Solar roadways? Yeah, we've
seen 'em before, but we've yet to see America's own Department of Energy give any one development company such a notable vouch of confidence. Just recently, the DoE handed over a $100,000 contract to Solar Roadways, which is just enough to build a prototype of the "first ever Solar Road panel." The 12- x 12-foot panels could theoretically be embedded into roads, and when shined upon, could pipe good, clean electricity straight into the grid. Heck, they could even boast LEDs in order to alert drivers to upcoming accidents or changes in road conditions. Reportedly, each panel would cost around $7,000 (at least initially), and if these were used on the entire US Interstate system, we could pretty much forget about using non-renewable energy sources to power our homes and businesses. Of course, our government is simultaneously wasting money on repaving perfectly good roadways with antiquated asphalt, so there's a tremendously great chance that this won't amount to anything.
[Via
Inhabitat, thanks Miko]
posted September 6th 2009 6:06PM
If it makes to world look more like lego, I'm down.
Sponsored by Legoland
Lightbright would have said otherwise :)
I do love my legos :3
Looks great.
Until someone hacks the road computers to spell out "Zombies Ahead" or "Trapped in road, Please Help!".
Or they could plug it into their iTunes music to make the largest visualization screen ever.
Or maybe if they get control of the nation-wide road grid, they'll start spelling swears only people from space can read.
The mind shudders.
I do like the iTunes idea.
I think we'll see a lot more kids playing on the streets.
seems promising imho, i hope to see this implemented in the near future
but heck imagine hackers gaining access to these panels... LOL
What about road dirt, Won't that effect the power generated over time.
This is extremely idiotic. Solar power isn't unused due to a lack of land! It's just more expensive than the alternatives.
Why would you intentionally build a solar plant *under cars* when you could just as easily buy some cheap land in a dessert and put it where it won't be continuously driven over?
Crazy people.
Well, there is the cost of creating the infrastructure to carry the electricity from the middle of the desert to where it will actually be used. Electrical transmission lines are very expensive.
Power generated by roadway EVs would at least be located close to where the electricity would be consumed - which is predominantly the suburbs and urban areas.
This way people who live in the not-desert could get power, too.
The problem is getting the power from the desert to the rest of the US. I read somewhere that solar farms set up in our deserts do produce more than enough electricity to power the rest of the US and then some, but there's no good way to get it from there to NY for example. Using roads would ensure that we get a good spread of sources throughout the US, and would also ensure that we don't take up valuable space with the extra panels needed to compensate for the lesser power that the sun provides for us up here in the north east compared to those deserts. It also avoids the NIMBY bullshit that people cry about when it comes to wind turbines.
So yeah. Your crazy people claim has no grounds in logic :D
Delivering electricity from the locale which it is needed, means that you will have a distributed network of electricity, which wouldn't be subject to the same terrorist threat as that of a centralized system where power generation was concentrated into clusters.
If the cost of laying solar cells into the parking lot is equitable, why wouldn't you want to do it?
Of course, I am skeptical that they can create glass that is strong enough to handle heavy equipment such as fire trucks, and the heat-expansion / cold-contraction at the same time without buckling, or the use of tire-chains and studded tires.
maybe because its more efficient to use infrastructure already in place for multiple purposes?
Hmmm.. I didn't know there was land in a dessert... maybe I'll have to ask my local shop..doesn't sound like it tastes to good
my thoughts on this is:
Take the world's deserts, build solar energy plants there, and produce hydrogen there. the hydrogen could then be transported to where it was needed, and conceivably some of our current oil-transportation facilities could be repurposed.
It's because then they can include it in your road tax.
He is right guys!
Don't forget building's and car's shadows!
This seems like a good idea, but solar is not an on demand power source. When the sun goes down where is the electricity going to come from? I don't think the battery technology to store that amount of electricity is there yet. Did they even take into account the cost of building battery storage facilities that will hold excess electricity for use a night?
@Dary,
Would you really see them putting this in downtown NY?
No, it would be on the more open roads that have exposure to sunlight like bridges, highways and suburban streets.
I live in Aus, and if the governement was to put this in between my town and the next town, they would get at least 50km in 4 directions. This would be quite cheap in the long run to do - especially when they plan on building a power plant close by. As Levi said, NIMBY comes around with power plants.
Listen to Pheonix.
@Tim
Agreed, except here's a novel idea to solve the "infrastructure of routing power from the desert problem".
I know this is very far fetched but, what if we put this new invention on all of the roof tops and power houses and building that way?
I guess that idea makes to much sense, lets just stick to the solar road idea or better yet lets cover the moon with solar panels then make a solar road to the moon. I wonder if the government will give me money?
tim got pwned.
Guess what guys, they secretly without you knowing and before your birth already created a distribution system, called the electrical grid, you learn something every day don't you?
The electrical grid is used universally and power is just added to it and the powerplants get paid for their contribution, it's not like every plant has its own electrical grid.
And it's even connected across borders, canada is connected to the US, all the EU countries are connected to eachother, andsoforth.
toocou: Yeah or perhaps there's just a lot of people here who don't know what they're talking about. As Wwhat says there's already a grid. Even if the energy transportation costs did outweigh the insane costs of these solar roads, a common practice is to just build aluminium refineries near the power stations. They use huge amounts of energy and are often situated near power plants.
There seems to be a trend on the internet of supporting cool sounding but *obviously* impractical energy generation ideas. For example:
* Solar roads
* Kinetic energy harvesting (not talking about regenerative braking)
* Solar power in space
etc. There are also loads of armchair engineers here (e.g. just read the comments on the article about hempcrete).
I've actually done a bit of work with a group that helps put solar power systems in place, and to be honest it's not nearly as expensive as it once was. A lot of new technologies have come out recently, including a plethora of solar panel solutions which do not require glass and are far more efficient.
But there are still a lot of practical problems with setting up solar plants out in the desert. For a start, most of the large scale solar plants in the desert aren't using photovoltaic cells. They use reflected sunlight to generate heat, as this is much more efficient than the photovoltaic panels. The problem with this, as you pointed out, is that these plants are far too expensive to produce and maintain to replace our current power plants. Modern photovoltaic cells, on the other hand, are very durable and cheap to produce. However they still suffer from a lack of efficiency in converting sunlight to energy. Even the best of them can only hope to achieve an efficiency rating of about 20%, with most of them today closer to 4%, so any attempt to make a large scale power plant with them would require far more land than anyone is willing to provide for them unless we figure out a way to incorporate photovoltaic cells into already existing structures, such as the roofs of buildings, windows, and, of course, roads.
Your second problem with putting a power plant out in the middle of nowhere has to do with resistance. Everything has some measure of resistance that has to be overcome in order to send electricity through it. Overcoming this resistance expends energy, and the longer your wires are the higher your overall resistance is going to be. Building a power plant out in the middle of nowhere is vastly inefficient compared to building it right next to whereever that electricity is going to be used. Problem is that we can't put these large solar plants in urban centers, because the array of mirrors they use to focus sunlight don't work well when they're surrounded by buildings that cast shadows. The beauty of photovoltaic cells is that despite the somewhat larger initial investment you have to make, once they're in place they can usually be counted on to run for years without maintenance and generally don't have very far to send their power, which in the long term actually makes them cheaper to own and maintain.
I have no doubt whatsoever that we can produce materials with embedded photovoltaic cells that are durable enough to serve as a road surface, and while I'll admit that it couldn't hope to produce as much electricity as it could without cars and trucks constantly driving over it, it would still produce a substantial amount. And while it's true that we would still need power plants to provide electricity during the night, the simple fact that we wouldn't have to be running these plants at their usual capacity during the day would have a HUGE impact. And as for individual cells breaking down, well, individually each cell puts out a pretty piddling amount of electricity. So long as the bulk of the grid remains operational you should be fine.
I'll grant you that put next to conventional power plants this kind of design seems pretty weird, but photovoltaic cells aren't really a comparable technology. They're completely passive solar collectors with virtually no maintenance requirements, all of which lends themselves to on-site placement rather than a centralized generation facility distributing power through a grid. Is it more expensive than normal roads? Sure. But after you factor in the money you'd be making back from selling the electricity it produces over the next decade or so, it's not that bad.
"if these were used on the entire US Interstate system"
Haha, that's a nice idea, but at $7000 for each square foot, I think that'd be a bit pricey. I've no idea how many square feet there are on the US highway system, but I reckon this would end up costing more than our entire GDP.
"12- x 12-foot panels"
But yeah, still pricey.
If you read the press release on their site, the panels are 12'x12' and they estimate it would cost 5 billion to cover all the existing asphalt with these. Quite a bit of $, but nowhere near the US GDP of 13.84 Trillion.
$5 billion is chump change for the usa. The Chinese banks won't mind owning just that little bit more.
The large hadron collider cost $4.4 billion i'm sure it can be done. I'm just wondering if this takes into account the cost of labour and not just the panels.
No, they're not estimating it would cost $5 billion. They're saying it would require 5 billion of these tiles. At $7,000 apiece. So their estimated cost is actually $3.5 trillion. I've probably seen dumber ideas, but please don't ask me where or when.
Wait, it would only cost 5 billion to cover the interstates with this? I somehow thought it would be some astronomical number. 5 billion seems manageable in 'light' of it paying for itself over time, especially if the conversion were spread over the course of 5-10 years, which I bet it would have to be.
The question I have is how well will these hold up over time? Less of an issue in the south, but here in the North East, winter can chew up our roads pretty badly. Granted it is more of a problem with local roads then highway (either due to superior highway grade asphalt or because more traffic on highways prevents ice from getting a foothold).
His numbers:
Solar Roads for country: costs around $33 trillion (no real numbers yet, so may cost less)
Solar Roads last about 21 years (this is what he wants)
Asphalt Roads for country: costs around $11 trillion
Asphalt Roads last about 7 years (or $33 trillion for 21 years)
So the numbers are about equal. He uses conservative numbers too. This does not include pot holes, line repainting, plowing, etc. on asphalt roads. This also does not figure the costs of power plants, coal being burned for power, delivery for power services, etc. You add in those costs, and the figure for asphalt goes up to $48 trillion for 21 years.
Asphalt costs also rise every year. Plus, this would prevent widespread power outages, which costs the country billions as well. They also should prevent many accidents by lighting up the road in dark areas at night and there should be less traffic since roads can warn people of upcoming hazards well in advance. Solar Roads can warm the roads in northern states during the winter to melt falling snow as soon as hit hits. They also are meant to be self-cleaning, but he admits that street sweepers may be needed during certain times.
It's not as dumb as you might think:
http://www.solarroadways.com/The%20Numbers.htm
This all depends on the prototype. They probably would start the switch in desert areas for a test and see how they work, then go on from there. Technology is growing faster every year, so crazy ideas are no longer that crazy. Dirt roads were used in 19th Century and earlier, Asphalt in the 20th. It's now the 21st Century, we should be changing our roads now anyway.
It would take 5 billion 12x12 ($7000) panels to cover all the roads.
That would produce 3x the most energy we've ever used, so 1.7 billion panels would satisfy the entire US electricity use. Or $11.7 trillion.
Satisfying half the US electricity use would be more than enough to be energy independent and discontinue coal plants. That would come down to $5.8 trillion at $7000.
But $7000 is only initially. On such a massive scale (hundreds and hundreds of millions) I bet the manufacturing costs would be only a fraction. Maybe one third. Or just under $2 trillion.
Is it worth $2 trillion to become energy independent? Maybe. It would sure make lots of jobs, help in the long run, and be not too much more than current spending.
What I *would* like to see is this being built on a small, one-city scale (in a more wealthy city without much debt) to see what happens.
Yeah, except the electricity companies won't like that very much... Something tells me someone up high will pay off some other people and we'll never see one solar road ever.
$3.5 trillion. It's not a dumb idea if you spread it out over a decade or more, but then I wonder about the longevity of these tiles.
They'll have thousands of trucks driving over them every day, after all. How often does the Interstate have to be re-paved as it is? More than once every ten years, I bet.
@Tom:
Are you kidding? Electric companies absolutely LOVE this kind of technology. They don't have to keep as many people on staff for maintenance, the transmision costs are often lower, and once the initial investment has been paid off there's no fuel costs to cut into their profit margins. If this kind of system actually went nation wide they'd probably end up making even more money off of it, not less.
Pfft. Why have technolical progress when we can give into one of the 7 deadly sins (greed) and relish in the past (false sense of nostalgia).
If God wanted These fancy new electronic roads, he wouldn't had created asphalt and motorized vehicles.
...
I lol'd
Dang, me too.
How long until hackers put a giant penis on the road...
If people are so inclined they don't need to hack. http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsbeat/newsid_7961000/7961224.stm
This could take dick topping to a whole nother level!
What about maintenance, do they self clean or need someone to clean them everyday.
I can see these to be a huge success if required little or no maintenance even with $7,000 /panel initial cose.
Wouldn't rocks stuck in tires and studded winter tires tear these panels up? As they become scratched and clouded wouldn't they lose their efficiency?
I don't think anybody would claim they will work at 100% efficiency. but with enough of them they don't need to.
They certainly do love wasting money repaving perfectly good roads. There's a major street less than a mile from my house that has been torn up and re-paved no less than 4 times in the last 2 years. Tell me, how the hell is that a logical allocation of government funds?! It's actually in the process of being torn up again right now. It's not a small patch either, they tear up a good 4 miles or so each time.
they dont like the colour...?