The solar-roadway tiles is/was a real thing and it would help if others would read the website to see what they have accomplished and plan to do. From what I can tell, they were looking at a “localized” source of energy for the highway in which the tiles were installed. Not necessarily for utility use. It’s obvious this system would be inefficient for utility use to everyone. But, for the roadway, night time, lighting, yes, it might be.
- What is the cost of maintenance?
- How often do the cells need to be replaced?
- How do you protect miles of free energy from being illegally siphoned off?
- Have there been any tests to see what it is like to drive on wet and/or icy glass? Hell, has anybody done any tests to see what it is like to drive on glass, period? I’m pretty sure there are going to be traction problems, and glass is going to give a much rougher ride than asphalt, which has some give to it.
If all the plan is to have the led lights in the highway, what’s the point of spending 100x the cost for a road, when we already have a good solution for road striping. See the fighter plane dump truck example.
There is also serious doubts that the LED lights could be seen in the daytime, so we would need paint anyway. Oh, and if this is for nighttime lighting, well, sort of sounds like a solar flashlight. Batteries? Store it in the grid?
It seems that the plan is to rough up the surface of the glass for better traction :dubious: . If that would even work, and if they could get it to last you have now created a surface that reduces the amount of light reaching the solar cells underneath. If the dirt and grime and poor sun angle wasn’t enough of a problem.
I love the idea of using these for parking lots :rolleyes:. You know, the ones that are shaded by parked cars. :smack:
Even if we had this wonderful solar paint, it’d probably still make more sense to put the panels over the roads. That way you wouldn’t have any of the problems of driving on the stuff, the cars wouldn’t be shading the road, and you’d also get all the benefits of a covered roadway.
Uh, no. Some people wanted a bunch of saps to fund their science project and implied that the project was actually possible, when there are a million things wrong with it. Looking at the video absolutely suggests that all the roads in the US would be solar panels.
Here’s a non-comprehensive list of everything that’s wrong with it:
[ul]
[li]Cost: in the trillions of dollars for that much glass alone, plus the cost of solar panels, installation, wiring (>$1 million/mile for buried lines), LEDs, maintenance, networking, etc. Estimates run as high as 50 trillion dollars for only parts of the project.[/li][li]Safety: glass has a lower coefficient of friction when wet than pavement, so car crashes would increase[/li][li]Efficacy (1): the glass would eventually be covered in tiny scratches that would reduce the amount of light generated[/li][li]Efficacy (2): very little direct light reaches city streets due to high buildings, while electricity generated in the middle of nowhere would dissipate almost entirely before reaching population centers because no high voltage power lines are used[/li][li]Efficacy (3): the road would be covered in grime and dust, which would reduce the amount of electricity generated. New roads are black while old roads are grey due to all the debris on them[/li][li]Efficacy (4): panels would have to be heated using inefficient electric heating to prevent snow, would suffer heavy losses from ideal conditions, would have to maintain a network of sensors and computers, and would use LED lighting. There are no calculations that show that solar roadways would even generate net electricity.[/li][li]Security: Having roads that can be hacked increases the amount of threat vectors that our enemies can use to cause us harm[/li][li]Snow: the panels have a raised pattern that means they cannot be effectively plowed[/li][li]Comfort: Driving over panels would be somewhere between driving over concrete panels on a bridge and cobblestones. It would also increase wear on car suspensions and other parts due to the vibration[/li][li]Nighttime: Panels only generate power during the day but need power at night, so traditional sources of energy would still be needed[/li][li]Freeze/Thaw: if something breaks and the panels cannot melt the snow on them or prevent it from freezing, freeze/thaw cycles would wreck the roads quickly[/li][li]Pressure: Solar panels and the circuitboards underneath cannot take the 100 psi pressure that truck tires would put on them[/li][/ul]
This is such a horrendously bad idea I’ll probably be back with more reasons why it won’t ever work.
Forgive the hijack but I think a better avenue to pursue right now is embedded induction power like researchers at Utah State and engineers in South Koreaare working on.
We’ll have to find a lot more electricity to make this a feasible substitute for oil but it certainly solves that annoying little battery problem.
Get yourself a used F-4 Phantom, aka “Flying Brick”, “Lead Sled”, and in Germany “Luftverteidigungsdiesel” (Air Defense Diesel)
Gotta say it. Cite? Re the train stations.
Where?
Tokyo
50 Hz. Not real power.
Harvesting wind beside roadsides isn’t so far fetched.
Penn State Institues of Energy and the Environment list a faculty member, Linghao Zhong, with interests including “wind turbines along the highway”/
The EPA lists a research project: Harvesting Roadside Wind Energy, which unfortunately seems to have run into red tape, and I can’t find a conclusion.
Thisabstract from IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) “A wind energy harvester for low power wireless sensor networks” mentions wind generators converting wind speeds of 2-9m/s (4.5-20.1 mph) supplying 70mW. No, you aren’t going to power a house with it, but you can power a sensor. Or string them together.
Wind turbines which happen to be located next to a road, but which use naturally-occuring winds, are a different matter from wind turbines harnessing the wind generated by passing vehicles.
As to the op … it would make some sense at locations where vehicles would be typically slowing anyway, such as exit ramps and approaches to toll booths (those that still exist) and places where rumble strips now exist.
Perhaps even built into bridges as part of vibration dampening systems.
How much energy such can harvest I don’t know but suspect not enough to be meaningful.
I knew someone whose husband was researching this. The goal was to scavenge enough energy to run a small sensor located in a difficult-to-access location, where power, light, and wind weren’t available, and changing a battery was difficult. IIRC, the use was some kind of sensor that could detect changes to the bridge that affected its structural soundness, then report that wirelessly.
Not really relevant to the OP, but kind of neat anyway.
Not if the pinwheels replaced something else that is already absorbing and dissipating the wake energy (such as roadside grass etc).
What if sections of the road were actually treadmills?
Again, it’s much more efficient to build those systems into the cars than the roads. Regenerative braking is standard on hybrid and electric vehicles.
But then you have to transport this energy over miles and miles to get it to a place where it’s used. There’s just no reason to want to use a road to do this. We have lots of horizontalish surfaces available that would be way better choices that roads. For example, right off the top of my head, the roofs of city buildings. Build covers for every parking lot, so the cars are protected from the weather, and the cover is itself a solar panel. And on and on. The idea of using the surfaces of roads is an idea that should have been interesting to whoever thought it up, for about two seconds. It’s amazing to me that it made it to the state where a group was trying to get funding.
I always thought the F-111 was the classic Jet Fighter Dump Truck.
Military aviation trivia: Any bomber (light or heavy) has been traditionally called “dump trucks”. So any recent tactical fighter/bomber is a “jet fighter dump truck”, including the aforementioned F-4 and the A-6. Usually by the crew of fighter pilots, who traditionally look down their noses at anyone flying something other than an air-superiority warplane. (Cargo planes were “garbage trucks”.) Of course, in today’s environment even the purest of air-superiority fighters often have ground-attack missions, so that distinction seems more psychological than practical nowadays.
A common nickname for the A-1 Skyraider was “flying dump truck”. Just not jet-powered.