Dr. Roy Spencer and I have been watching this project with amusement combined with incredulity. Somehow, this mom and pop operation have raised over $1.9 million on Indiegogo from gullible people who don’t have the skillset or decide to ignore basic physics, economics, and common sense in favor of future pipe dreams of green energy. This video that follows shows why their claim doesn’t make any sense, none at all. The best part? The impetus was for this idea was global warming. Here is what they say about the birth of “solar roadways”:
Years ago, when the phrase “Global Warming” began gaining popularity, we started batting around the idea of replacing asphalt and concrete surfaces with solar panels that could be driven upon. We thought of the “black box” on airplanes: We didn’t know what material that black box was made of, but it seemed to be able to protect sensitive electronics from the worst of airline crashes.
Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to “paint” the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.
Source: http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
Got that? Airplane black boxes to road surfaces logic, check. LED’s to guide cars down the road at night with optional Windex tankers ahead of you, check. Heating elements to melt snow and ice, but no cognizant idea of just how much power it takes to melt snow and ice versus the amount of power a dirty scuffed up solar cell will produce, check.
The most ridiculous parts of this idea don’t just include the unsuitability of solar tiles as a road surface (high friction surfaces and transparent optical surfaces are total opposites) and the ginormous production and maintenance costs involved, but also include the ill-considered support infrastructure requirements, the poor visibility of LED road lighting itself, and the short lifespan of materials involved.
All in all, it’s a colossal green tech train wreck, but these clowns may be laughing all the way to the bank, or they may be shysters, either way, there’s a sucker born every minute.
From the YouTube video description:
Well it basically proposes the union of 3 or 4 technologies. LED lights, solar panels, and glass roads.
Glass really isn’t a feasible material to make roads out of.
1) its too expensive. Just coating the US road system with roads would cost many times the federal budget.
2) Its too soft. Even with a textured surface for traction, it will wear away too quickly. Dirt on roads is basically small rocks, which are generally much harder than glass. Imagine taking a handful of dirt and rubbing it a window. Now imagine doing that with the wheels of a 20 ton tractor/trailer.
3) I have doubts about the physical properties of the glass to take the load and mechanical heat stress required of a road making material.
Solar panels under the road is a bad idea from the start. If they are under the roads, they are hard to maintain. They will have reduced light from parked cars etc. They are fragile. Not really congenial to the conditions you are likely to get on a road. In many ways building a shed over the road, or just having solar panels by the side of the road is a far better idea. However the power transport really isnt practical. One of the most efficient ways to transport electricity around is as high voltage AC. However to build those lines would probably double the cost of any construction. To bury the cables is even more expensive.
LEDs for variable road marking have been partially implemented. They are usually only cost effective in dynamic traffic management systems. For most roads its utterly pointless as the road markings almost never need to be altered. These LED are usually not easy to see (especially in full daylight when the solar panels are meant to be generating power).
However solar powered roadways has generated well over a million dollars for Julie and Scott Brusaw (a therapist and an engineer).
I’m still on the fence as to if they are just delusional dreamers or (now millionaire) con artists. A lot of this looks like just direct ‘what if’ daydreaming, but then you get the part of the promotional video where they are shoveling ground up coloured glass into a wheelbarrow, while narrating that they use as many recycled materials as possible in this project. It’s very difficult to not see that as a direct lie. They must know full well that they did not use any of that material in the construction of their glass tiles.
Watch the video:
And here is the original video pitch that earned these green dreamers 1.9 million dollars for an idea that was dead out of the gate.
This is inspirational. Completely inspirational. There is money in them thar rubes.
It is time to tuck in and get some.
I think you are all being needlessly cynical. They know, as we do, that this will never be adopted on major public roads. But you can imagine large prestige companies putting it down on their driveways and employee parking of their headquarters etc. not for its utility, but because it shows everyone how much money they have yet at the same time care for the environment.
As a business idea, it’s not as whacky as it looks AS LONG AS you appreciate the pitching as a public highways products is a smokescreen, and it will sell as a niche status product, and probably make them a sackfull of money.
Easy. You power the ‘solar’ cells with moonshine. It’s not altogether looney—if you can’t sell the idea, you can drink it.
/Mr Lynn
Ideal project for Arctic roads where the sun never sets in summer. Pity about the winter, though.
Put them on airport runways. I’m sure there are grants to a) study the issue, b) study the issue some more, c) put a “pilot” operation together, and d) subsidize the “Airport Energy Self-Sufficiency Mandate (EPA Approved)”
Agree fully with “soarergtl” above at 6:12am, “It’s just an idiots tax….”
Usually the morally superior use MY money to make themselves feel better and to retain a seat on their high horse. This time they’re putting their OWN money in – so good luck with that.
As the saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted”.
TheBigYinJames
“…probably make them a sackfull of money”. I think it has done already
No mention of water in the interstices freezing and expanding in winter. They look to be quite expensive items too.
Still it must be quite a good feeling to take money off of the greenies who want to feel good about themselves. Kind of a win-win as long as they never have to actually produce any let alone put them into service.
But, it’s so COOL!!! Damn you, harsh reality.
Good for them.
They are simply making use of the well-known law that states “it is immoral to allow idiots to remain attached to their brass”.
I just wish I had the bottle for it!
Ric Werme says:
June 4, 2014 at 7:37 am
“Yeah, but how about all the parking lots that are empty at night? :-)”
Shouldn’t be a problem in Spain…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/the-insanity-of-greenery/
I always thought that depleted reactor rods could easily be recycled by burying them under roadways. What could be simpler? You get all the benefits of this silly project, including a warm blue glow…
I like how in the FAQ they say that roads really don’t get very dirty and they are more-or-less self-cleaning.
Why not just build a canopy, high over the highway, out of solar panels?
It keeps the snow and ice off, so no winter maintenance. Without the effects of sunlight, precipitation, and ice, the road surface will last longer.
Imagine the tremendous reductions in wasteful carbon emissions, from the vehicles underneath being shaded and needing much less air conditioning.
The waste heat from the vehicles is put to use in the winter, as it aids the melting of ice and snow off the panels, if needed.
There are even health care savings, good for society, from reduced cataracts and skin cancer, and less heat-induced road rage.
Why push to acquire vast swaths of usable land to despoil and inflict the blight of vast solar farms, when we have so many black barren stripes already snaking throughout the countryside?
Plus the roads already usually run alongside the electric lines, as both go to where electricity is used. No infrastructure construction to link the sources to the grid!
Is that too practical for crowd-sourced funding? What about the government? Big Brother, can you spare a grant?
The Entire car should be made of solar panels ,thus negating the loss of solar power to the roads!
Can I have a Nobel award please?
WalMart has tens of thousands of acres of parking lot. This exact idea has been around since about 2009: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/driving-on-glass-solar-roads/
If this were cost effective, stores and malls would have been running over themselves to get these installed for all the “free” energy.
Ohhhh, that easy – Take some dust from the moon and spread on the roads… That will do the trick!
Solar Roadways has already obtained Federal Highways Administration funding of nearly $1 million since 2009, according to their website. http://www.solarroadways.com
It is well worth a visit to the site to see the power of sophisticated computer graphics to overwhelm common sense. The deer walking on the pressure sensitive roadway surface, triggering warning lights in the glass roadway…in daylight!…is apparently totally believable to huge numbers of Green minded Facebook followers.
Each of the 160lb glass paving blocks contains it’s own microprocessor and communicates wirelessly with every other paver. What could possibly go wrong? Only Deniers would question.
The breadth and level of gullibility to swallow this concept is breathtakingly dismaying.
Yeah, I get this from my Facebook friends, too. The same ones who forward the “This [insert month] is very lucky, it only happens every [insert large number] years!!!” posts.
When I point out that there are precisely 14 calendars, and very slowly the reason why, and that any particular month is repeated within a decade or so…crickets.
This is the slacktivist generation, isn’t it? Who needs science and engineering when you have instant gratification (or shaming as the case may be?).
Here is the ultimate problem as far as I can tell: These panels use active electronics. If each panel has a mean time between failure (MTBF) of 10 years, putting down 3650 panels means you have one panel failing every single day. Once any appreciable sized area is covered with these panels, one would have to employ someone full time to continuously repair/replace failed panels. This means that the deployment must be such that the panels can be easily replaced. This also means a LOT of fastening hardware must be used per mile of roadway *and* since the panels must be easily replaced, they are also easily stolen. Also, what happens with a gas tank rupture and fire? Currently you dig out the asphalt and put in a patch and you are all done in a few hours. What about a leaking battery case that spills acid? The areas between the cells must be water tight or water seeping in is going to freeze (I don’t care how good these things are, they aren’t going to keep from freezing at -30F on a cold winter night in Minnesota).
Might as well just throw some piezoelectric material, semiconductive dust, some conductive fibers, into the asphalt mix and hope for the best.
@Yellow-striped Roadkill
Good thinking. Diamond is certainly more durable than glass, transparent as well. It may be brittle though, so it should be reinforced by carbon nanotubes. Also, the surface should be made self cleaning and the entire structure self repairing.
However, lithium ion batteries are not such a bright idea. But energy storage is, so let’s split the task. Solar panels below the surface should make no electricity for the obvious reason we mostly need it in winter and at night, while the sun prefers to shine during daytime in the summer. Therefore solar panels are supposed to make some non toxic non flammable energy rich substance instead, like sugar and store it locally. The other component we need is a fuel cell that generates electricity on demand using said stuff.
Now, technical feasibility and costs. The system described is utterly unfeasible and even if it could be built, its costs are prohibitively insane. That’s the end of it.
Or is it? With the emergence of self replicating programmable molecular nanobots we shall be able to return to this idea, but not sooner.
In that case road surfaces need not be manufactured at all, just sprayed with nanobots, which are programmed to self organize and build all the structures needed, up from the molecular level with closely packed arrays of micron sized energy modules below, using sunshine as their energy source and atmospheric carbon dioxide as raw material. That is, active road surfaces, with all capabilities described above could be grown if seeded.
It is definitely a future technology, so the current push for SOLAR ROADWAYS is nothing but a hoax, a dishonest money grab.
But there is nothing physically impossible in a diamond based road surface, it is just another allotrope of carbon, after all. Therefore it will become practical as soon as we have the technology to create it cheaply.
Until such time it makes sense to preload the atmosphere with CO₂ as much as possible, otherwise the coming Diamond Age could deplete it in no time, killing all plants off effectively, which is kinda bleak. Or we’d be forced to replenish it from limestone, but in that case we’ll have to figure out what to do with the enormous amount of lime milk. If dumped to rivers, catastrophic ocean basification is inevitable.
And all their demos were on a solid substrate.
Pavement has no strength.
It’s the subsurface soil that carries the load.
And its physical characteristics change, seasonally.
“pbft says:
June 4, 2014 at 6:24 am
Didn’t even mention what snowplows would do to these things….”
1. they argue that plows wont be needed
2. they suggest retrofitting plows into street sweepers”
‘ This also means a LOT of fastening hardware must be used per mile of roadway *and* since the panels must be easily replaced, they are also easily stolen. ”
The panels are trackable.
@Steven Mosher
Like the guns with Fast and Furious.