efficient.

 

As discussed here, solar panels and roads that you drive on are two things that are very incompatible. There is no good reason to mix them. In fact there are many reasons to NOT mix them.

 

Nevertheless, the Department of Transportation awarded almost $1 million in Phase I and Phase II SBIR contracts to study the idea. Of course, we all know the government is careful about what it gives money away for, right? (I used to review SBIR proposals submitted to NASA. I wouldn’t have recommended this for funding.)

At the end of the SBIR Phase II, there is supposed to be a solar parking lot completed…which is big enough to park 4 cars on. Cars which would shade the parking lot from collecting solar energy. A parking lot which you can’t tilt toward the sun to collect more energy, as is usually done with solar panels. For close to $1 million.

 

Sorry, folks, but solar-based electricity is far from free. In fact, it’s very expensive, even under optimum collecting conditions. Even with subsidies and higher rates forced on consumers, less than 1 kWh of every 500 kWh generated in the U.S. comes from solar. You can have quite a bit more than that 0.2%…if you want to pay extra. After we went one week without power following the 2011 Alabama tornado outbreak, I looked into building my own system with cheap China-made collectors. I finally decided that it wasn’t worth several thousand dollars to collect enough energy to power only a refrigerator and a couple of light bulbs.

 

I encourage you to read the problems other people see with the idea, posted above. I agree we need to be investigating alternative sources of energy, but I can confidently predict this is an idea that is going nowhere. And as long as we keep spending money on stupid ideas, it takes that money away from funding more deserving ideas.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/05/why-are-solar-freakin-roadways-so-freakin-popular/