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.
Sorry mods. The #$%! autocorrect on this computer just changed all my small i’s to capital I’s. Don’t know if it’s worth the fuss to fix ’em.
Best,
H.R.
friendsoffairview says: June 4, 2014 at 6:07 am “Dream Stealer. Maybe its the same reason we give money to homeless bums. We hope they’ll do something amazing with it.”
Well, more than that, we give money to homeless bums to help them stay alive. We do hope they’ll change their life.
Have the idiots looked at what a flight recorder enclosure is? A compact strong metal enclosure, opaque. Not magic material, a different strength requirement in any case.
A strange analogy – better would be the steel plates temporarily covering holes in the road, but of course those are also opaque.
To get wild, I’d look at thermo-electric devices to use road surfaces heated by the sun, though cooling the other side of the devices seems impossible at first glance. Better to use liquid heat transfer (pipes in the road surface). But I can immediately think of problems with those schemes, Including that they too require the sun to be shining (people who suffer through winters on the mid wet coast of NA will be ROFL at that).
Some people naiively think that snake oil disappeared decades ago. 🙂
As for parking lots, careful which ones you speak of – offices and schools use theirs during the day, shopping centres mixed, churches in the evening and on weekends. Many factories use theirs day and evening (two shifts), private schools too.
(Side tangent: the control freaks of Delta BC blocked building a church and office building together, insisting that churches had to be in residential neighbourhoods so children would have to dodge people rushing to church. The logical plan was to share parking space, due different times of use of the offices and church.
friendsoffairview says:
June 4, 2014 at 6:07 am
Dream Stealer. Maybe its the same reason we give money to homeless bums. We hope they’ll do something amazing with it.
Apologies if I’m missing a sarc here, but I do hope no one is stupid enough to give money to bums in the hope that they’ll “do something amazing with it.” Or maybe that was you point, and that the people who contributed to the indiegogo campaign are that stupid.
Damn, I hate typing on an Android tablet.
The sad thing is, other start ups with viable ideas missed out on this misdirected funding.
A bit like cold fusion? Has that issue died? Good.
Steve Mosher , I enjoyed your post on trying and failing. We don’t give up, we try again. Thank you!
This is funny. I own an electric car, have done some study of renewable energy and generally (with important caveats) support renewables. I will support renewables a whole lot more if someone will just invent a cheap, grid-scale battery. But solar roadways? What a complete scam!
And Roy Spencer, you’ll be happy to know that in the electric car group I belong to, the solar road project was hooted off the page.
Steven Mosher said on June 4, 2014 at 9:34 am:
I’m reading this is basically a scam, so the “literature” is packaged deception for marketing purposes. So you are directing me to a propaganda site, where presumably I’ll find an honest appraisal of a competing proposal.
So how long have you been directing people to SkepSci for a balanced discussion on global warming?
BTW, you are wrong. There is no automatic FTP access, thus it is not a Direct Access File System from the internet.
Guess that’s another inscrutable drive-by dropping from old Crypt-Mosh.
Found it in the FAQ on the deceptive marketing propaganda site. Thankfully I have NoScript, AdBlock, and am running Linux, so I hopefully have adequate protection from the malware.
http://www.solarroadways.com/faq.shtml#faqCanopy
>It would be incredibly expensive as you would still have to pay for our current road systems. We plan to use the money already budgeted for roads for the replacement Solar Roadways.
The money budgeted for roads is highway maintenance like cleaning and plowing, with pothole and crack fixing, sign and guard rail replacement. There are road resurfacing projects paid for by “whatever’s left”.
Road and bridge replacement and new construction are usually special projects where they seek government funding, usually federal.
Thus they are mistaken. There will still be road surface maintenance, cleaning and replacing pieces, etc. You still need guard rails and signs.
There will be subsurface issues, which cause cracks and some potholes in tarmac, with sinkholes, etc.
They would pay for the solar road with non-existent money. Scam.
>If we still had to build current roads plus pay for the canopies, the cost would likely be so high that taxes would have to be raised to cover it.
The Government will raise taxes regardless, as this is a “worthy project” reminiscent of FDR and the New Deal thus a plausible excuse. There will be massively expensive initial construction, worth decades of highway funds.
When you tell the states they will have money freed up in the budget, they will spend it elsewhere. It’s tough convincing the public that this money they don’t have to spend on roads in the future cannot be a tax cut or used for sheltering abandoned puppies, but must go towards paying back a road-building debt they never asked for, for decades, with interest.
Thus they are mistaken. It will have to be a Massive Public Works Project, for which they will raise taxes. Scam.
>And it would leave our highway system just the way it is – crumbling and antiquated.
Roads would last longer between resurfacings with the canopy protection. “Antiquated” is road width and patterns, location of major roads near former centers of population and industry instead of current ones, etc. The Solar Road won’t fix that. Scam.
>Imagine taking a family vacation on one of these roads. It would feel much like being in a covered parking garage with a roof right over your car!
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? When has the drive been that great?
>Then there would have to be pillars all along the road holding up the canopy, which would be unsightly and could lead to increased accidents.
With precipitation and ice off of the road, extremely decreased daytime glare, and reduced eye fatigue, accidents will drop. The pillars, which would be outside of road edges, will no more increase accidents than guard rails and divider barriers. And since when have highways not already been unsightly?
I’m sorry, Crypt-Mosh, but having to trudge through such easily refuted deceptive denying dreck is really making me want a smoke. Which I no longer do. So I’m going to stop. It is a scam, and their level of chicanery in marketing shows they know it as well.
You know who else never gave up? Bob Berdella.
All joking aside, a (admittedly low efficiency) thermocouple would probably be the best way to exploit the low albedo road surface.
Also, Mosher is perfectly free to distribute his ill-gotten gains to these obvious charlatans. It is obviously going to go the way of the Hotchkiss Bicycle Railroad.
Did any of you even LOOK at their website? Here’s the part all of you seem to have missed. They are developing durable, impact resistant photovoltaic cells. They would LIKE to see them used to cover all the roads in the US, but their tech is meant to be used in smaller areas like private driveways and parking areas just as well. In other words, similar to Bill Gates in the early 80’s “I want to see a PC on every desk” which also got laughed off the stage by people like you, what they WANT in the future is not what they expect today.
Since all of the comments I see here are debunking the idea of covering roads, maybe you should dial it back (just like the Solar Roadways website does) and consider them on a smaller scale. If it is practical to put solar PV on your house, then cells with similar efficiency placed in your yard, roof, driveway or anywhere else will perform exactly as well. Period. Depending on the cost / panel your personal return on investment period will vary compared to a roof system, but the overall effectiveness of the technology is exactly the same. Their literature online indicates they are using commercially available PV cells at about 18% efficiency. This is the ‘high-average’ end of current technology. Slap on a tempered glass cover instead of the usual plate glass or plastic, make it a nifty hexagon and add some circuitry to allow them to talk to each via wifi and run some LED’s and you’re done.
Ridiculous extrapolations to the cost of covering every road in the US are irrelevant. If this product succeeds it will be one consumer at at time putting them in a private area. No one on the Solar Roadways website is talking about asking any taxpayers to magically pony up the multi-billions it would cost. They are selling a dream. It’s called marketing. Go read their actual claims and numbers and you’ll see a very reasonable business model.
There is an enormous upside to this product without it needing to be ‘everywhere’.
All those parking lots at night are okay. You have starlight and moon-light for the solar cells… 🙂
Ah, MarkP, did you bother to think thru your response ?
Piezoelectric or Peltier devices built into roadways would make more sense than solar tiles, as they could compensate for, and even utilize (piezoelectric) the stress of trucks and cars on the surface. Running thousands of heavy, dirty, oil-dripping vehicles across solar panels makes no sense at all. Solar-panel awnings over roadways would make sense, but none of these ideas concentrate the electricity collected in a way that is easily utilized—unless maybe it can be fed into the existing grid via the lines running alongside the roadways. But at what cost?
The main question is: why bother? We can generate all the power we want with our huge reserves of coal and natural gas and uranium and thorium, and we already have a network to distribute that power. Is there any likelihood that these roadway systems could compete in cost? Solar power is good for small, specific applications along highways and byways, and is already being used.
I don’t think I’d want those solar tiles in my driveway, which chronically suffers from left-over sand (from the winter), grandkids dumping dirt, leaves, and parked cars. Put solar panels up out of the way, on a roof or portico, and that may make sense. Or it will here in New England, when the liberals force electric rates out of sight, imitating California. The key to prosperity and progress is cheap, abundant, electric power, not taxpayer-funded boondoggles.
/Mr Lynn
LOL the parking lot prototype is idiotic. I assume parking lot is where you park your car. If you do the car will block the sun. Maybe that’s why people put solar panels on the roof.
Until about 1980, Intel was producing the 4004 processor and RAM chips.
Nope. Intel was making the 8080 in ’74. I should know. I designed an S-100 I/O board that went into the worlds first BBS. The Altair (an 8080 S-100 machine) hit the front cover of Popular Electronics in Jan of ’75.
BTW Bill Gates got his start with S-100 machines with a Basic compiler. Running under the C/PM OS. His IBM DOS (developed by some one else) was an offshoot of C/PM.
Angech says:
June 4, 2014 at 4:54 pm
A bit like cold fusion? Has that issue died? Good.
Not dead yet:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/lenr-year-of-answers/
With links to a Wired article and others.
From MarkP on June 4, 2014 at 6:59 pm:
Wrong. That’s a flat application. Unless you live in the tropics near the equator and expect the sunlight shining from directly overhead at noon, you will lose considerable production over tilting the panels towards the sun.
Also sunlight from low on the horizon reflecting off solar paving stones certainly does not generate much electricity. They would not be a good choice anywhere outside the tropics where there could be ice and snow during winters with low-angle sunlight.
SunPower currently says their top-end residential assembled panels get 21.5%. Bare cells at 18% doesn’t sound that great.
Tempered glass for solar PV panels is common, low-iron type recommended. Common thickness spec is only 4mm (0.157″) thick, perhaps only 3.2mm (1/8″). Obviously the solar paving stones will have considerably thicker glass with greater transmittance losses.
Plus they are on the ground, where they will collect dirt and dust and pollen and leaf residue and will require cleaning. My outdoor concrete and slate looks just fine with my strict regimen of benign neglect.
Why would I want a backyard of tens to hundreds of wifi-enabled computing systems? That’s a lot of signals to cram into the frequencies. I can imagine trying to track them with the laptop as it struggles to make hundreds of connections. I don’t want them hacked, so they’ll need encryption, each with their own key. With the selection thoroughly randomized, and likely stored in a file I hope is not corrupted or lost.
If it is, well, a device I can shine on the solar paving stone that would reset the key to default, would be terrible for security, anyone with one could reset and take over any of them. Perhaps even load malware to crack my home system. Same problem if I can send a reset over the electrical wiring. The paving stones would need a physical reset. So I would have to dig up each one, flip them over, and hit the concealed button. Ugh.
Do you know that any necessary commands and data can be sent over the electric wires, just as how the electric meter on your house “phones home” your energy usage? Such signaling is the basis of most home automation. Why would they need wifi for what simpler tech can accomplish?
Wally says:
June 4, 2014 at 2:44 pm
seed money to spread around DC to get your hands on real money.
http://classicalvalues.com/2014/06/crazy-ideas/
Intel played no part in the development of the Internet protocols.
Yeah, except for creating the entire reason anyone uses the Internet: affordable computing on a scale that makes widespread computer-to-computer communication useful.
It’s like arguing Ford and GM had nothing to do with the development of the Interstate Highway System.