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.
In the crowdsourcing world, a critic must prove why something will not work, instead of the inventor proving it will work. One emotional laden tweet can have more value than any amount of common sense analysis; a truly democratic process that Socrates could appreciate. Add that to the sad fact that most of the fans of this idea confuse technology with energy, and may not know the difference between energy and power. Dream Stealer indeed!
wws said on June 4, 2014 at 7:09 am:
“They really should read “The Roads must Roll” by Heinlein if they want to propose a unique, all purpose change to the nation’s Transportation system. Sure, that was written in 1940, but it was still more plausible than this proposal was.”
IIRC (and it has been a very long time since I read the story), the “sun screens” were mounted over the road, and road itself was a sort of a conveyer belt. I don’t recall if there was a power storage system for nights and storms.
This is an old idea and I remember coming up with it about 45 years ago when I was computing the area of land covered by asphalt during what seemed like endless drives through Alberta and Saskatchewan with my father while he was doing timber cruising. It seemed obvious to me then; there was a huge expanse of land covered with a heat absorbing substance which was much warmer than the surrounding area and one should be able to make use of this temperature differential to produce power. At the time I was thinking more in terms of large Stirling cycle engines which would have their hot ends embedded in the roadways. Having viewed hundreds of miles of highway on those trips I was very conscious of the damage done to the road surface by heavy trucks and while paving the roads with solar cells seemed like a good idea, I concluded it would only work if no vehicles were allowed on the roads. Now, I’d consider the use of Peltier devices to produce electricity from highways but have not performed a cost analysis of this method.
While the amount of power collected by highways is huge, people also forget that the area of highways is also huge. Solar power is a good idea near the equator for remote locations, but when one gets to the northern latitudes of Canada, alternative sources of energy are far more practical. In Kamloops, latitude 50.7 degrees N, my experimental solar cell setup produces a maximum of 1.5 W of power for 2 hours/day on a really sunny day. Any cloud cover, and the power output drops to 50 mw. It’s fun to play around with solar powered distributed sensor systems to see if one can reduce their power requirements to the minimum possible but for large scale applications solar power is simply far too expensive. It would be far cheaper for me to use disposable batteries to power the distributed sensors rather than solar cells and the only reason that I’m playing with solar cells is that I ordered a bunch during one of my late night electronic shopping sessions on the internet and thought summer would be a good time to play with them. They’re also more durable than IR thermometers when used in an overhead cloud sensing configuration.
Too late, Obama is already giving them a billion dollars. Let a thousand Solyndras bloom!
Steven Mosher — Sure, BeaconPower had a big idea too. Lots of losers in high tech think big too.
Government should not be trying to pick the winners from the losers at taxpayer expense.
crosspatch says:
June 4, 2014 at 10:43 am
#1 indication that it won’t work as advertised: they have been around for 5 years and nobody uses them.
A typical transformative product can languish for decades before finding its beachhead.
some beachheads can be dead ends, others can be a safe haven until you can assualt
inland markets.
Their problem amounts to this. They are aiming at replacing all roadways ( the mass market)
The success, if there is one, will not come in the market they want. It will come from
a customer who has a bleeding from the neck problem. All transformative products are adopted this way. rarely in the mass market, always in a niche where the customer either has a really
bad problem.. or a customer ( typically a gadgeteer) who buys stuff just because its cool.
Mp3 for example. Little known fact but the first hot market was
1) old men with CD collections averaging 571 CD
2. Reporters.
the teen mass market came much later
so take the product and pitch disneyland, universal studios. pitch developers in Dubai that have no shortage of money and a willingness to do crazy shit
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01970/palm_1970288c.jpg
The question is when will these guys pivot to a different market and how big will that specialty market be.
talldave2 says:
June 4, 2014 at 11:44 am
Steven Mosher — Sure, BeaconPower had a big idea too. Lots of losers in high tech think big too.
Government should not be trying to pick the winners from the losers at taxpayer expense.
###########################
Of course the government should be trying to pick winners and losers. The issue is how you do the picking and how much you bet.
For example.
The government has a bad track record of picking short term winners and losers. take Solyndra.
That bet was stupid and everybody in the valley knew it was stupid. We knew it was stupid because we had watched china crush whole industries.
But when it comes to picking longer range trajectories, say 30 years and out, limited government encouragement in deep research has pretty good pay offs.
Long ago sitting at Arpanet meetings many of us wondered how we could turn this wild technology into something commercial. Now at that point none of us would have put our own money on the line. So, we bet your money. Thank us.
Boris
“Now, I’d consider the use of Peltier devices to produce electricity from highways but have not performed a cost analysis of this method.”
very cool.
here was a fun idea
http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/09/piezoelectric-generators-electric-cars/
but your peltier ideas made me think of this.
One day I was sitting in a design meeting looking at all the fricking heat this 3D chip would generate. At a trade show the frickin system shut down due to over heat.
There were two ideas We came up with. Peltier devices and shrouds with built in fans for the cards.
Everybody laughed and argued that there was no way people would build systems with liquids running around in them or buy graphics cards with shrouds.
I dont think they had ever seen a cray cooling tower
“A typical transformative product can languish for decades before finding its beachhead.”
Ok, well, we shall see. My background is in hardware design though I am not currently working in that field. In particular, I designed power systems (mainly switching power supplies). That these panels have active electronics pretty much dooms them. They would be better off with conventional panels mounted in the conventional manner along the roadside with resistive heating to the pavement. When that isn’t needed, feed the grid. The more “passive” it can be made, the more likely it is to be a viable solution. This thing is nice — kind of like a $200 banana slicer is nice. Some are going to want to do it just for the sake of doing it (because its all solar, and stuff) but I believe the overall benefit will be negative.
Well, solar roadways might work if they lay a solar panel and a lunar panel every other panel. Gotta have power day and night, don’t you know ;o)
Long ago sitting at Arpanet meetings many of us wondered how we could turn this wild technology into something commercial. Now at that point none of us would have put our own money on the line. So, we bet your money. Thank us.
ARPANET didn’t invent the Internet, Intel did. Someone would have come up with a protocol eventually, probably faster and cheaper than you government drones.
@talldave2 – Actually it was a consortium. Digital, Intel and Xerox. Arpanet was not looking at the commercial application, but at the government application. Networks were coming. and pre-date the commercialization of ARPANet.
Taking away the power generation aspect, lets look at the other physical properties:
Is it a *better* or even “just as good” a road surface as we have now?
Can it be maintained with existing equipment / expertise or will it require the purchase of two sorts of maintenance gear and having two sorts of expertise.
I am interested in its nighttime properties. Will it actually ENCOURAGE the formation of black ice at night because it has produced liquid water during the day and can not keep it thawed overnight?
It is my opinion that the places that would be best suited for deployment would be large parking lots. There is not a lot of very heavy, high speed traffic. Parking lots are designed for peak capacity on weekend during holidays. On weekdays in non-holiday periods, the parking lots sit mostly unused leaving a lot of unshaded space. BUT, commercial parking lots are also the place that are least likely to get a government subsidy. So if you want to see its real viability, look at deployments in private commercial spaces where conditions are optimal for use. So far we see pretty close to none. Places where politicians like to throw money just for the sake of throwing money are not an indication of real value of it. It is an indication of political benefit to the politician. Politicians are at the whim of 50% +1 of the population. 50% of the population are below the median intelligence level and at least 1 person is profiting from that.
But when it comes to picking longer range trajectories, say 30 years and out, limited government encouragement in deep research has pretty good pay offs.
No, it doesn’t. For instance, they’ve spent tens of billions on fusion and have absolutely zero practical value to show for it — not a single watt of fusion power has reached a commercial grid. There is virtually nothing useful that government research has done that would not have been done voluntarily if not for the fact that government is already doing it coercively.
Supposing the U.S. is better off with government-run research is like supposing North Korea is better off with government-run food supply.
Steven, thanks for the link to an actual trial of piezoelectric power generation from road traffic. Something I’ve also thought about, but the economics aren’t likely that good.
With Peltier devices, the efficiency is a function of the temperature difference across the device. One very practical application is my wood stove stovetop fan which rotates faster the hotter the stove gets. It does an excellent job of moving warm air around my workshop in winter and also has enough air flow around the plastic components of the electric motor to prevent it from melting. I consider this to be appropriate technology as it’s economically sound.
The problem with highways is that one is dealing with a very distributed system and hence while the potential power output is huge, one also needs an equally large, very expensive distributed system to collect the power. Where piezoelectric power generation would be practical would be to put the piezoelectric generators in ones shoes and use an energy harvester chip to use the small amount of power one generates during a hike to charge a cell phone battery. Having a cell phones GPS turned on continually to allow plotting ones route during a hike will discharge an iPhone battery in less than 2 hours so in such a situation a piezeoelectric power source would be very useful.
Distributed sensors are another area where solar or exotic power sources are useful as I’m finding out as I instrument my yard with soil moisture sensors in my garden and multiple microprocessors to read them out. Parallax’s Propeller chip can be set up for truly micropower operation and a solar cell/energy harvester chip/LiPo battery combination would work even in the winter if one is sampling at low data rates and writes power optimized code. I can see use of novel sources of environmental power revolutionizing the development of the internet of things as it would be very nice to put a remote sensor in an inaccessible spot and not have to worry about powering it via a cable or batteries. What I don’t see is the large scale use of such power given current economic realities.
For collection of diffuse solar energy plants are the best devices to use for this and it would be far more worthwhile to see if one could engineer plants to convert solar energy into electricity and transmit this power via organic conductors to create a biologic battery. The nice thing about such a system is that one would be able to have the plants use carbohydrates photosynthesized during the day to produce electricity at night. So, the solar powered highway that would make the most sense would be to have such electricity producing plants growning on both sides of the highway and providing highway lighting and powering a set of WiFi routers which would allow one to access the internet while driving. Hacking chloroplasts to make them into a solar powered battery shouldn’t be that hard and a distributed energy generation system of this type would represent rational use of biofuels, not the insane conversion of food to fuel with the side effects of rising food costs and increased political instability in poor countries once people can no longer afford food. Plants represent a readily available form of nanotech and it would be worthwhile to put government money into hacking plants to come up with self-reproducing power generation systems. Perhaps a fast growing weed with electric eel genes and new genes to synthesize high conductance organic conductor pathways would be the answer. Of course, the watermelons would have head explosions over creating “genetically modified organisms” but such a solar power system would be very low cost if one didn’t count development costs. It would have to be open source, of course, and the plants would be required to produce fertile seeds that could be planted to increase ones local power generation capacity.
Steven Mosher says:
June 4, 2014 at 11:53 am
Mosher says:
ARPAnet meetings where? Did they make it into the RFCs? I wasn’t involved in the dreaming, but did implement part of telnet, FTP, and Email for the systems at CMU and Harvard.
talldave2 says:
June 4, 2014 at 12:19 pm
I call BS. I left CMU in 1974, and didn’t really get involved in the TCP/IP protocols until 1985. I do have the 1982 “Internet Protocol Transition Workbook”. I just checked – I don’t see any reference to Intel. There are a lot of DEC systems, of course. The PDP-10 was the workhorse of the ARPAnet, and early TCP/IP was done on that, PDP-11s, and of course VAX, especially at Berkeley where their 4.1 BSD Unix release became the workhorse of the early Internet, both on Vaxen and also on systems from many startups. Some Intel, I’m sure, but most not, e.g. Sun, Pyramid, Alliant, Convex, etc.
The protocols were created by many of the people who were involved with the ARPAnet. Heck, telnet and FTP live on with very few changes to be carried by TCP instead of NCP.
The “government drones” worked on the OSI protocol suite. Well, not quite fair, a number of private companies put a lot of resources into that. It’s just that simple and running trumps complex, expensive, and late.
I recently bought http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style-Animadversions-Intercomputer/dp/0595088791 in part to fill some of the network history I missed, and in part because I never bought when it was first in print. I don’t see anything about Intel in there either.
The whole “solar roadways” is a solution to a non-existent problem. There’s no shortage of space to install solar panels across the US. It makes zero sense to install solar panels over huge areas they need to be concentrated to be useful.
Ridiculous. Yet simple people support it without question.
Didn’t Pink Floyd mention something about keeping “the lunatics on the path”.
Well now we have loonies paying good hard earned cash for loonies on the road! Time to re-read “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” which contains Global Warming and screwball glass roads.
If I was a member of this ”think tank”, I would try to think of a totally different tech. The asphalt does get hot. Maybe panels under the cars and trucks could pick up infrared radiation on a hot day and also have panels on the top to add direct solar. It might run a beer cooler in the trunk.
I’m backing Dr. Roy Spencer with this. The knee jerk bigotry over this is astounding.
I see nobody here are engineers. There are some issues with this design but avoiding the road heating idea, it is easily do-able.
The problem with this design begins with the method to bolt these to the road which requires a concrete base with many, many accurately positioned studs. The glass road surface meets all roadway requirements. I would not use these where cars park/house shade but the likes of lighting up my rear patio with the possibility for kids to use as a disco floor?… I’d love them!
On roads, they are thinking of these as power conduits, setting speed limits, directions and the ability to easily move lanes, like cats eyes, around roadworks. Repair would be easy and drainage between the panels.
These will also make you electricity. Apart from being hexagonal, what’s not to like?
Crowd sourced funding is kind of like the stock market. Only not as risky.
seed money to spread around DC to get your hands on real money.
Ric Werme: You are correct. Intel played no part in the development of the Internet protocols.
DARPA was not just government, but a lot of Universities played a part. There were several different protocols developed and scrapped. The original APANET had very little in common with modern TCP/IP.
It was around 1974 that Vinton Cerf et. al. created TCP.
Until about 1980, Intel was producing the 4004 processor and RAM chips.
As they say in an advert in Australia ‘tell ’em they are dreaming.’
pbft on June 4, 2014 at 6:24 am
Didn’t even mention what snowplows would do to these things….”
Don’t need snowplows…these things will melt all the snow and ice away with their infinite reserves of good clean renewable energy!
I want to see the energy calculations. What is the energy per mile of road that could theoretically be generated, and how much energy is required to move an average slug of traffic through that mile. I’ll bet it’s not even close to breaking even.
@Andyj says:
June 4, 2014 at 2:19 pm
“I’m backing Dr. Roy Spencer with this. The knee jerk bigotry over this is astounding.”
Read the article and Dr. Spencer’s comments again (or perhaps for the first time?). I don’t get a ringing endorsement from Dr. Spencer’s comments, unless I’m misreading him.
“I see nobody here are engineers. There are some issues with this design but avoiding the road heating idea, it is easily do-able.”
I are a engineer as are several of the regulars who have commented above. N.B. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it is feasible in any way shape or form.
“The problem with this design begins with the method to bolt these to the road which requires a concrete base with many, many accurately positioned studs. The glass road surface meets all roadway requirements. I would not use these where cars park/house shade but the likes of lighting up my rear patio with the possibility for kids to use as a disco floor?… I’d love them!”
I agree that they should not be used where cars park or where the panels would be shaded. I’d also recommend not using these where people drive cars.
“On roads, they are thinking of these as power conduits, setting speed limits, directions and the ability to easily move lanes, like cats eyes, around roadworks. Repair would be easy and drainage between the panels.”
Are you sure about easy repairs?. First off, what sort of monitoring system would be required to identify exactly which little hexagon needs replacing? Then, once a gimpy panel is identified, someone must go out, re-direct traffic, unscrew the little panel from its precision bolts, plug in another panel, and then bolt it back down. I like the current system where the orange barrels come out for a few weeks while they plane the roadway and then resurface with blacktop. They can do several lane miles in one overnight shift.
“These will also make you electricity. Apart from being hexagonal, what’s not to like?”
What’s not to like? Solar potholes, shorts to ground, scratched glass after 2-3 days of service cutting efficiency by 20-30-50%, ground heave and bed settling, washouts and undercuts… for starters. I’d also be concerned that the government contract would specify that the panels be wired in series so that officials can be quickly alerted when a panel goes out and they can dispatch someone to fix it.
Go ahead, Andyj. Invest your money in it. This dumb ol’ engineer will put his money elsewhere.