Invention!!!! Solar panels used as roadways! Check this out!

[Deborah K]

Can this really work?

 

[Sam I am]

I can't watch videos right now, and all I know about this subject is from what I've heard on Penn's Sunday School, but my understanding of it is that they haven't' quite executed on this idea yet in any significant scale.

Considering what happens to regular roadways over just a little bit of time, I suspect that solar roadways are a fairly difficult problem to solve.

 

[Zippyjuan]

The would be better along side roads rather than as roads themselves- the wear and tear of vehicles driving on them and damaging them would be a problem. Depending on traffic, the cars would block at least some of the light reaching them which would reduce their efficiency. No mention is made as far as the cost either. We can't afford to maintain the much easier to fix concrete and tar roads we have today. Maintenance costs on a solar road would be much higher. Sounds cool, but not really practical.

http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-idea-1582519375

First, some background: Roads are built with asphalt, which is made of the leftovers from gasoline refining, mixed with a bunch of dirt and pebbles. They cost a lot to make, but the raw materials are not the cost driver. Labor and equipment is. An asphalt road is made with big machines that can form a 12-foot-wide lane in one continuous motion at a walking pace. No one touches the road; they just walk next to the machines and the road appears.

The Solar Roadway plan is to replace the repaving of a road with some sort of processing that will leave it in a condition to accept hexagonal solar panels and their associated wiring and networking needs. The current state of the design appears to depend on the placement of a one-foot-square grid of large bolts in the roadway. I've installed bolts into concrete, and it takes me several minutes to mark the hole, drill it, clean it out and pound the anchor into place. A mile of 30 foot wide roadway would have 150,000 bolts to install. Whee!

Then there may be some work required to make the panels talk to each other. There is mention of cutting a raceway for cables. Given the number of panels, it's likely to need a grid of raceways to work. Let's guess one cross-ways slot per row of panels, and one lengthwise raceway to collect the power. Better make that two for redundancy. That's a lot more cutting than the typical concrete highway receives for rain grooves and so forth.

The power also has to get processed. It may be possible to put some power conditioning in the panels, but that would likely double the panel cost, which is not such a good idea. No, a box by the side of the road every couple hundred feet is more likely to be the answer. I'm sure the Solar Roadways folks want the box to be under the road, but that would get in the way of cars when the box needs attention from a repair crew.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I sometimes have to play one at my job, working on huge radio telescopes. I'm familiar with statics, compression, tension, strain, Young's modulus, etc. These are the words of people who analyze whether something will break or not.

One thing about solar panels is that they are delicate. The proposed roadway protects the solar panels by placing them under a 1/2" thick glass plate. The typical solar panel that is installed on a rooftop has a 1/8" thick sheet of tempered glass. The rooftop panel is rated to about 150 pounds per square foot, or 1 PSI. Car tires are 35 PSI, and truck tires are filled to over 100 PSI. That's two orders of magnitude higher pressure. It must be passed through the solar cells to the roadbed in order for the glass to survive. Unfortunately, the scant information on the IndieGogo page gives no clue as to what method is used to transmit this force safely through the solar cells to the roadbed below.

The bumps on the prototype Solar Roadway glass hexagons are about an inch apart. A car driving at highway speeds moves about 100 feet per second, so the bumps would make a very well-defined tone of about 1 kHz. That's a medium-pitched whine. Get used to it, because you'll hear it ALL THE TIME.

More at link.

Not to mention traction problems driving on glass covered solar panels if you get snow or rain.

 

[Deborah K]

I think the concept is well-worth further exploration and experimentation. Someday vehicles will most likely be all electric/solar and lighter weight, not to mention that we would be able to program them instead of drive them. And if they're built with sensors, that would eliminate accidents.

As with all new inventions, the kinks need to be worked out but the possibilities are promising.

 

[deadfish]

 

[Deborah K]

Yeah I saw that. Did you watch it?

 

[deadfish]

Did I watch the EEVBlog video? Yeah, I watch most of the EEVBlog videos, Dave Jones is very entertaining. 90% of it is above my technical knowledge but it's still entertaining and learning about electronics is a bonus.

 

[Zippyjuan]

He spends a lot of time crunching some rough numbers. At the highest, most optimal conditions, just the LEDs to illuminate the lanes (assuming they were bright enough to see during the day which is another issue) would use up 25% of the energy they produce. If you want to add heating (as they suggest) that is going to use more of the energy (and reduce the space available to collect energy). He estimated about $10 a year return on each panel just based on energy costs and electricity production being sold back to the power grid. That does not include any other costs beyond energy production.

Night would be another issue. The entire road would have to be attached to a power grid (or tons of batteries) to be able to power the LEDs and heaters when the sun doesn't shine (as well as to take away any excess energy the tiles produced and sold back to try to pay for the construction/ installation / maintenance of the roadway.

 

[phill4paul]

Someday vehicles will most likely be all electric/solar and lighter weight, not to mention that we would be able to program them instead of drive them. And if they're built with sensors, that would eliminate accidents.

As with all new inventions, the kinks need to be worked out but the possibilities are promising.

Just hush your mouth woman. There is no promise in the possibilities. Only subjugation and loss of freedom.

 

[Dr.3D]

Just hush your mouth woman. There is no promise in the possibilities. Only subjugation and loss of freedom.

Well, maybe they will have special roadways for those who wish to control their own vehicle manually. I suspect there will be an extra fee for that though.

 

[phill4paul]

Well, maybe they will have special roadways for those who wish to control their own vehicle manually. I suspect there will be an extra fee for that though.

I hope paying extra for freedom isn't more than I can afford to spend.

 

[presence]

I read something one time about a few cities around the world that provide piped hot water to their residents using passive solar water heating in their roadways. I think the idea of photovoltaics in roads is pretty preposterous, no way it will hold up to 18 wheeler traffic, and moving goods is what roads are all about. I can see heat/hot water generation being plausible though in warm climates.

 

[Cleaner44]

Last time we had this discussion 05-27-2014:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?452889-Solar-Freakin-Roadways&highlight=solar+freakin

 

[Deborah K]

Last time we had this discussion 05-27-2014:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?452889-Solar-Freakin-Roadways&highlight=solar+freakin

I thought that might be a possibility. I never saw the last thread, and I think this is worth discussing. I love new ideas. I'm an inventor of sorts myself.

 

[dannno]

The would be better along side roads rather than as roads themselves- the wear and tear of vehicles driving on them and damaging them would be a problem. Depending on traffic, the cars would block at least some of the light reaching them which would reduce their efficiency. No mention is made as far as the cost either. We can't afford to maintain the much easier to fix concrete and tar roads we have today. Maintenance costs on a solar road would be much higher. Sounds cool, but not really practical.

http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-idea-1582519375


More at link.

Not to mention traction problems driving on glass covered solar panels if you get snow or rain.

They are expensive but the idea is they pay for themselves over time by creating energy.

They are good enough to survive wear and tear of vehicles, and they are octagonal and easily replaceable if one gets damaged.

They are covered in bumps and I think that is what helps with the traction issue, they could also frost the glass if traction is still an issue.

 

[thoughtomator]

we went over this before... it is orders of magnitude from being economically feasible even in relation to other solar energy projects which are not presently economically feasible

 

[Zippyjuan]

They are expensive but the idea is they pay for themselves over time by creating energy.

They are good enough to survive wear and tear of vehicles, and they are octagonal and easily replaceable if one gets damaged.

They are covered in bumps and I think that is what helps with the traction issue, they could also frost the glass if traction is still an issue.

That is the theory but the numbers don't add up. Not even close. Durabilty had not been tested.

Frosting the glass (or just dirt and scratches from cars) reduces light reaching the photo cells to create electricity.

Then there is the question of lifespan. Concrete roads are good for about 27 years- asphalt around 15. Solar roads? About ten. And the costs of replacing all those solar panels every ten years is huge by comparison.

 

[Peace Piper]

I love new ideas.

Exactly. All ideas should be considered. One idea leads to another. Whether the solar roads would work or not at least someone is thinking outside the box. And there's usually a median- unused land almost everywhere. Every Solar Photon that hits the earth is wasted.

If Washington DC wanted the US to be energy independent they would have done something about it in the last 40 years. What's the latest average MPG figures? 26 MPG or something? My old Acura got ~40 in the early '90s if I drove it right. There are 80 MPG clean diesels in the UK but we can't have them here. 26 MPG is a joke. But it supports the PetroDollar.

Germany: a 2.8-megawatt solar array on the roof of a 2.7 km long noise-barrier tunnel
on the A3 highway near Aschaffenburg

Germany found a use for abandoned air bases- that's Neuhardenberg Solar Park

Japan built the first of mahy solar islands-that's Kagoshima Solar Power plant

Britain built floating collectors

USA! USA! Oregon's Solar Highway project site along the interchange of I-5 and I-205 near Tualatin

A big problem is that lots of people think solar doesn't work. And lots of people still think fracking is a good idea.
Imagine what a Manhattan style project for renewable energy independence could do. Lots of jobs and the money that is going overseas would stay in this country.