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.
Pretty easily summed up:
Solar panels/cells/power are a GOOD idea.
Putting em in roadways seems like a particularly POOR idea.(for all the reasons mentioned in Roy’s article and comments there and here).
Putting em ABOVE roadways may work, but then again, they can equally well go above other things too.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 4, 2014 at 8:25 am
Why not just build a canopy, high over the highway, out of solar panels?
###########
this is addressed in their literature. DAFS
I remember when people were talking about making electricity at home by having a heat collector in the attic and in the crawl space. The temp difference could be used to make electricity some how. I know it did not work. But the diff between blacktop and the surrounding ground would be much greater. Could this be possible in theory? In practice?
The US isnt able to properly maintain the roads and bridges it already has.
It cannot be a scam.
Think of it more as a public service.
The true believers, fools and bandits one and all, have raised our cost of energy, allowed insane regulations to crimp our freedom and continue the assault upon reason and our wallets.
They promote civic insanity.
Taking their money from their willing paws is no fraud, the less wealth the members of The Cult of Calamitous Climate have, the less damage they can do civil liberties and public wealth.
Think of these Solar Roadways personel as thought leaders… saving the CCC members from them selves.
After all the Alarmed Ones do advocate giving up modern energy use and such lifesaving conveniences .
Al Bore.. My hero.
Course the longterm consequence of depriving self pitying fools of their money is they always blame someone else, so their vengeance will fall upon all who tried to save them from making fools of themselves.
Better get those FEMA camps ready.
“No mention of water in the interstices freezing and expanding in winter.” Hey – only irresponsible conservative water does that! Responsible liberal water contracts as it gets warmer, and then contracts some more if it gets colder. Pretty soon, it seems like there was never any water in the first place. (It works for Liberal promises; why not water?!)
markx:
At June 4, 2014 at 9:33 am you claim
NO!!!
All large but intermittently available electricity supplies are a BAD idea. All of them. No exceptions.
Richard
Flight?! HA!
Invisible power from tiny object that make up the universe? HA!
Thinking machines? HA!
What’s next? I guess I’ll just go print a pair of shoes on my printer. HA!
What exactly is so crazy about solar roadways? I would say that 2/3rds of the US would be unworkable for this idea. And the solar cells in their present form are way to bulky and fragile to work. But that’s the point of a campaign like this. A few million spent to develop the idea is peanuts. And so what if it doesn’t work? Perhaps it leads to something else?
That’s frequently how invention works. Set out to solve one problem, fail at that, and solve something else in the meantime. Perhaps a process for solar roofs, which makes much more sense. But whatever. This money is a fraction of the amount your average CEO receives in bonuses every year, which they just sh!t into big stupid houses and other crap they don’t actually need, but makes them forget that they’re going to rot in the ground with the rest of us some day. It’s well worth the investment to see what these guys can come up with.
The sun bathes the Earth’s surface in something like 100 petawatts every year. If you could capture a tiny fraction of that power, we’d be set. To do that, it’s going to take lots of people working on every possible angle. That you guys are simply so dead set against it is nothing short of insane.
Ric Werme
your calculation neglects the heat energy of earth radiating into space from natural sources (residual heat, radioactive decay) This value is .0863 watts per square meter.
In addition to this continuous source of energy, there is significant thermal mass in the road substrate, this is why it takes several snow storms to cool the subsurface of normal roads before the snow “sticks”.
If only a slight increase in this residual energy mass was added during snow storms, the squeegee effect of car tires running over the snow would also push significant mass off of the roads.
I confess my initial reaction to solar roadways was the same as we see expressed above. Even so, I feel compelled to come to the defense of my fellow north Idahoans. Consider the following quotes…
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” (Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.)
“A new source of power… called gasoline has been produced by a Boston engineer. Instead of burning the fuel under a boiler, it is exploded inside the cylinder of an engine.
The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming… [T]he cost of producing [gasoline] is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry… In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses, which would wreck our agriculture.” (U. S. Congressional Record, 1875.)
“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” (Albert Einstein, 1932.)
From crosspatch’s Scientific America linki:
So taxpayers are footing some of the cost for this idiocy. It seems way to easy to get a spot at the public funds trough, nearly makes me wish I wasn’t an honest person.
Crosspatch, I went to your link. Those are the same people as these, apparently pulling the same scam. They’ve managed to live off this nonsense for 5 years. (And the fact that it was in UnScientific American tells you all you need to know about that “publication.”)
The 52 watt (max sunny midday) output panels have 72 watt heaters ….powered by the fossil grid.
(Scott Brusaw has a EE Masters from the University of Dayton.)
If this is such a good idea, why are not invite investors?
“… we have various fears about loss of control that can come with bringing in a large investor. We hesitate to go public (sell stock), because we’d then be answering to stock holders…”
http://www.solarroadways.com/faq.shtml#faqInvestors
Must be a sign to go read “The Madness of Crowds”.
Do the raw materials even exist for this idea? They don’t call ’em rare-earth metals for nothing.
Also, forget heating the road. What happens to their circuitry when you put it under a glass lens on a summer day in Arizona? Are they planning on installing air conditioning for the panels, or maybe they will be liquid cooled? That should go over well in the desert.
I remember the day my friend ( a former employee) from Omnivision came into my office in the late 90s.
He showed me a 640*480 CMOS camera connected to a phone via the audio jack.
we played around taking pictures on this dumb phone. Well, in those days CMOS sucked.
phone displays sucked. I had just launched the first HD Mp3 player and my roadmap for product development look like this: add more disk space, add wifi, add 3D ,add GPS, add big color touch screen,
and looking at this clunky camera, I decided to put an internal camera on the road map, and oh ya, add GSM..
Of course everyone thought it was crazy.. I would be turning a MP3 player into a all in one device.
I pointed folks at what Palm was doing, and Ericssons “penelope” the Nokia 9000.
Of course people had all sorts of practical objections: digital photography was limited. Nobody would watch video on a handheld device. there wasnt enough bandwidth. screens were super expensive, memory was expensive and volitile. the phone companies would never agree. Battery life was estimated in the minutes, the cost estimates put the product at 1000 or more.
Crazy idea.
A similar thing happened in 1994. in that year i figured that a single z buffered tri linear mipmapped, 30 hertz pixel cost about a dollar. in other terms if you bought a million pixel system that could draw a z buffered, tri linear mimapped pixel at 30 hertz, it would cost you a million dollars.
I built a cost model of the system. How much dollars went into drives. How much went into processing. how much went into memory. I sat down with Phil Carmack.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/philip-carmack/11/857/715
We guessed at a bunch of stuff. Phil was convinced we could shrink 7 chips down to one.
he was convinced we could put this 3D stuff in a PC. We pushed the numbers further, and it was clear that in a decade or so maybe 2 that 3D could make it into a phone or handheld device. Phil went on to join 3D0 and then a start up named 3dfx (later bought by Nvidia). a couple of years after our 1994 discussion, we were both shipping 3D on the PC.. mobile would follow almost exactly as we had guessed.
Further back in 1985 I sat in a lead lined room brainstorming what the platforms of 2020 should look like. We took the pilot out of the plane. We made them from materials that didnt exist.
we gave them sensors and electronics that didnt exist. optical backplanes, high bandwith coms, we showed how they could be trained to cooperate or swarm with each other. paper studies.
simulations. lots of what ifs materials that were broadband invisible. subsystems that could actively cancel ( zone of slience) any threat radar. all blue sky. all impossible. All waay to costly.
until today that is.
And lastly one day I went into a design shop where the guy was doing a rapid prototype for me using stereo lithography. Hugely expensive. he joked. ‘one day it would be cool to be able to built parts with a ink jet printer.. except not using ink” haha, ya someday.
I’ve also had my share of huge failures. 5 million wasted on chip here, 20 million blown on another thing that looked really good. Ive seen things that look easy become hard. And things that look impossible become easy.
I still want my flying car.
That said I’m not too hopeful for this idea replacing roadways, so I didnt contribute.It may find a use in other places which is a common occurence for wacky ideas.
plus a couple of million bucks is nothing and nothing teaches you more than failure.
have big ideas and fail. or be safe and boring
Robert Bissett says:
June 4, 2014 at 9:50 am
I confess my initial reaction to solar roadways was the same as we see expressed above. Even so, I feel compelled to come to the defense of my fellow north Idahoans. Consider the following quotes…
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” (Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.) . . .
And so on. Good point, but the problem with ‘solar roadways’ is not that they are impracticable, and infeasible (given current technology), or just moonshine, but they make no sense. Why would you want to pave the roads with any kind of tiles, solar or not, when that would obviate the virtues of pavement? Why would you want to go to enormous expense to string together millions of those tiles with expensive wiring all over the country when you can generate electricity in central locations with traditional power plants? Yes, as someone suggested above, you could one day used nanobots to transform the highways into something else—who knows? by then we might not even need highways—the matter transporter has been deemed feasible, in theory. So then we could pave over the obsolete highways with cells that collect power radiated from satellites. Or something.
I don’t think the fanciful idea of ‘solar roadways’ rises to the level of fast train travel, or splitting the atom, because that’s not the point of a roadway. You want solar power, then put it where the sun shines. You want ‘solar roadways’? Put them where the sun don’t.
/Mr Lynn
Rats! Left off the block quote tags. /Mr L
In Pamela’s Area of Operation:
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/td/tp_res/docs/reports/laddcanyonheatingproject.pdf
Electric heating of I-84 freeway in Ladd Canyon, OR project was accomplished. Power is cheap in Oregon. Ladd Canyon is dangerous. But a far cry from solar cells on the road surface.
In the land of fantasy.
Lived a wizard fearsome clever bold.
Click heels road of gold.
#1 indication that it won’t work as advertised: they have been around for 5 years and nobody uses them.
“So taxpayers are footing some of the cost for this idiocy. It seems way to easy to get a spot at the public funds trough, nearly makes me wish I wasn’t an honest person.”
Funny,
That reminds me of the $$$ I got from the government in the early 90s to study this crazy thing called Virtual reality.
http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/153182
I spent some time reading everything this dude wrote
http://www.jaronlanier.com/
and after a wonderful visit with him, thought the dream was worth my time and your money.
thanks!
At that point we had crappy 640*480 screens and the device looked like a brick strapped to your face.
http://hplusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Fisher.HMD_.jpeg
But the concept was simple: eventually, we argued, we though the display could be shrunk to fit into a device that looked something like this
http://www.google.com/glass/start/
it will never happen.
dont even ask me the reaction we got when we suggested that it could be built into contact lenses.
can’t do it. no way no how.
“What exactly is so crazy about solar roadways? I would say that 2/3rds of the US would be unworkable for this idea. And the solar cells in their present form are way to bulky and fragile to work. But that’s the point of a campaign like this. A few million spent to develop the idea is peanuts. And so what if it doesn’t work? Perhaps it leads to something else?”
every winner I have known in high tech. thinks like this.
moon shots.
sometimes shit blows up
Ok, this is a little bit different idea than the one posted above but, since it concerns CAGW, I think it’s appropriate to bring it up here.
Now, we all know that CO2, on its own, will not raise atmospheric temperatures much. It’s the positive feedbacks, most notably water vapor. Well, I’d like investors to assist me in the development of anti-perspiration suits. Now, we all know we all sweat more when it’s hot outside. Sweat is what? Water vapor? You betcha. So, my proposal is to make perspiration capturing suits (anti-perspiration is a little bit of an inaccurate description but it sounds catchy) to prevent the evaporation of human perspiration into the atmosphere. Voila, positive feedback water vapor amplification reduced. And, due to the emergency nature of CAGW I’m sure we could lobby Washington to require every American to wear these suits, so my investors will have a market guaranteed by law. Here’s the clincher. If the suits prove popular with voters (pretty damned unlikely) we could label them as ‘O’ suits. If the suits prove extraordinarily, teeth gritting, unpopular with voters (pretty damned likely) we could label them Bush suits. Well, whaddaya think? Wanna’ invest?
These people are on their way, but I have a better idea, that I offer freely to anyone with the sand for massive fraud like these people. The idea is, instead of glass tiles, use carbon nanotubes and graphene, all made of carbon. Make these materials out of CO2 freely from ambient air, and release free oxygen as a benevolent byproduct. Voila! Now you can not only produce free power from free carbon, you decrease CO2 at the same time. That’s a win/win for Gaia and humanity. If glass roadways can attract $2 million, this idea should attract really big bucks from the same clueless investors. The only thing I ask in return for inventing this is a promise that you never use my name if you actually solicit funds for it.
No comment from bikers? No ‘funding from them either I guess …