Solar Roadways Project Beats $1M Goal, Should Enter Production 311
Lucas123 (935744) writes "It appears an Idaho-based company that created prototype panels for constructing roads that (among other features) gather solar power, will be going into production after it exceeded its crowdfunding goal of $1M. ... Solar Roadways' Indiegogo project has already exceeded $1.6 million. The hexagonal-shaped solar panels consist of four layers, including photovoltaic cells, LED lights, an electronic support structure (circuit board) and a base layer made of recyclable materials. The panels plug together to form circuits that can then use LED lights to create any number of traffic patterns, as well as issue lighted warnings for drivers. The panels also have the ability to melt snow and ice. Along with the crowdfunding money, Solar Roadways has received federal grant money for development."
Thermodynamically Impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't it impossible for solar cells to melt significant snow?
The black road surface will effectively capture almost all of the sun's energy. In the northern U.S. and Canada, roads routinely get covered in snow.
The solar cell can capture a portion of the sun's incoming energy, and potentially use it to power heaters to melt the snow. This approach has several problems. Firstly, the solar cells / heater mechanism is less energy efficient than a black road surface. Secondly, if the snow falls when it is dark, the solar cell will stop working (unless it has some big batteries are present, and even they won't last long in a heavy snow fall.) Lastly, the best sun occurs in the summer, and the snow hits in the winter, when less solar energy is available.
About the only way a solar cell can keep up with incoming snow is if the solar array is much larger than the area of snow being melted. However, even then, you still have the problem of the solar array getting covered in snow ...
Re:Thermodynamically Impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
> Isn't it impossible for solar cells to melt significant snow?
Yes. Obviously if there is enough energy in the sunlight to melt the snow, the snow would melt already.
Heating snow to clear it is multiply-times less efficient than scraping it off with a snowplow.
This whole idea is the dumbest thing I've seen in years, designed by someone who knows nothing about solar power or road engineering. Ask anyone on the planet who's ever had a re-lay a cobblestone road surface how well they think this will work.
Re:Thermodynamically Impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, cobblestone?
I'm a transportation engineer (I'm posting this anonymously so the details of my employment are not associated to my account) though with very little experience designing pavements. What my experience tells me though is that regardless of the panel itself it needs some sort of frame to hold it down.
Vehicles generate thousands of pounds of force parallel to the pavement face when they brake. This is what causes rippling in pavement at intersections when the asphalt is too soft or weak. So they've got the friction to stop the car what transfers that force to the ground (and prevents the ground from shifting)? Naturally you are going to need some sort of frame with very positive connection to the ground. That sounds unbelievably expensive. Current roadway costs are near $2 million dollars per lane mile (a 12 wide width of pavement 1 mile long). The materials that make up the roadway are generally pretty cheap (various engineered sands and gravels) and are applied to the roadway using large heavy equipment with very little human labor. You've now replaced that with presumably the same base system (you still have the same loads) a metal frame to hold the panel in place and the panel (these systems would replace the hard surface ie the asphalt or concrete). Even a minimal frame material wise is going to massively expensive. Steel is very very expensive in rough bar form (in comparison to things like concrete and asphalt), let alone in machined frames that require manual hand labor to install. What happens when a frame is bent? How's it anchored? Even massively damaged pavements are usually traversable, a missing or damaged panel sounds like a 2' circumference 1' deep pothole that will rip a tire off a vehicle at speed.
The next question is durability. They say they've tested them with truck loads, have they done the standard AASHTO pavement test that involves driving a semi around (in a 1/4 mile loop track) on them for 5 years straight to demonstrate long term durability? What about studded snow tires? What about an accident where a car flips at 70 mph and imparts forces that literally pulverize concrete to powder? What if the car then burns (a typical car fire approaches 3000 degrees) What about an accident where hazardous or corrosive products are spilled? What happens when a car being chased by the cops has it's tires shredded but then keeps driving on rims for 20 miles until the rims literally weld themselves to the rotor (the typical result on standard pavement is about a half inch groove from every rim for the length the car ran without rubber)? What about road debris coming off cars and hitting other cars (I've seen sections of concrete a foot thick destroyed by heavy objects falling off semis)?
How long are the panels good for? We design asphalt roads for 20 years and concrete for 40-50 years. And though the asphalt requires perodic treatments as part of it's life cycle unless a mistake was made they generally last that long. Most of the interstates lasted far longer than the 40 years they were designed for, in my state we've still got original interstate in locations that is approaching 60 years old.
We use the materials we do in roads because they are cheap, easy to put down (ie not labor intensive) and easy to fix (a temporary fix can involve dumping and spreading a load of gravel with common construction equipment). This system just screams money, and labor and lack of durability. Maybe I'll be wrong, I suspect I won't be. The ESALs (equivalent single axle loads) that a pavement takes over a life time can be astonishing (trillions of pounds of force over a 20-40 year lifetime). The panel and frame that support this are going to be flexed billions of times a year, fatigue fractures are a very real concern in metals.
Anyway, as I say I might end up wrong, i suspect I won't. I'm astonished people donated a million bucks for this and I believe once they do the real AASHTO testing that will be required before this can be used on roads they will demonstrate
Cut the bullshit. REAL FACTS FROM THE SITE. (Score:2)
Some good points, but if you're going to post such a long rebuttal to the concept you should first watch their videos and read their faqs. A lot of these points have been covered, though there are undoubtedly lots of things that need to be tested and the kickstarter is apparently to help them hire those kinds of experts. I heard about these guys some years ago and am delighted they made so much progress, so I'll take a few minutes to reply (since I just read their faq, watched the videos, etc.). p.s. they c
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p.s. I would just like to add that there is an awesome story by the great Robert Heinlein, The Roads Must Roll. He predicted moving solar powered roads decades ago. Fiction, but a great story about engineers with a can-do spirit like a lot of his stories. I remember it well from when I was a kid and reread it once in a while. I'd like to recommend it to you. Some ideas are neat but just bad engineering ideas, and some of those become better when you figure out workarounds or the science evolves. Like, I am
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Have you looked into geopolymer concrete? How does a modern freeway compare with a modern airport landing strip?
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Yeah, they're as loony as the idiots who tried to introduce portable computers.
Re:Thermodynamically Impossible (Score:4, Informative)
As someone with a PhD in Pavement Engineering, and an active researcher into pavement design, let me say this is a classic case of someone thinking that because something looks simple it is. Pavements are the most complex civil engineering structures to design, because they are the only structures designed to fail in fatigue. My wife showed me their video the other day, and all I could do was laugh. Reading their FAQ now, shows they've never asked an actual pavement engineer for their input (and FHWA funding shows nothing, in fact googling shows that they're not even really being funded by the FHWA research budget but by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program i.e. this is money to promote small business, the research is a secondary goal).
Just a correction for you though - there is not really an AASHTO testing protocol, that was a one off test done 50s and 60s. Now, most proof testing of these types of innovative designs are done by accelerated pavement testing.
Before we even look at the engineering, look at the cost: the highest cost pavement currently are precast concrete slabs, which are similar in some ways to this idea (except they are 50 times the size). They cost about $3 million per lane mile to install. There are over 8 million lane miles of public road in the US, so their idea in their video of covering all the roads in the US would only cost $24 trillion (or nearly twice the US annual GDP) assuming they could get the cost down to that of concrete... Assuming for the moment that the solar panels themselves are cost neutral, just the cost of the glass and support structures would make this impossible to afford.
From an engineering perspective, you have functional and structural criteria. Functional are skid resistance, spray, noise and light reflectivity. The glass would polish, resulting in low skid resistance at high speed, and bad light reflection. Their textured surface would be OK for low speed skid, but really bad for noise and spray, even with drainage between the panels. Many new pavements have a porous top layer for this. Their paving stone like pattern would be really bad for noise (like block paving). Putting LED lights into pressure sensors for animals would be fun, but probably not reliable, and on roads you have to have systems that are reliable because either drivers can trust them, or they are a waste of time.
Structurally, the fact that they refer to gross vehicle mass is a dead giveaway that they don't know the first thing about pavements... The critical number is wheel load. Their panels look to be an awkward size between an interlocking block paver where the wheel load is spread across several blocks, and a concrete slab. The panels would need to be connected in such a way that they can expand and contract, with sufficient load transfer between panels for the entire surface to act as a continuum. With this size of panel there would a lot of flex at the joints, which would break most materials. Concrete slabs get joined using 1 inch dowel bars... Assuming these were placed on existing pavements, maybe they would work, but my guess is that they would get beat up quickly by highway traffic.
Then there is a question of life cycle assessment. Their "numbers" page shows they also know nothing about this either. They just include the benefits... There is no measure of the system, including manufacture, construction, maintenance, etc. They also don't have albedo measurements, etc...
So, to conclude, I don't think this idea is going anywhere fast. Their first step should be to hire a pavement engineer. Then they need to do some lab testing, then use their $1.7 million for an accelerated pavement test to determine if their design can work as a road, before they do any more messing around with electronics... At least their idea is not as silly as the people who want to put piezoelectric generators into pavements to capture all the "wasted" energy...
Regards,
-Jeremy
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The thing is that it is not snowing most of the time so you only need the heat for brief periods of time. The road can soak up the solar power over many days (where individually each day could not provided the power) and dump it's power over a short period of time to heat the road to melt the snow.
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Even if we're talking about using solar power from tiles in Texas to melt the snow covering tiles in Vermont, we're talking about moving gigawatts+ of power here. I don't think these tiles could replace the huge power transmission lines.
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Solar powered melting devices have two advantages over blacktop from a thermodynamic perspective:
- Blacktop conducts part of the collected heat into the ground, whereas solar collection could hypothetically collect the energy before it gets to the ground, leaving more available to radiate back upward.
- When it isn't snowing, blacktop still radiates into the air above it. These devices could store energy to be released only when it's actually snowing.
That said, implementing these devices as anything other th
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essentially combines the labor-intensiveness of a cobblestone road with the specialized labor requirements of a hardwood floor
IF ONLY!
The plan is to have large concrete access channels [gizmag.com]underneath the hexes.
Big enough for a man (or a wild dog, or a bear, or a nest of snakes, or wasps...) to crawl through.
Cobblestone roads?
These are concrete crawlspaces filled with easily harvestable copper and covered with electronics with built-in heating elements.
You know how roads tend not to spontaneously catch fire then burn for miles underground and you can't put them out with water cause they are electrified?
Well if this ever makes it off th
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a billionaire's ruinously expensive driveway
I think you've found the real use case.
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From the Solar Roadways FAQ:
We designed our prototype to use 'virtual storage', meaning that any excess energy is placed back to the grid during daylight hours and then can be drawn back out of the grid at night. This is important as solar energy is only available during the day, but our heating elements need to have power at night in the wintertime in northern climates for snowy weather. However, we can add any current or future energy storage devices to our system. For instance, batteries and flywheels can be placed in the Cable Corridor for easy access, if customers wish to incorporate them. We chose to not use batteries in our prototype system. We fear that, if we make that the norm, our environmental project could leave mountains of lead acid battery in its wake."
Because solar roads will be on the electrical grid as both producers and consumers, the net effect is that roads and parking lots that aren't under snow cover, (because they've been plowed already, or because they're in a snowless region), provide power to offset that used to melt snow on roads that do have snow falling on them. Yes, this means that the snow melting capability will only be significant when the total road surface area 'paved' with these cells reaches a certain cri
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Their FAQ addresses this specific point. The heaters are powered by the grid, not solar alone. The solar panels feed in to the grid and then draw back out from it at night out when heating is required, eliminating the need for batteries.
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I don't think the plan is to melt snow from the energy generated from the panels but would require an input of energy. Obviously there are few things more effective in turning incident solar energy into heat than black rough surfaced asphalt.
Imagine the opacity of the glass surface after a few days of traffic with steel studs or rocks caught in the treads or just tires driving over blown dirt and dust .
The idea of a solar roadway sounds great to the intuitive but lousy to the analytical and practical.
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This approach has several problems. Firstly, the solar cells / heater mechanism is less energy efficient than a black road surface.
[citation needed]. you sound like a wikipeida editor.
Secondly, if the snow falls when it is dark, the solar cell will stop working (unless it has some big batteries are present, and even they won't last long in a heavy snow fall.)
[citation needed] or are you also a meteorological modeling scientist as well??
Lastly, the best sun occurs in the summer, and the snow hits in the winter, when less solar energy is available.
[citation needed]ahh, you're a nobel winning physics scientist as well. then you are an expert in all things and don't need to provide any citation!
About the only way a solar cell can keep up with incoming snow is if the solar array is much larger than the area of snow being melted. However, even then, you still have the problem of the solar array getting covered in snow ...
not if the solar panels were kept vertical... which would reduce the angle of incidence to snowfall.
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I have a hard time taking anybody serious who thinks you need to be a meteorological modeling scientist to know that solar panels don't work when it's dark...
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It would make more sense to just have large solar arrays in the desert in my opinion, and then roads with built in heating elements, if required, or maybe just better ways to deal with snow.
I think there are supposed to be multiple arguments for these roads in these locations. In theory, they could last longer than normal road and actually reduce maintenance costs. And if you're going to integrate heating elements, then it would be nice if they were in a section of road that would hold up. Sure, the road might not be able to actually clear its own snow, but the supposed advantage is that the road will be able to provide some of the power for its own clearing.
The basic question is whether these
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False, the solar roadway is part of the power grid, it means for a limited time it will draw additional power from the grid in winter to melt the snow and then it switches back to normal operation.
Well, I guess winter IS a limited period of time.
Critical piece in The Verge (Score:5, Informative)
The Verge had a good article criticizing this project [theverge.com]. The article doesn't break down the project completely, but points out why their goals are far-fetched, and people should not get too exited.
Also note that when looking at the project, it's not initially clear that a connection with the main electricity grid is still necessary. At night, displaying the signs and defrosting the road is done with electricity from the net. During the day, the solar panels can transfer electricity back to the grid. Their current implementation doesn't include batteries to store electricity locally, and this wouldn't be very environmentally friendly anyway.
Magic is Magic (Score:2)
Honestly this seems too good to be true. I see this endeavour never making it past a trial phase as per the below:
Disclaimer: I haven't done too much research on the subject past viewing that video that went viral a week ago.
1) Capital Cost: Looks expensive. Think of all the trenching/corridors that would need to be built. Never mind the electrical infrastructure which I think would need to be upgraded. The incremental cost to add all this to existing and even new road development is intuitively high. Espec
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It seems by approaching an optimistic (hopeful) and uneducated public they found a million dollars worth of sucker money
That's a BINGO!
Someone needs to take steps to save the planet.
HAD they made this to be installable as easily as a macadam road, and as robust and scalable, there is a VERY slight chance that somewhere down the very long road this would actually benefit the environment.
Mainly because something like that is pure science fiction.
Instead, they made this in such a way that it must sit on a HUGE foundation of concrete, with both access shafts along the whole thing AND storm-drain channels (storm-water is apparently a pollutant according to their video) AND ev
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Storm water is a pollutant depending on what it is flowing over or leaching through. In addition it can overflow combined sewer storm water systems and dump untreated waste into rivers. Have you ever done any storm water work? What county do you live in? Go try and get a permit for an acre of flat impervious surface and find out.
Not all concrete leaches C02. Make it out of geopolyer concrete a C02 sink closely related to the long carbon cycle.
If you have to invest some energy to raise the surface temp to ju
Test it parking lots first (Score:2)
Test it parking lots first as some real year round traffic and weather will show where things like this will fail.
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Test it parking lots first as some real year round traffic and weather will show where things like this will fail.
That don't make no sense, because what you want is to have it in the actual use case scenario for testing. On a nice straight piece of road someplace, where people don't tailgate too much, ha ha. You need vehicles to be going over it at speed, and you need significant sections with on and off transitions etc so that you can perform a meaningful evaluation.
As slippery as oily, wet pavement is, I don't see how glass can't be a zillion times worse, no matter how you texture it.
Light pollution? (Score:2)
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Hmmm...Good point...but if they can make it smart enough to detect animals on the road and warn drivers, then they could design them to only light up the sections of roadway that are in use, which would presumably make them even more energy efficient. Side effects of this methodology would be that it would alert cross traffic that vehicles were coming and it could dovetail into smart intersections, autonomous cars and traffic flow, but that is jumping a few steps further ahead into that general direction t
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Very little.
They will fail long before that.
It costs far more than ANY form of road (except maybe suspension bridges) and it is far harder to maintain WHILE it is far less durable.
And on top of that the quantity of electricity it produces is negligible.
And Yet (Score:2)
One is feasible and lowers carbon footprint.
The other is too costly and uses enormous amounts plastics.
Do simple tests first (Score:4, Insightful)
The should do the simple tests first.
They claim that the glass cover panels can hold up to traffic and provide sufficient traction. Why not mount just the glass covers over a stretch of road and see how it behaves? Until they get the covers right, the rest is irrelevant.
Once they have the ability to make a glass roadway, then they can deal with the question of what to put under it. How about just LEDs for traffic marking? Will they work in the day time? Will they put out too much light pollution?
Once they have the traffic markings working, they can get the heating elements needed for installing where it might snow. I'm under the impression that they have to melt the snow because the panels won't stand up to snow plows. Maybe it will make more sense to run pipes with heated antifreeze solution instead of direct electric heat. Maybe it will make more sense to redesign the glass covers to stand up to snow plows.
Once those are solved, putting in solar panels is a no-brainer that helps the economics of the project work.
In the end, once all the technical issues are solved, it's a matter of economics. What is the cost of a road made with the panels over 50 years as opposed to a traditional asphalt or concrete road when all the maintenance is factored in for each road type?
Considering all the above, I'm convinced that it makes much more sense to put solar on rooftops.
Covered roadways? (Score:2)
One economic test would be to compare the price of installing the solar roadway with the cost of building a cover over the roadway with solar panels on it.
No (Score:2)
I would rather see more businesses and individuals install PV into their local locations, that are either grid-tied with failover to standalone when there is a grid power outage, or standalone.
No need for solar roads, when most people and businesses have plenty of square meters on their property that could have PV. Over roofs, over driveways, over parking lots, and such.
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Then we need some changes in thinking on the legal side. Laws to allow individuals and businesses to install solar panels despite HOA or downtown "beatification" laws. I'd have solar panels on my house right now if I could.
The numbers (Score:2)
I was curious so I added up all the crowd funding levels for this project. I came up with some interesting numbers.
1. The sum of all funding levels is $1.37M and not $1.75M. Where does the other $400K come from?
2. 80% of the contributors gave $50 or less resulting in 35% of the contributions.
3. 1.2% of the contributors gave $300 or more resulting in 22% of the contributions.
I wonder how many of those big contributors have a stake in the business and want to make it look good.
Flat roads (Score:2)
Roads are not flat [staticflickr.com]. I realize that is an extreme example but roads are not always completely flat. They go over hills, through valleys and weather causes them to buckle slightly. All that has to happen is for an edge of one of these panels to come up a bit and you get a permanent bump in the road. Conventional roads can handle this as the bump just wears or is ground down and the road is fine again. With these panels any protruding edges would receive stresses at different angles and be prone to breakage. T
This won't work on so many levels... (Score:3)
Thunderf00t [wikipedia.org] summed up a lot of arguments why this is futile and/or a scam in this video [youtu.be]. From the summary:
(And yes, he's got a PhD in chemistry, so I trust he might have more of a clue or two what happens when a truck hits the road than an electrical engineer(!)...)
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I was a bit skeptical when I'd first heard about this.
What I hope happens is that they start off focusing on commercial applications like parking lots and drive ways.
That will give the technology time mature and the price to come down.
otherwise yeah, I suspect we'll be rebuilding a lot of roads as they work the real world bugs out.
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
That is, in fact, their plan.
Read about it on the "Vision" page of their website: http://www.solarroadways.com/v... [solarroadways.com]
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I really hate to be skeptical, especially with a project with goals as desirable as this, however I just don't see it happening. Road surfaces receive an enormous amount of wear. The current state of materials technology just isn't able to deliver the properties that such a surface would need to have to provide the described functionality.
Don't get me wrong, I really, really want this to succeed. It's just that we still can't make a solid bitumen road resistant to cracks in the long term, so how can we hope
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
They address this on their website:
"What are you going to do about traction? What's going to happen to the surface of the Solar Roadways when it rains>
Everyone naturally pictures sliding out of control on a smooth piece of wet glass! Actually, one of our many technical specs is that it be textured to the point that it provides at least the traction that current asphalt roads offer - even in the rain. We hesitate to even call it glass, as it is far from a traditional window pane, but glass is what it is, so glass is what we must call it.
We sent samples of textured glass to a university civil engineering lab for traction testing. We started off being able to stop a car going 40 mph on a wet surface in the required distance. We designed a more and more aggressive surface pattern until we got a call form the lab one day: we'd torn the boot off of the British Pendulum Testing apparatus! We backed off a little and ended up with a texture that can stop a vehicle going 80 mph in the required distance."
Not sure how true or relevant this is but they do address it.
Motorcycles? (Score:2)
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Considering in Canada we don't even go a few years without normal asphalt disintegrating from regular weather I wonder how this stuff will hold up. Winter is a bitch, especially our rapid freeze/thaw cycles. -25C today +10C tomorrow is common.
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Your windows break every year do they?
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Windows don't have to deal with frost heaves [staticflickr.com].
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And you buy that without evidence? What other glass-based material has grit and grime just "brush off?" Nevermind "doesn't scratch overtime by being worn down by grit and rocks."
It's *barely* cost effective for companies to line rooftops with solar panels which have clear glass, are tilted towards the south, and are maintained. And these folks think it will be worth the cost to bury them in roads and compete with asphalt for price? There's just no way. It's a really stupid idea. Line the side of the r
Re:Deja vu (Score:4, Insightful)
You missed the whole point of durability that I mentioned.
In Thailand, many of the roads in the southern areas use glass balls as lane markers. They don't get driven over unless a wheel is in on the lane marker, hence, only a small fraction of the actual traffic. Nonetheless, it is plainly obvious that they just don't last. They are chipped and damaged to the point that they don't fulfill their function.
Roads are possibly the most abused surface mankind makes. No type of glass that we have access to could ever stand up to long term road wear. It's just not possible with today's tech. I really think that this is a grant scam, which is unfortunate, because the politicians being scammed will be less favourable to green projects the next time a real idea comes around.
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Are they flush or do they rise above the surface? Just about anything that protrudes from a road is going to get beaten on pretty hard. This stuff is flat so the force is not going to be vectored but compression.
Re:Deja vu (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever seen a road that is perfectly flat for any reasonable distance? There are hills and valleys everywhere and on every hill there will be small edged that stick up. The edges will cause roughness and driving noise. They will also cause impacts that may greatly shorten the life of the panels.
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There are many forms of glass. Some types of glass are a lot tougher than other types. They describe the testing that they have done and how it holds up to wear and tear and how they're designed to handle loads as high as 250,000 pounds.
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They address it - but they're naively assuming that the glass won't wear down over time to a nice sheen by all the grit that will be constantly grinding away at it. And that it will apparently remain optically transparent while doing so.
Working on day 1 is easy. Working several years later is a much trickier problem that I don't believe they've even come *close* to addressing. Not to mention that replacing these tiles is going to cost orders of magnitude more than cheap asphalt.
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That is a myth [glassnotes.com]. The main reason very old glass is generally thicker at the bottom is that the manufacturing process produced glass with a thicker edge and was installed with that thicker edge at the bottom. It did not flow that way it was installed that way.
What Dr. Neuman and Labino is saying and is that if glass flowed, all the glass that comprised antique windows should be thicker at the bottom, but we know that is just not true.
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I was scrolling up and down the page, got distracted, and copied the answer from the wrong question. Here's what they say:
"How will you replace damaged panels in a highway?
Since our system is modular, repair will be much quicker and easier than our current maintenance system for asphalt roads. We've learned that in the U.S., over $160 billion is lost each year in lost productivity from people sitting in traffic due to road maintenance.
Each of the panels contain their own microprocessor, which communicates wireless with surrounding panels. If one of them should become damaged and stop communicating, then the rest of the panels can report the problem. For instance, "I-95 mile marker 114.3 northbound lane, third panel in, panel number A013C419 not responding".
Each panel assembly weighs 110-pounds. A single operator could load a good panel into his/her truck and respond to the scene. The panel could be swapped out and reprogrammed in a few minutes. The damaged panel would then be returned to a repair center. Think of how this compares to pot hole repair!"
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It is so funny how little the average nerd understands the concept "perfect is the enemy of the good." e.g.
AC: Tesla can cat FIRE!
JoeSlashdot: No shit, so does gasoline. Which one catches fire more frequently and under what conditions?
AC:No man TESLAS CATCH FIRE!!!!
Or
AC: Glass be slippery!
JoeSlashdot: The coefficient of friction is an empirical measurement.
AC:Glass be slippery!
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You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
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You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
No worse, in other words. Except it is better, because in a major metro area the roads are never actually empty, so they have to close a lane (two guys deploying cones), keep it closed (guy sitting in truck with big flashy arrow sign mounted on the back and huge shock absorber deployed), dump asphalt in the hole (aforementioned guy with shovel), compress asphalt (guy driving one of those mini roller things), and let's face it, it's the highway department, so there's at least 5 other guys standing around no
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It's just that we still can't make a solid bitumen road resistant to cracks in the long term,
If you made a road out of solid bitumen, then it would be resistant to cracks, but it would also be resistant to rolling. It would glue your car down to the road bed as you sunk into it.
so how can we hope to make electronics and other far more fragile components match or exceed that level of durability without making the costs skyrocket to the point that it is not economically viable
One of these things is not like the other. Solar panels are actually amazingly durable. I don't know of anybody driving over them, though. On the other hand, some of these fancy new kinds of glass are fairly astounding. On the gripping hand, what kind of additives do they require?
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Bitumen+gravel is used because the stone gravel provides excellent wear resistance while the bitumen holds it in a flexible and self-healing suspension. It is still the best road surface material we have by a country mile.
I share your concerns, as well as your appreciation for asphalt road surfaces, but I don't think we can't do better. What is glass but a sort of artificial rock? I've got a nice big chunk of obsidian in my yard...
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Current roads last a decade? Where? Seems round here the roads are resurfaced annually.
you must live in a land where the road workers union / mafia gives kickbacks to govt officials to pay for repairs of good roads just to flow down more taxpayer money to the mafia. welcome to how the real world works.
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Actually, I live in California, and our roads are bad because of the mafia kickback program. At least, here in Lake County. It got out of hand though, and now they kind of have a hard-on for the latest gang of thieves, who did an unacceptably bad job. It's always been bad, but this last time through was agonizing.
In fact, the rest of the country gets money from California to fix their roads, while we can't afford to fix ours, because of the way taxation works and the way the funding is distributed afterward
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The $ per square meter spent on a runway at an airport is more than a few orders of magnitude more than that spent on public roads.
I call BS on your assertion. Either that, or you can't be serious. A "few orders of magnitude" is like 4 or 5 or 6, but let's say for the sake of discussion that you mean the lowest possible value of "few," which would be 3. That's still 10^3 = 1000. And then you say "more than a few orders of magnitude," which would mean at least 10^4 = 10,000. In any case, there's no way that the dollars per square meter spent on a runway at an airport is 1000x— let alone 10,000x — more than that spent on publ
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Look into pyrcrete (sp?) by Lonestar, it was developed from geo-polymer concrete. Made from basically pourable limestone. The inventor thinks it was how the pyramids where made. In Desert Storm we landed C-130 aircraft on them 48 hrs after pouring. The pyramids are up to what ~5k years old. That is pretty fucking durable.
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Looking at their business plan, they are headed straight for failure. Reason is actually very simple. Roads are a key part of basic infrastructure. As a result, we need many of them, and they need to be cheap to construct and cheap to maintain.
Their idea of a road is extremely expensive to build regardless of mass production or technology advancement in comparison to modern roads for very obvious reasons, and maintenance is unknown but likely also astronomically higher.
Essentially this is a choice of having
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Asphalt. In some cases, concrete. In some cases, gravel.
All several orders of magnitude cheaper.
When you say "several hundred millions a year" you simply do not understand how much roads there are in US alone. Or the fact that the asking price in this project would dwarf GDP of the entire planet to replace just US roads. This not even talking about maintenance, which is bound to be monstrous in its own right, as their idea for getting decent traction is to (hold on to your seat) make patterned glass.
Which m
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Really. Because for price of one single long road of theirs, you'd have to dump half our current road network. Mathematics are brutal in this regard.
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Let's exaggerate the cost $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Let's also say at the end they pay for themselves and then some. You could take out a loan to pay for them and pay the money back with the energy they produce. So does cost really matter if, in fact, they pay for themselves?
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"Let's exaggerate the cost $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Let's also say at the end they pay for themselves and then some. You could take out a loan to pay for them"
You must have a very good credit rating if you can borrow $10^26
And who are you going to borrow it from? Theres not that much money on this planet.
If you could get that sort of money you could pay Magrathea to build you a whole new planet, and bribe the Vogons not to blow it up
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The government borrows money from itself all the time. Not a big deal, especially if this is rolled out over a few decades. And clearly, I was exaggerating the amount to make a point.
We just spent $4 trillion on a couple of wars over 10 years. Where there is a will to find the money, there is a way.
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Yeah, but you know how Vogons are. Who the hell would want to go through that kilometre-high pile of paperwork?
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This thinking if why America is in such incredible trouble right now, and it's how people are going to go into generational slavery soon.
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Man we could just get that monorail that is going to solve all of our problems then!
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not to mention the 'heating element' covers the thing? wtf? And it would have to be very hot to metl snow fast enough not to require plowing. And just imaging what a plow could do to it. How do they handle frost heaves and other shifts in the road bed?
this whole thing is impractical for roads... maybe walkways it might work.
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Um? WTF are you talking about? They are grid tied. Some times it take electrons to make electrons.
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Cost doesn't matter if they pay for themselves. "If" being the operative word here. But if it's true, it makes no difference how much more expensive they are than asphalt.
Even if they do cost more than asphalt after factoring in the electricty they produce, how do you place a cost on avoiding all the human misery that will come about from climate change?
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I've looked at their costs, and right now there's not enough money on the entire planet to replace even a portion of US road network with what they have.
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What about if we pay for it with space cash?
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You mean the military industrial complex? Those fuckers hold onto their cash tight!
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Wouldn't be enough even with that. We're looking at costs of replacement that dwarf GDP of the entire planet.
Yes, it's that silly.
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Oh cool, they put out a cost analysis? I hadn't thought they were putting it out until July.
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This sounds so prohibitively expensive to build and maintain that I don't see how any energy gained from the solar panels makes it worth it, especially since they are going to be covered by cars for a large portion of the time.
Please explain how this is better than asphalt?
From the Solar Roadways FAQ:
Since our system is modular, repair will be much quicker and easier than our current maintenance system for asphalt roads. We've learned that in the U.S., over $160 billion is lost each year in lost productivity from people sitting in traffic due to road maintenance.
What they're saying is that between reduced cost of paving, filling potholes, etc, and the reduced loss of productivity that results from less construction/maintenance, the system should pretty much pay for itself. (Also, it might make sens to factor in reduced healthcare costs and legal costs from fewer accidents as a result of better nighttime visibility, etc).
Initially the cost will probably be huge, especially accounting for the 'things they don't know they don't know' that w
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*see fundamental attribution error.
Because he is a single car commuter who lives in the burbclaves he is unaware that sometime roads are empty.
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Yeah, but you're talking about summer snow falls here. What about winter?
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They got a million dollars from people who they fooled into thinking they have something however. It's not he who asks, but he who pays after being asked that's at fault here.
They presented their project fairly well, and anyone with understanding of how things work in this world understood that it has no chance of succeeding. About the only complaint I have about this project is that if someone has extra income and they want to feel good about themselves, they would have done better putting money in countle
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That already exists. Their specific innovation is that their "tiles" are apparently tough enough to survive road use.
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And, still, the power it supplies will be unable to compensate you for anywhere near the purchase price + installation cost + maintenance costs over its lifetime, let alone pay back the original investors from just the "profit" part of that payment to the company that made it.
Sorry, it's just a huge waste. I'm all for progress and advancement and science, but when it comes from ideas that are just poor commercial products to a handful of super-rich wastrels for the look of the thing, at the expense of idea
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Just wait until an 80,000lb truck going 60mph starts flipping up those tiles like flapjacks.
I'd have to agree that I think THIS will be the real test involved. But considering we give millions away on bullshit at the federal level, at least this has a goal that people can recognize.