Not enough to give anyone any money, mind. It’s all pretty pie-in-the-sky stuff. The only part of it that really sounded feasible was the programmable blacktop - I could see that application working with the technology as-is, at least as a novelty in high-end neighborhoods.
The rest of the stuff… well, just because the couple who invented this stuff think it would be good road-building material doesn’t mean that’s the use it will eventually be put towards. There was talk upthread about roads versus roofs. The idea of combining programmable LEDs with solar panels might end up being a boost for the solar roof industry - imagine if your roof top solar panels could, with a flip of a switch, also be your Christmas lights.
I want to love this concept, but there are just too many problems to overcome (some of which I didn’t even think of before reading this thread) and probably much better alternatives.
You’re right! We can’t build programmable, solar-powered roads right now, so we shouldn’t conduct feasibility studies or probably even think about it! We should just keep right on doing what we’ve been doing … no harm can come of that!
Oh, come off. Nobody is saying we shouldn’t do feasibility studies. What people are saying is that the grandiose claims can not possibly be implemented given the state of present tech.
Well tech changes. And the one thing we DO know is that we are going to have to adopt some new methods of generating and using energy that are not so unhealthy as the ones we use now (globalwarming-globalwarming-globalwarming). Now I’m all for looking at this idea critically, but really, we DON’T have an option to just stand pat, we KNOW that won’t work. We have to look hard at new ideas and make them work.
And frankly, a new infrastructure of smart, solar-powered roadways could be JUST the massive, government-sponsored project that could get our economy out of the doldrums.
Ow, that video gave me an instant migraine. It’s like some unholy alliance of Richard Branson and Billy Mays.
Nevertheless, I for one am happy that this appears likely to get a tryout with private, rather than public, financing. I don’t really think this will make a practical road material any time soon, but I could see some potential for areas of low impact (read: foot) traffic. The key, as someone mentioned, seems to be whether there’s a net energy gain; the small size of individual cells, and all the powered doodads they seem to want to add, that would be of most use during periods when the cells are not actually generating any power, makes this seem unlikely.
Still, it’s worth a test, at least as a niche product.
These things, as described, would be an energy debt. I am not talking about dollars,I am talking about Watts. Average Earth surface collects about 160 Watts per square meter over a 24 hour period. The best photo voltaic cells we have now can’t even harness half that. 80 Watts per square meter of roadway, per day (which this design will never get) is probably going to have a hard time generating enough power to offset the power needed to run the roadway… as the roadway is described.
I’m not against solar, but as I was the first one to mention it in this thread, I’ll mention it again. Roofs. Solar roadways are a ridiculous idea. Solar roofs are not.
BTW, although the video proposes that the roadway will have programmable lighting for safety signage and whatnot, you just know it will eventually be used for this sort of thing:
Well I’ll be danged
It’s a
solar cell
mounted in the road
so we can sell
Burma-Shave
Watts is per second. So 80W means average power, per second. That’s enough to run a microprocessor and LEDs, though I’m not in any way going to defend the feasibility of the idea.
Eh, as I said before it sounds like a nice, feel-good, high tech lookin’ option for business park courtyards and things like that. Eliminate most of the road surface concerns (even in a parking lot at least you’re not closing down a highway to mess with it), looks all fancy and futuristic with lit up arrows in the courtyard pointing to the E Building and dancing snowflakes come Christmas time. Also sounds great in the company brochures about how environmentally friendly your building property is and how you care about the future.
Tech building hard surfaces? Sure, have at it. Replacing I-80? Not really convinced yet.
Right now each hexagonal plate is a 35W panel and once they go into production they’ll be 56W or something. The little parking lot they already made is 3600W I think. Sounds like enough to run LEDs. Don’t know what it takes to charge an EV. They’d like to eventually add some sort of piezoelectric system to it too.
Had to google. Loved the phrase “spectral irradiance decreases exponentially with depth with a decay constant called the asymptotic flux extinction coefficient.” According to measurements taken in 1970, about 10% of the light will get through an inch of snow. From more recent tests: “three percent of light can penetrate to a depth of 20 cm.” A foot is a bit over 30 cm, and it looks like it’s down to 1% about there.
Maybe if it could keep up with the snow as it fell, it could keep clear. If you get a foot dropped overnight, maybe not.
That was a Kickstarter. Truly. It funded and now the group is working to create trees with glow in the dark genes as a first step in trees taking the place of streetlights.
There were no smarmy videos and no promises beyond “splicing these genes has gotten to be pretty off the shelf, now, let’s see how much light we can get a tree to make.” Another company is doing the actual splicing. It’s going to take years. If they get it to work at all, I may get seeds for a glowing houseplant.
That answer is:
Could this be foiled by: 1) driving overland away from the road, 2) driving to the nearest exit and then away from the road, 3) transporting them in a Faraday Cage, 4) putting them into a steel box, 5) figuring out where the communication came from and poking that with an ice pick . . . ?
These kind of remind me of flashing crosswalk lights, which was much lower tech and which everyone wanted as soon as they saw their first one. The city has switched to rapid flashing beacon signs on both ends of the crosswalk because the companies producing the in-street flashing lights keep going out of business. It’s hard to order replacement units when the company’s gone. And the units will stop working eventually.
That’s a very good point. What happens if the company goes bankrupt at some point. Will the highways slowly degrade with more and more dark spots as units fail over time and can’t be replaced? Will we end up eventually blacktopping over them?