DO what???
Mine runs off of a separate 30 gallon water heater, gets pumped through pipes in my driveway and back. Doesn’t cost much at all really. I think my gas bill is maybe a few bucks more when it’s on if that but I only run it when it snows and gets icy.
However it is awesome, my driveway is always clear. I don’t even own a snow shovel but I typically have to broom off the porch is about it.
I guess you are talking about this: Solar Panel Roads ?
We certainly have solar-heated roads in Bangkok. And man, do I wish sometimes that I could turn it off!
I would think that would be costly to repair if roads needed to be dug up.
Fortunately, our solar heating comes from above. 
My first thought was that it would be incredibly expensive (I mean like really, really expensive - pushing a trillion a year). Doing some number crunching shows it’s only really expensive.
Assuming the above cost is true and that only half of the country would need it gives a total cost (only for the heating, installation and upkeep are to be added on) of about $!45,000,000,000 a year.
There are 4,090,000 miles of public highways in the US. Assuming 15% of these are 4 lanes. Assuming the miles of streets to population ratio is the same everywhere as in Los Angeles (a bit of a stretch I know, but this isn’t a PHD dissertation so work with me here) there are about 650,000 miles of streets of which 5% are 4 lane. Further assuming a driveway is 100 feet long (most are much shorter but a whole lot are much wider than a single lane of a road).
While a butt-load of money it’s not nearly as high as I first thought.
My 2,000th post by-the-way.
Actually, widespread installation of long moving sidewalks – assuming it were practical – would have the opposite effect. People sit on their asses in their cars and drive a hundred yards to get from the store to the restaurant. With moving sidewalks, they would be standing, perhaps holding a moving handrail, for miles on end, stepping from one to the next where they would be interrupted for access points. Standing takes more effort than sitting, so overall, a large-scale moving sidewalk scheme in the suburbs would make people a little less fat because they would spend less time on their fat asses.
Air conditioning is less efficient and costs more than heating. So the additional cost for AC would outweigh any savings.
Also, the costs for people to commute back up north to grow food would be high,
Right. Before we do heated roads, could we make sure that every person has a home with heat first?
to further reduce cost, you dont need to heat the entire road, keeping a single lane clear would be totally fine for most places.
WOOT!
No it doesn’t.
A cubic foot of ice weighs about 60 lbs. I took the 10lb/ft[sup]3[/sup] from the first website that suggested it as the density of snow. It might be off by a bit, but it’s not off by that much.
The 334 J/g is the heat of fusion for ice at zero Celsius. It also takes 2.09 J/g degree C to get the snow up to 0 C.
I was talking about it could be costly to repair solar roads , my city can’t afford to repair our roads and sidewalks and I can 't seeing the city being able to even afford
to have solar roads .
Not necessarily. Standing in line burns 47 calories/30 minutes for a 155 pound person, while sitting and driving a truck burns 75. Presumably the attentiveness and foot and arm motion required for driving increases the calories burned. There’s no clear evidence that moving sidewalks would make us healthier.
It would be ridiculously expensive. The car washes I used to operate had what we called “floor heat” on the lot…you know, lots of runoff water coming off the cars exiting the tunnel accumulating on the exit driveway, can’t have cars sliding into a self-created ice sheet into traffic and all…
It was a system that was put in place during construction. Tubing was installed in a bed of pea gravel under the concrete that funneled heated propylene glycol through the system. The boiler that heated and circulated the glycol (essentially a form of antifreeze) ran on natural gas and since we are talking about an area that had the tubing that heated certain areas of the lot was about three quarters of an acre, it cost us about $500/day to run it. That’s just the natural gas cost, let alone the cost of installation. Now extrapolate that cost onto every major thoroughfare in the USA and you’re talking an ENORMOUS amount of money for something you only need for about three months out of the year, and for a large portion of the country, not really at all.
Fix our bridges and potholes, fuck that noise with heated roadways. Give me affordable and non-complicated healthcare ahead of that idea.
If we all had reliable, practical, manageable hovercrafts, like they promised us when I was a child, all this plowing, salting and defrosting nonsense would be moot.
Tell you what. Instead of solar cell roads (which is the silliest idea in a long time), lets perfect solar shingles.
It would be a hell of a lot easier.
This isn’t true. It’s a complex problem : see, in terms of fossil fuels used, for air conditioning you burn a unit of natural gas (about 50% efficient with combined cycle), then lose some energy in the transmission grid, so maybe 40% of the energy reaches the A/C. The A/C’s coefficient of performance ends up being about 3 (varies quite a bit though), so that’s 3 * 0.4 = 1.2 units of heat removed from a house for every BTU of gas burned.
If you burn the natural gas directly in the house to add heat, it’s about 90% efficient, so it ends up costing more fuel.
There’s a bunch more factors, though, but another major factor is that the temperature difference is smaller. The A/C only needs to remove enough heat to reduce the inside temperature to 70 fahrenheit from maybe 90 fahrenheit average outside temp. That’s only 20 degrees dT. Winter temps can easily average in the 30s or 20s or even lower, depending on the state and climate, and you end up with a much larger dT to reach 70 fahrenheit in the house.
So all in all, heating is usually more expensive than A/C. Oh, but A/C also removes humidity and then Southern houses are usually less insulated and…
I wonder whether you could make gas-powered cooling work for A/C, seems as though that would be much more efficient than electric, as well as quieter.
Unless you cleared the snow, at least when it’s light and fluffy, any heavy traffic would create impossible conditions as the snow was back into the air.
Well, if you have a natural gas engine (turbine/piston) driving the compressor, it would…not be as efficient as having the power company drive their engines with the same natural gas and send it over many miles of wire to your house. That’s because the power company’s version of the engine, at least if it’s a modern one, ties together two thermodynamic cycles.
So, ok, instead of cranking a compressor, you can use the fire from the gas directly to heat something. Apparently, though, this is not anywhere near as efficient to do it this way.
The wikipedia article says absorption refrigeration is only about 20% efficient compared to turning a compressor.
So, remember that math above, where its BTUs of gas * 0.4 * 3? The new equation would be BTUs of gas * 3 * 0.2. Half the efficiency.
So, that’s why we don’t do it that way.
