Solar Roadways Seeks $1M to Replace Streets with Solar Panels
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I'm really not seeing the advantage of combining these two things.
I mean solar panels are great. Roads are great.
But why would you put solar panels in a place you know for certain they're going to be covered at least part of the time by cars?
Why not just make your regular road and then take all those solar panels and put them in an area where conditions are optimal for solar energy and no cars covering them to simply generate energy 100% of the possible time and then route that to said routes if you really do want to get the heating stuff working there and whatever else these solar roadways can.
I honestly don't see a single advantage to putting solar panels beneath thick murky plates of glass when you could be putting them elsewhere while still retaining all the extra functionality these things provide.
I mean solar panels are great. Roads are great.
But why would you put solar panels in a place you know for certain they're going to be covered at least part of the time by cars?
Why not just make your regular road and then take all those solar panels and put them in an area where conditions are optimal for solar energy and no cars covering them to simply generate energy 100% of the possible time and then route that to said routes if you really do want to get the heating stuff working there and whatever else these solar roadways can.
I honestly don't see a single advantage to putting solar panels beneath thick murky plates of glass when you could be putting them elsewhere while still retaining all the extra functionality these things provide.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that this would make maintenance of the roads easier. Currently, you have to get a team to block off the road for an extended period of time, peel up the existing, old/damaged asphalt, lay new asphalt, let it cure, then paint it before finally allowing traffic back on it.
This stuff would take a few guys with a few special tools to unlock, pull and place a new tile only on the damaged/worn space and they're done.
If they can use the lights on it in place of paint(which seems to be the goal) you can skip the paint step as well.
From there you can re-recycle a lot of the damaged tile before putting it back into circulation.
Also, I'm confused why people think the panels storing some electricity and outputting some as heat(only when cold) would magically cause destructive damage to vehicles driving on them. I cannot imagine these tile getting any hotter than asphalt in the summer sun, and if that doesn't destroy your tires, these things won't.
The problem is, to use solar power for anything other than helping lower the costs of a single house, is you need a TON of surface area. Solar panel farms are friggen huge and you can't place them in farmland and the like as easily as you can wind generators.
If - as unlikely as it is - every major city's roads were this stuff, you'd offset the competitive inefficiency of the glassed plates by sheer input surface volume.
That, and I'm not sure why you think having cars occasionally covering the surface would be any more damaging to efficiency if a regular solar farm has a cloudy/stormy day. It'd only really matter in places like L.A., where you get gigantic, long-running traffic jams.
And even then, the sheer surface area doing an entire city's roads would give would invalidate that localized problem.
This stuff would take a few guys with a few special tools to unlock, pull and place a new tile only on the damaged/worn space and they're done.
If they can use the lights on it in place of paint(which seems to be the goal) you can skip the paint step as well.
From there you can re-recycle a lot of the damaged tile before putting it back into circulation.
Also, I'm confused why people think the panels storing some electricity and outputting some as heat(only when cold) would magically cause destructive damage to vehicles driving on them. I cannot imagine these tile getting any hotter than asphalt in the summer sun, and if that doesn't destroy your tires, these things won't.
Economy of scale.Hagi said:
The problem is, to use solar power for anything other than helping lower the costs of a single house, is you need a TON of surface area. Solar panel farms are friggen huge and you can't place them in farmland and the like as easily as you can wind generators.
If - as unlikely as it is - every major city's roads were this stuff, you'd offset the competitive inefficiency of the glassed plates by sheer input surface volume.
That, and I'm not sure why you think having cars occasionally covering the surface would be any more damaging to efficiency if a regular solar farm has a cloudy/stormy day. It'd only really matter in places like L.A., where you get gigantic, long-running traffic jams.
And even then, the sheer surface area doing an entire city's roads would give would invalidate that localized problem.
Didn't they state in the article that these things are designed to take punishment? They'd have to be pretty stupid if they didn't create these things with making them resilient enough to handle what a typical asphalt road can or better in mind.FalloutJack said:
This^ is the reason I don't expect this to actually happen, especially not anytime soon. The corporations that make so much money off of oil and other consumable power sources would lose BILLIONS if this was actually implemented on a wide scale, so they'd do everything they can to prevent this from getting off the ground until they absolutely positively needed to.Rex Dark said:
Why do futuristic things always need to have so many features? You want to make a new form of roads? Fine. You want it to collect solar energy? That's crazy, but let's go with it. You want it to melt snow and light up? And, what was that with the wires, have the power lines underground? I just don't get why all these things have to happen at once. Revolutions almost always go back to the way things were, while small changes actually get stuff done over time.
Ah, no no, I mean like stuff getting all over the panels. They wouldn't let people drive on it if they didn't think it could remain intact. I mean more like all the crap of the world getting all over it and inhibiting the process.immortalfrieza said:
i just dont like the blind optimism that goes along with "renewable" im no expert in any of the fields of science touching this , but correct me if im wrong , you cant create or destroy anything you can just change its state, e=mc sq and all that and we know we cant predict effects this complex that chaos theory thing.... i just dont see how blindly removing such huge amounts of energy from the weather system can possible be a good thing.
The Earth isn't a closed system. Sunlight is constantly bombarding the planet, which is energy coming into the system. We are simply harnessing some of this energy with solar technology.zumbledum said:
Or, if you want to think about it another way, the sun is basically a massive nuclear reaction and we're just harnessing a tiny fraction of the energy it's producing. It's not truly limitless since one day the sun will burn out, but for our needs it's practically limitless energy.
At any rate, renewable energy certainly doesn't violate any fundamental laws of nature or energy conservation or anything like that. Like I said, the key thing to remember is that Earth is NOT a closed system, so mass and energy conservation laws can't be applied.
yeah i do get all that , but whatever energy we take from the system , be it solar wind tide whatever, means that energy isnt going where it used to that has to have an affect?Avaholic03 said:
sticking this solar powered road surface downs isnt going to magically make the sun shine brighter is it? no its going to redirect that energy from where it currently goes.
butterfly wings... but sucking enough energy out of the weather system to power a country np! i just dont see it.
Hahaha.. no.
This is a dumb idea because we have cities full of houses that have roofs that really could use a solar power upgrade....
Noone drives on fckns house roofs....
Germany was well on its way subsisding houseowners to install solar panels and alas it had a positive impact, but then the energy lobby won the lobby war and now its fucked.
This is a dumb idea because we have cities full of houses that have roofs that really could use a solar power upgrade....
Noone drives on fckns house roofs....
Germany was well on its way subsisding houseowners to install solar panels and alas it had a positive impact, but then the energy lobby won the lobby war and now its fucked.
I think you're thinking about this a bit too hard. But hey!zumbledum said:
Consider how energy from the sun impacts earth. Currently, light that comes in is largely refracted in the atmosphere, or bounced back into space from the cloud layer.
If it GETS to the surface of the earth, right now, you've got part of it hitting asphalt roads, some of which bounces off back into the atmosphere. Some of it, however, is absorbed due to the asphalt being a dark color, and is retained as heat.
However, this heat is non-permanent, and is bled off back into either the ground or the air over the course of the day as it gets cooler.
Percentages-wise, I don't imagine it's likely to impact things on a large scale.
As they're using glass, you're still getting some reflecting back off of it into the atmosphere(actually likely a much higher percentage than the asphalt), and some of it is being absorbed into the solar cells for energy instead of heat, as in the case with asphalt.
From there, the cells could either heat the cells, making it act identically to asphalt, or whisk it away to be used elsewhere as electricity. So at most, you'd get a very minute variation in ground-level temperatures during the daylight hours where roads are. Given that the glass surface is likely to reflect back a comparatively larger percentage of light and energy than the dark asphalt, it would likely even-out the amount of energy going into the atmosphere at ground-level.
So the likelyhood of it being an appreciable enough difference to have huge impacts on the weather or environment is pretty astoundingly unlikely.
Obviously to be sure you'd need to run some kind of simulation to see if there's any real impact, but but a rough thought-experiment and my gut says it wouldn't.
This biggest issue here is that they're promising the moon. I mean, smart roads offer everything but a back rub, and while I get futureproofing something designed for massive infrastructure, it increases the cost and doesn't all seem necessary. Some of the features are neat, though.
We're talking about a fairly trivial amount, even if we're talking huge sections paved. solar cells aren't even that great at conversion and still do put off a fair amount of heat. It's not going to be significantly worse than putting pavement there in the first place. And there's a lot of other factors, which I'm almost positive if someone crunched would make any net loss not worth the energy it took.
I mean, we actually have people painting buildings to reflect more light/heat and contribute to counteracting climate change, which is going to do (comparably, remember) way more. And it's been suggested we do this for roads.
But still, everything we do takes energy from the system. Existing means we have an effect.
This operates on the assumption that they cannot or will not be cleaned. Otherwise, there's no issue from any of the listed items.FalloutJack said:
As opposed to normal asphalt, which doesn't absorb sun? Most of the panels I've dealt with get less hot than your average city road, so the major difference is that one converts sun into potential to do useful (for us) work, while the other solely heats.
Even without the raised sections, the glass appears textured.Jupiter065 said:
I really don't think the two are mutually exclusive.thaluikhain said:
I'd be more worried about the drag the moon causes on the earth. And I'm not very worried.zumbledum said:
We're talking about a fairly trivial amount, even if we're talking huge sections paved. solar cells aren't even that great at conversion and still do put off a fair amount of heat. It's not going to be significantly worse than putting pavement there in the first place. And there's a lot of other factors, which I'm almost positive if someone crunched would make any net loss not worth the energy it took.
I mean, we actually have people painting buildings to reflect more light/heat and contribute to counteracting climate change, which is going to do (comparably, remember) way more. And it's been suggested we do this for roads.
But still, everything we do takes energy from the system. Existing means we have an effect.
heh once again i get all that , all im saying is every joule amp or whatever you measure raw energy in goes somewhere. and renewable energy gathering methods do alter it.Areloch said:
i also know very small changes can have very massive impacts. hurricanes only become possible with a certain sea temperature for an example.
now i recall seeing a meteorologist saying that the most we can really predict ahead is 2 hours with real accuracy we simply cant model the system it has far too many interacting parts
it just seems to me the only things we can definitively say about renewable energy, it will have an impact on the weather, and we dont know what it will be.
if its good bad small or world altering we dont know and we dont have the ability to tell. and as we have set up according to how it is, isnt any change going to be bad news
The way I see it is that any sudden, radical, change is going to be really bad for quite a while. It all comes down to long term benefits. Overall if this could be made to work, it would be great for humanity in general *HOWEVER* the problems I can see with this are legion (some of which have already been mentioned), and that is to say nothing of
what will come up later. My basic attitude is that if this is going to work the government needs to go "all in" despite massive inevitable political and public backlash on an unprecedented scale, and work on the problems as they occur once the infrastructure has been installed. I do not however see that happening though, so I imagine this will be one of those ideas that might see some limited trials, but will likely never go anywhere because it will never see the necessary backing until all of the problems are dealt with in a way that could never happen without implementing the technology on a large scale first. We are incapable of achieving the needed level of perfection to get a consensus for radical changes like this, especially when you consider all the old fogeys who will oppose anything this radical figuring it's something other people can do once they are gone.
That said, a big thing that needs to be considered here is that a LOT of states have trouble maintaining their roads, and especially when your dealing with areas away from the coast, the so called "flyover states" unpaved roads become increasingly common due to the state simply being unable to afford paving everything, never mind maintaining it. Heck, some states are under constant fire for not even being able to maintain their most vital highways without assistance.
what will come up later. My basic attitude is that if this is going to work the government needs to go "all in" despite massive inevitable political and public backlash on an unprecedented scale, and work on the problems as they occur once the infrastructure has been installed. I do not however see that happening though, so I imagine this will be one of those ideas that might see some limited trials, but will likely never go anywhere because it will never see the necessary backing until all of the problems are dealt with in a way that could never happen without implementing the technology on a large scale first. We are incapable of achieving the needed level of perfection to get a consensus for radical changes like this, especially when you consider all the old fogeys who will oppose anything this radical figuring it's something other people can do once they are gone.
That said, a big thing that needs to be considered here is that a LOT of states have trouble maintaining their roads, and especially when your dealing with areas away from the coast, the so called "flyover states" unpaved roads become increasingly common due to the state simply being unable to afford paving everything, never mind maintaining it. Heck, some states are under constant fire for not even being able to maintain their most vital highways without assistance.
there is a road in my city where i can release my steering wheel because the traffic has work ditches so deep the car steers itself inside them. they replaced that road couple years back and the ditches are back, because thats how much cars drive there. and i live in a eastern europe country where what we call traffic jams are a joke to westerners.
can these panels deal with wear and tear hundred times better than actual asphalt? no? well then its not going to work.
can these panels deal with wear and tear hundred times better than actual asphalt? no? well then its not going to work.
actually clouds do not hamper solar panels much nowadays. theres plenty of sun going through clouds. for example the UV is going through clouds completely.Areloch said:
Certainly...but we've not really achieved the much easier one, I think it's a bit early to talk about getting a much more complicated one.Zachary Amaranth said:
Ah, you have a point there.nevarran said:
Still, why use the roads, instead of building a dedicated solar plant somewhere?
I think they should spend the cash on a prototype; build a single road in a place with extreme weather & have semis drive over for a year, see how it holds up.