why are solar roadways not good
https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-reasons-solar-roadways-are-fucking-stupid/
4 REASONS SOLAR ROADWAYS ARE FUCKING STUPID
2016-07-18
DangerOnion
<div><article>
<div>
<p>The idea of solar roadways has been around for a while, and I haven’t said anything about it because I thought it was self-evident how stupid it was. I was wrong. The Indiegogo page raised $2.2 million and recently, prototypes have been built, to much applause from the environmentally-minded. So now, instead of just being a moronic idea, this is a moronic idea that a lot of people are giving a lot of money to. And since I am sick and tired of the collective societal delusion surrounding this FLAMING GARBAGE PILE OF AN IDEA, I’ve decided to point out the myriad flaws with it.</p>
<p></p>
<p>First, let’s establish exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a solar panel that you put on the road. Actually, it replaces the road surface entirely. From their website:</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>Solar Roadways® (SR) is a modular system of specially engineered solar panels that can be walked and driven upon.</h5>
</blockquote>
<p>So now we know we’re on the same page. You install these instead of laying asphalt or concrete, and they generate power when exposed to the sun. According to their website, these solar panels also have built-in heating elements to prevent snow and ice buildup, built-in LEDs to display road lines and even warning signs and detours, sensors that allow them to detect wildlife, channels that allow them to collect water, enough strength to withstand the heaviest of trucks, and imperviousness to potholes.  Let’s get started, shall we?</p>
<h3>1) Lighting</h3>
<p>Solar Roadways (SR) says that their roads won’t need to be painted, because they’ll use LEDs to make their tiles display lines, like so.</p>
<p></p>
<p>To prove that that’ll work, they cite a study, saying “Solar Roadlite LED Road Studs™ in the UK have been shown to reduce nighttime accidents 70%.” Solar Roadlite is a different company, but they do indeed say that, and I can’t find any reason to believe they’re lying. The key there is <em>nighttime</em> accidents, though. Doesn’t say a damn thing about daytime. And I find it very hard to believe that these little lights are going to be sufficiently visible in broad daylight to make for a satisfactory road line. In fact, the company that makes Solar Roadlite lights (whose website is appalling) shows it exclusively used in conjunction with existing road lines. Even in areas of the southwestern United States where road reflectors are ubiquitous, <em>there are still lines painted on the road. </em>And do you really think that lawmakers are going to let electricity be the sole source of road lines? What if they fail? What if there’s not enough power to run the lights?</p>
<p>The second problem is that the LEDs in SR’s panels are pointed straight up, not toward cars like existing light and reflector systems. Not only will that increase light pollution, but it’s less effective at actually showing people the lines. Even if the little glass bumps on top of each panel scatter light sufficiently, it’s really hard to see an LED light on the road in broad daylight.</p>
<p>And finally, there’s the matter of power. SR says elsewhere that the LEDs will be powered by the grid, so really it’s just chipping away at the bottom line of energy production, but that’ll add up.</p>
<h3>2) Heating</h3>
<p>The power demands of the LED lighting, however, are nothing compared to the power demands of melting snow.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Just so I’m not accused of a straw-man argument here, I’ll tell you exactly what SR is saying about their panels:</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>Solar Roadways® panels have an integrated heating component. The heating system in Solar Roadways® maintains a temperature above freezing. This keeps the road free of snow and ice. Since more than 70% of the U.S. population lives in snowy regions, this system is crucial to maintain safe road conditions…The electronics in Solar Roadways® are divided into separate systems. Each panel’s heating element and LEDs are driven by the grid/storage system, not by the solar cells directly. The solar cells place the harvested energy on the grid/storage system. The systems are independent of one another. This is important because the heaters/LEDs must work at night when the solar cells are incapable of producing power…The heaters only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation. The panels will not be heated to the extent of being warm to the touch.</h5>
</blockquote>
<p>Ok, so the heating components are powered by the grid. And they’re only heated to the point of melting temperature, like a car’s rear windshield. They don’t have to evaporate water, they just have to melt ice. Let’s run some numbers, shall we?</p>
<p>Let’s assume it’s winter in Colorado. It’s 25 degrees out, and it’s night time so the sun isn’t helping. A storm has rolled in, and it’s snowing at a rate of about an inch per hour (I live in Colorado and can promise you that this will happen at least once a year, probably more). According to <a href="http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/earth/88Mod11Prob1.pdf">this worksheet from NASA</a>, snow in those conditions is about 1/15 (6.7%) water. So that’s .067 inches of water per hour, or <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+square+foot+*+.067+inches"><strong>158 cubic centimeters of water, per square foot, per hour</strong>.</a> I switched units because specific heat capacity is always in metric and it’ll make the next bit of math easier. Some of you are having nervous tics as a result. Deal with it.</p>
<p>But of course, it’s not water. It’s frozen. 158 cubic centimeters of water weighs 158 grams, so really we’re working with 158 grams of ice, all of which has to be melted from a starting temperature of 25ºF (-3.9ºC). There are actually two components to this math problem: heating up the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC, and then melting it. I’ll go through them one at a time.</p>
<figure><figcaption>There’s about to be a lot of math, so here’s a puppy.</figcaption></figure>
<p>First, we need the specific heat capacity of ice, which is 203 joules, per degree of temperature change, per 100 grams of ice. Running the numbers on that gives us a result of 1,250 joules to get the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC. But it’s still ice. To melt it, we need something called heat of fusion. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion">For water, that number is 333.55 joules per <em>gram</em></a>. You’ll notice that that’s far higher than the specific heat capacity of ice. That’s just one of the many magical results of water’s polar molecules. Anyway, that means that to melt our 158 grams of ice, we need another 52,700 joules, for a total of <strong>53,950 joules of energy, per square foot, per hour</strong> to melt the snow as fast as it falls.</p>
<p>Now, it makes sense to think of this in terms of the size of each SR panel, since the roadways are supposed to be modular. <a href="http://www.solarroadways.com/Home/Specifics">According to their website</a>, “Each of the SR full-size hexagonal panels covers an area of about 4.39 square feet.” So that means that to keep up with our hypothetical Colorado snowstorm, each panel will need to use 236,840 joules of energy per hour.</p>
<p>That’s a lot of energy. <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=236,840+joules">According to Wolfram|Alpha</a>, my go-to utility for doing math I don’t want to do, it’s 65.79 watt-hours of energy. Since our original time frame was per hour, that handily works out to a sustained power output of 65.79 watts per tile, all of which is coming off the grid. For a standard 9’x18′ parking spot, it’s about 2660 watts, or the equivalent of two hair dryers running nonstop. For my apartment building’s 90-car parking lot, it’s 482,000 watts, or enough to power about 120 homes. And for one mile of four-lane road with shoulders (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_standards">76 feet wide</a>), it’s <strong>6,621,000 watts</strong>.</p>
<p>Think about how big that number is. That’s enough power to run up to 2200 homes. It’s on par with train engines. It means that keeping my tiny 8-mile commute free of snow during that storm would require as much energy as is produced by two Los-Angeles-class nuclear submarines.</p>
<figure><figcaption>This. But two of them.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Do these numbers sound absurd? <strong>Good.</strong> They should sound absurd. They <em>are</em> absurd. And that’s from a relatively mild hypothetical storm. We had a storm in April that dropped <em>forty-six inches</em> of heavy snow on the highways in the mountains. Imagine those power estimates going up by a factor of about five. That is why, everywhere that snow falls regularly, NO ONE HAS EVER TRIED TO MELT IT. We shovel it and plow it and put gravel on top of it and make huge piles of it in parking lots and just <em>deal with it</em> until May, when the Sun finally takes care of it. Melting snow is a preposterously inefficient proposition. And given that peak power output for each panel is 46 watts, compared to the 65 they’ll have to burn, the roads are operating at a huge loss.</p>
<p>This is a promise that Solar Roadways absolutely, inarguably, unequivocally can not deliver on.</p>
<h3>3) Cost and Time</h3>
<p>Unsurprisingly, SR haven’t given us any numbers on cost. Here’s their official line:</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>Cost is still a moving target and will continue to come down over time as we take on more and more of the manufacturing in house.</h5>
</blockquote>
<p>So that’s useless. Their Indiegogo campaign didn’t mention costs either, which means that almost 50,000 people gave an average of $50 apiece to a company that has no idea what it’ll cost to actually make their product. The closest thing we have is <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/183130-solar-roadways-passes-1-4-million-in-crowdfunding-just-short-of-the-56-trillion-required-but-not-bad-for-a-crazy-idea">an estimate from Scott Brusaw in 2010, when he estimated $10,000 for a 12-by-12-foot section of SR panels</a>. Assuming he was including installation—and he probably wasn’t, given that all these panels will have to be wired into the grid as well as installed on the road—that’s roughly <strong>$16 million per mile of two-lane road</strong>. <a href="https://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Finance/GASB%2034%20Documents/PavingCostpermile.pdf">According to the Ohio Department of Transportation</a>, paving costs for that same road would be roughly $240,000.</p>
<figure><figcaption>You could literally pave a road in gold leaf for only about three times more than the cost of SR tiles. I checked.</figcaption></figure>
<p>That means that it costs <em>over 65 times as much</em> to pave a road in SR panels as it does to use good old-fashioned asphalt. And then there’s the matter of timing. A mile of two-lane road is going to require over 50,000 panels, all of which have to be laid down and connected to each other and the grid. Even if there were a machine that could automate that process—there isn’t, and SR hasn’t mentioned plans to make one—the process will almost certainly take <em>far</em> longer than putting in asphalt roads.</p>
<p>I’ll do a very rough estimate. Recently, CDOT finished a project to replace roughly 30 miles of road from Denver to Boulder, eight total lanes wide. It took four years. If we assume that the project was underway for 3000 hours a year (12 hours a day, 50 hours a week), that’s 12,000 hours. To cover that same amount of area with SR panels would take 2.7 million panels, meaning they’d have to be laid at a rate of one panel, fully installed, every 16 seconds. There is simply no way in hell that’s possible. Even if they were as easy to install as LEGO bricks, it’d take a minute or two per panel to install, and that means that same project would have taken up to 30 years to complete.</p>
<p>And no matter how well-designed, they can’t just snap into place. Remember, they’re supposed to be “intelligent.” They can automatically warn drivers if there’s an accident ahead, or automatically re-route lane lines around construction or other obstacles. That means that some kind of central processing is going to have to know where every panel is in relation to every other, like pixels on a computer screen. You can’t draw a line down a row of panels unless you know which panels are next to each other.</p>
<figure><figcaption>Sometimes, drawing a line on asphalt is hard enough.</figcaption></figure>
<h3></h3>
<p>This is kind of important. Roads don’t pay for themselves, which SR are quick to point out. In fact, in the pros and cons column on their website, they make it abundantly clear that these roads are supposed to generate a net gain in energy. If they don’t, they’re kind of pointless.</p>
<p></p>
<p>We’ve already established that during a snowstorm, if they want to keep snow from building on the road, these tiles will have to operate at a huge loss, but that’s a pretty small percentage of the time. What about for the lifetime of a tile?</p>
<p>From <a href="http://www.alphapavingtexas.com/faq/what-is-the-average-lifespan-of-asphalt/">Alpha Paving Texas</a>, asphalt lasts an average of 25 years (call it 24 for the sake of easy math). We’ve already established that asphalt costs $240,000 per mile to lay down per mile for a two-lane road (44 feet wide). So the math is pretty simple. <strong>Each mile of road is costing $10,000 per year, and returning nothing.</strong></p>
<p>That road is a total of 232,320 square feet. At an area of 4.39 square feet per tile, that’s 52,920 tiles. How much energy will that generate? From SR’s own numbers, each tile will generate a peak of 46 watts, for about 4 hours a day (weather and such aside). We’ll run with this, even though it’s an absolute best-case scenario. So that’s 46 watts times 4 hours times 52,920 tiles times 365 days a year, for a total of 3,554 GWh generated per year. <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/30/average-utility-scale-solar-price-in-u-s-falls-to-5%C2%A2kwh/">According to Cleantechnica</a>, wholesale solar power costs five cents per kWh, so that’s how much money someone will be making back on it. It’s not really clear who’s going to be owning these panels, but it’s offsetting the cost of installation either way. At five cents per kWh, that’s a grand total ROI of $177,700 made back on these panels. So that road, assuming it lasts the same amount of time, is going to make about $4.3 million in its lifetime and cost $16 million. That’s an ROI of -73.13%, which is really shitty. Granted, the ROI of an asphalt road is -100%, but there’s a lot less money going in in the first place. <strong>All told, the net cost of the SR road is $585,000 per year.</strong></p>
<p>There are countless more issues that I won’t go much deeper into. How will you keep the tiles clean? Cars are constantly shedding tire dust, oil, water, and particulate pollution on to the road surface, not to mention tiny bits of trash and such that fall off of or are thrown out of vehicles. That stuff adds up, and due to the way solar panels are engineered, even a small obstruction has a disproportionate effect on the efficiency of the panel. What about traction? SR says that their glass tiles have passed traction tests in civil engineering labs, but look at it.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>At this point, I feel like I’ve adequately explained why this won’t work. They’re too expensive, they’ll take too long to install, they don’t return any money for the cost of installing them, they can’t do what they’re supposed to do, etc. But all of this has been building to the single biggest question that SR and its proponents have failed to answer:</p>
<h2>If you want to power the entire country with solar panels, why in the name of all that is good and pure would you want to put those solar panels UNDERNEATH CARS?</h2>
<p>Seriously. Take a second and think about that. Of all the options for places to put solar panels, who in their right mind decided that the best place to put them would be in probably the most physically taxing location imaginable? SR says that there is roughly 33,000 square miles of roadway in the US, and bases their energy estimates on that number. But would you like to know what there is almost three <em>million</em> square miles of—almost a hundred times the area of all our roads put together?</p>
<p><strong>Open fucking space.</strong></p>
<p>That’s as of <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2003/07/01/census-bureau-946-percent-us-rural-open-space">the 2000 Census</a>, so that number will have gone down a tiny bit. And it includes national parks and other protected land, but even so, there is a <em>shockingly large</em> amount of space where we could build solar panels. And those solar panels would be vastly cheaper and easier to install and run, for a number of reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>No new R&amp;D required. We already know how to make solar panels.</li>
<li>Ability to angle them toward the Sun means more efficiency (almost two-thirds more, actually).</li>
<li>Ability to consolidate them near high-voltage inverters means more efficiency in adding power to the grid.</li>
<li>They’ll be easier to keep clean, since they won’t have cars on them.</li>
<li>They don’t have to be as durable, since they won’t have cars on them.</li>
<li>They’ll be easier to maintain, since they won’t have cars on them.</li>
<li>They’ll be exposed to sunlight for more hours of the day, since they won’t have cars on them.</li>
<li>They won’t have to light up or sense wildlife or melt snow, since THEY WON’T HAVE FUCKING CARS ON THEM.</li>
</ol>
<p>Think of one piece of electronic equipment that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. Think of one thing, of any kind, in any context, that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. It doesn’t exist. Running hundreds of cars over a thing is one of the worst things you can reasonably do to that thing, and yet these people have spent the last decade trying to make delicate electronics that you can run hundreds of cars over. This is what I mean by a garbage fire of an idea. SR have needlessly introduced a massive obstacle to the problem of solar panels (ALL THE GODDAMN CARS), and then raised millions of dollars trying to fix that problem. That problem doesn’t exist. Don’t put the solar panels under the cars. Here are some far better ideas that took me zero seconds to come up with:</p>
<ol>
<li>Put the solar panels OVER the roads</li>
<li>Put the solar panels NEXT TO the roads</li>
<li>Put the solar panels in Arizona or Southern California, where there is a shitload of barren desert that no one is using anyway and that gets approximately one million days of sunlight a year.</li>
</ol>
<p>See how easy that was? Just to make my final point, I decided to see what it would cost to cover my whole apartment’s parking lot in solar panels, both with the SR technique (stupid) and by building a giant carport with standard home panels on top.</p>
<p>SR already told us it would cost $10,000 for 144 square feet of tiles, so my 180-by-180-foot parking lot (32,400 square feet) would cost about $2.3 million and generate 338 kilowatts of power, assuming full sunlight, which it won’t get because it’s a parking lot and it’s full of cars.</p>
<p>Now for the not-stupid way. Solar carports already exist, and shade your car while generating electricity. <a href="http://www.solarelectricsupply.com/commercial-solar-systems/solar-carport">According to Solar Electric Supply</a>, I can get a carport setup that will cover roughly the same area and generate 500 kilowatts of power — way more than what SR’s system will give me — for around $750,000. That’s more power, shaded parking, and faster and easier installation, and I’d still have enough money left over to buy five or six condos. Plus, those panels will pay for themselves in 20 years. SR’s roads will take 90 years, and they don’t last that long. And you know what else is great about the carport panels?</p>
<p><strong>They won’t have fucking cars on them.</strong></p>
</div>
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 4 REASONS SOLAR ROADWAYS ARE FUCKING STUPID

 by DangerOnion Posted on July 18, 2016November 8, 2017

 The idea of solar roadways has been around for a while, and I haven’t said anything about it because I thought it was self-evident how stupid it was. I was wrong. The Indiegogo page raised $2.2 million and recently, prototypes have been built, to much applause from the environmentally-minded. So now, instead of just being a moronic idea, this is a moronic idea that a lot of people are giving a lot of money to. And since I am sick and tired of the collective societal delusion surrounding this FLAMING GARBAGE PILE OF AN IDEA, I’ve decided to point out the myriad flaws with it.

 First, let’s establish exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a solar panel that you put on the road. Actually, it replaces the road surface entirely. From their website:

 Solar Roadways® (SR) is a modular system of specially engineered solar panels that can be walked and driven upon.

 So now we know we’re on the same page. You install these instead of laying asphalt or concrete, and they generate power when exposed to the sun. According to their website, these solar panels also have built-in heating elements to prevent snow and ice buildup, built-in LEDs to display road lines and even warning signs and detours, sensors that allow them to detect wildlife, channels that allow them to collect water, enough strength to withstand the heaviest of trucks, and imperviousness to potholes. Let’s get started, shall we?

 1) Lighting

 Solar Roadways (SR) says that their roads won’t need to be painted, because they’ll use LEDs to make their tiles display lines, like so.

 To prove that that’ll work, they cite a study, saying “Solar Roadlite LED Road Studs™ in the UK have been shown to reduce nighttime accidents 70%.” Solar Roadlite is a different company, but they do indeed say that, and I can’t find any reason to believe they’re lying. The key there is nighttime accidents, though. Doesn’t say a damn thing about daytime. And I find it very hard to believe that these little lights are going to be sufficiently visible in broad daylight to make for a satisfactory road line. In fact, the company that makes Solar Roadlite lights (whose website is appalling) shows it exclusively used in conjunction with existing road lines. Even in areas of the southwestern United States where road reflectors are ubiquitous, there are still lines painted on the road. And do you really think that lawmakers are going to let electricity be the sole source of road lines? What if they fail? What if there’s not enough power to run the lights?

 The second problem is that the LEDs in SR’s panels are pointed straight up, not toward cars like existing light and reflector systems. Not only will that increase light pollution, but it’s less effective at actually showing people the lines. Even if the little glass bumps on top of each panel scatter light sufficiently, it’s really hard to see an LED light on the road in broad daylight.

 And finally, there’s the matter of power. SR says elsewhere that the LEDs will be powered by the grid, so really it’s just chipping away at the bottom line of energy production, but that’ll add up.

 2) Heating

 The power demands of the LED lighting, however, are nothing compared to the power demands of melting snow.

 Just so I’m not accused of a straw-man argument here, I’ll tell you exactly what SR is saying about their panels:

 Solar Roadways® panels have an integrated heating component. The heating system in Solar Roadways® maintains a temperature above freezing. This keeps the road free of snow and ice. Since more than 70% of the U.S. population lives in snowy regions, this system is crucial to maintain safe road conditions…The electronics in Solar Roadways® are divided into separate systems. Each panel’s heating element and LEDs are driven by the grid/storage system, not by the solar cells directly. The solar cells place the harvested energy on the grid/storage system. The systems are independent of one another. This is important because the heaters/LEDs must work at night when the solar cells are incapable of producing power…The heaters only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation. The panels will not be heated to the extent of being warm to the touch.

 Ok, so the heating components are powered by the grid. And they’re only heated to the point of melting temperature, like a car’s rear windshield. They don’t have to evaporate water, they just have to melt ice. Let’s run some numbers, shall we?

 Let’s assume it’s winter in Colorado. It’s 25 degrees out, and it’s night time so the sun isn’t helping. A storm has rolled in, and it’s snowing at a rate of about an inch per hour (I live in Colorado and can promise you that this will happen at least once a year, probably more). According to this worksheet from NASA, snow in those conditions is about 1/15 (6.7%) water. So that’s .067 inches of water per hour, or 158 cubic centimeters of water, per square foot, per hour. I switched units because specific heat capacity is always in metric and it’ll make the next bit of math easier. Some of you are having nervous tics as a result. Deal with it.

 But of course, it’s not water. It’s frozen. 158 cubic centimeters of water weighs 158 grams, so really we’re working with 158 grams of ice, all of which has to be melted from a starting temperature of 25ºF (-3.9ºC). There are actually two components to this math problem: heating up the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC, and then melting it. I’ll go through them one at a time.

 There’s about to be a lot of math, so here’s a puppy.

 First, we need the specific heat capacity of ice, which is 203 joules, per degree of temperature change, per 100 grams of ice. Running the numbers on that gives us a result of 1,250 joules to get the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC. But it’s still ice. To melt it, we need something called heat of fusion. For water, that number is 333.55 joules per gram. You’ll notice that that’s far higher than the specific heat capacity of ice. That’s just one of the many magical results of water’s polar molecules. Anyway, that means that to melt our 158 grams of ice, we need another 52,700 joules, for a total of 53,950 joules of energy, per square foot, per hour to melt the snow as fast as it falls.

 Now, it makes sense to think of this in terms of the size of each SR panel, since the roadways are supposed to be modular. According to their website, “Each of the SR full-size hexagonal panels covers an area of about 4.39 square feet.” So that means that to keep up with our hypothetical Colorado snowstorm, each panel will need to use 236,840 joules of energy per hour.

 That’s a lot of energy. According to Wolfram|Alpha, my go-to utility for doing math I don’t want to do, it’s 65.79 watt-hours of energy. Since our original time frame was per hour, that handily works out to a sustained power output of 65.79 watts per tile, all of which is coming off the grid. For a standard 9’x18′ parking spot, it’s about 2660 watts, or the equivalent of two hair dryers running nonstop. For my apartment building’s 90-car parking lot, it’s 482,000 watts, or enough to power about 120 homes. And for one mile of four-lane road with shoulders (76 feet wide), it’s 6,621,000 watts.

 Think about how big that number is. That’s enough power to run up to 2200 homes. It’s on par with train engines. It means that keeping my tiny 8-mile commute free of snow during that storm would require as much energy as is produced by two Los-Angeles-class nuclear submarines.

 This. But two of them.

 Do these numbers sound absurd? Good. They should sound absurd. They are absurd. And that’s from a relatively mild hypothetical storm. We had a storm in April that dropped forty-six inches of heavy snow on the highways in the mountains. Imagine those power estimates going up by a factor of about five. That is why, everywhere that snow falls regularly, NO ONE HAS EVER TRIED TO MELT IT. We shovel it and plow it and put gravel on top of it and make huge piles of it in parking lots and just deal with it until May, when the Sun finally takes care of it. Melting snow is a preposterously inefficient proposition. And given that peak power output for each panel is 46 watts, compared to the 65 they’ll have to burn, the roads are operating at a huge loss.

 This is a promise that Solar Roadways absolutely, inarguably, unequivocally can not deliver on.

 3) Cost and Time

 Unsurprisingly, SR haven’t given us any numbers on cost. Here’s their official line:

 Cost is still a moving target and will continue to come down over time as we take on more and more of the manufacturing in house.

 So that’s useless. Their Indiegogo campaign didn’t mention costs either, which means that almost 50,000 people gave an average of $50 apiece to a company that has no idea what it’ll cost to actually make their product. The closest thing we have is an estimate from Scott Brusaw in 2010, when he estimated $10,000 for a 12-by-12-foot section of SR panels. Assuming he was including installation—and he probably wasn’t, given that all these panels will have to be wired into the grid as well as installed on the road—that’s roughly $16 million per mile of two-lane road. According to the Ohio Department of Transportation, paving costs for that same road would be roughly $240,000.

 You could literally pave a road in gold leaf for only about three times more than the cost of SR tiles. I checked.

 That means that it costs over 65 times as much to pave a road in SR panels as it does to use good old-fashioned asphalt. And then there’s the matter of timing. A mile of two-lane road is going to require over 50,000 panels, all of which have to be laid down and connected to each other and the grid. Even if there were a machine that could automate that process—there isn’t, and SR hasn’t mentioned plans to make one—the process will almost certainly take far longer than putting in asphalt roads.

 I’ll do a very rough estimate. Recently, CDOT finished a project to replace roughly 30 miles of road from Denver to Boulder, eight total lanes wide. It took four years. If we assume that the project was underway for 3000 hours a year (12 hours a day, 50 hours a week), that’s 12,000 hours. To cover that same amount of area with SR panels would take 2.7 million panels, meaning they’d have to be laid at a rate of one panel, fully installed, every 16 seconds. There is simply no way in hell that’s possible. Even if they were as easy to install as LEGO bricks, it’d take a minute or two per panel to install, and that means that same project would have taken up to 30 years to complete.

 And no matter how well-designed, they can’t just snap into place. Remember, they’re supposed to be “intelligent.” They can automatically warn drivers if there’s an accident ahead, or automatically re-route lane lines around construction or other obstacles. That means that some kind of central processing is going to have to know where every panel is in relation to every other, like pixels on a computer screen. You can’t draw a line down a row of panels unless you know which panels are next to each other.

 Sometimes, drawing a line on asphalt is hard enough.

 4) Return on Investment

 This is kind of important. Roads don’t pay for themselves, which SR are quick to point out. In fact, in the pros and cons column on their website, they make it abundantly clear that these roads are supposed to generate a net gain in energy. If they don’t, they’re kind of pointless.

 We’ve already established that during a snowstorm, if they want to keep snow from building on the road, these tiles will have to operate at a huge loss, but that’s a pretty small percentage of the time. What about for the lifetime of a tile?

 From Alpha Paving Texas, asphalt lasts an average of 25 years (call it 24 for the sake of easy math). We’ve already established that asphalt costs $240,000 per mile to lay down per mile for a two-lane road (44 feet wide). So the math is pretty simple. Each mile of road is costing $10,000 per year, and returning nothing.

 That road is a total of 232,320 square feet. At an area of 4.39 square feet per tile, that’s 52,920 tiles. How much energy will that generate? From SR’s own numbers, each tile will generate a peak of 46 watts, for about 4 hours a day (weather and such aside). We’ll run with this, even though it’s an absolute best-case scenario. So that’s 46 watts times 4 hours times 52,920 tiles times 365 days a year, for a total of 3,554 GWh generated per year. According to Cleantechnica, wholesale solar power costs five cents per kWh, so that’s how much money someone will be making back on it. It’s not really clear who’s going to be owning these panels, but it’s offsetting the cost of installation either way. At five cents per kWh, that’s a grand total ROI of $177,700 made back on these panels. So that road, assuming it lasts the same amount of time, is going to make about $4.3 million in its lifetime and cost $16 million. That’s an ROI of -73.13%, which is really shitty. Granted, the ROI of an asphalt road is -100%, but there’s a lot less money going in in the first place. All told, the net cost of the SR road is $585,000 per year.

 There are countless more issues that I won’t go much deeper into. How will you keep the tiles clean? Cars are constantly shedding tire dust, oil, water, and particulate pollution on to the road surface, not to mention tiny bits of trash and such that fall off of or are thrown out of vehicles. That stuff adds up, and due to the way solar panels are engineered, even a small obstruction has a disproportionate effect on the efficiency of the panel. What about traction? SR says that their glass tiles have passed traction tests in civil engineering labs, but look at it.

 You can’t make it too rough, or light won’t get through. And I find it impossible to believe, without seeing some sort of test video (that doesn’t exist), that a rubber tire will grip a wet glass panel the same way it’ll grip wet asphalt. You don’t have to be an engineer, you just have to be a human who’s walked on a wet tile floor with shoes on. And what about longevity? Solar Markers give their road lights a life span of five years. This site says that household LEDs will last 50,000 hours, which at 24 hours a day is about six years. SR claims that their LEDs will outlast their panels, which they say should last 20-30 years, but they don’t say how that’s possible. What about durability? If a washing machine falls off a truck or a car rolls in an accident, chances are an asphalt or concrete road will be mostly fine. What about the glass? There’s no way it’ll fare as well as what is effectively a stone road surface. And what about road glare? You can be damn sure that the sun bouncing off of glass tiles—especially if they’re somehow kept clean—will be worse than it is off of black asphalt.

 At this point, I feel like I’ve adequately explained why this won’t work. They’re too expensive, they’ll take too long to install, they don’t return any money for the cost of installing them, they can’t do what they’re supposed to do, etc. But all of this has been building to the single biggest question that SR and its proponents have failed to answer:

 If you want to power the entire country with solar panels, why in the name of all that is good and pure would you want to put those solar panels UNDERNEATH CARS?

 Seriously. Take a second and think about that. Of all the options for places to put solar panels, who in their right mind decided that the best place to put them would be in probably the most physically taxing location imaginable? SR says that there is roughly 33,000 square miles of roadway in the US, and bases their energy estimates on that number. But would you like to know what there is almost three million square miles of—almost a hundred times the area of all our roads put together?

 Open fucking space.

 That’s as of the 2000 Census, so that number will have gone down a tiny bit. And it includes national parks and other protected land, but even so, there is a shockingly large amount of space where we could build solar panels. And those solar panels would be vastly cheaper and easier to install and run, for a number of reasons:

 1. No new R&D required. We already know how to make solar panels.
 2. Ability to angle them toward the Sun means more efficiency (almost two-thirds more, actually).
 3. Ability to consolidate them near high-voltage inverters means more efficiency in adding power to the grid.
 4. They’ll be easier to keep clean, since they won’t have cars on them.
 5. They don’t have to be as durable, since they won’t have cars on them.
 6. They’ll be easier to maintain, since they won’t have cars on them.
 7. They’ll be exposed to sunlight for more hours of the day, since they won’t have cars on them.
 8. They won’t have to light up or sense wildlife or melt snow, since THEY WON’T HAVE FUCKING CARS ON THEM.

 Think of one piece of electronic equipment that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. Think of one thing, of any kind, in any context, that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. It doesn’t exist. Running hundreds of cars over a thing is one of the worst things you can reasonably do to that thing, and yet these people have spent the last decade trying to make delicate electronics that you can run hundreds of cars over. This is what I mean by a garbage fire of an idea. SR have needlessly introduced a massive obstacle to the problem of solar panels (ALL THE GODDAMN CARS), and then raised millions of dollars trying to fix that problem. That problem doesn’t exist. Don’t put the solar panels under the cars. Here are some far better ideas that took me zero seconds to come up with:

 1. Put the solar panels OVER the roads
 2. Put the solar panels NEXT TO the roads
 3. Put the solar panels in Arizona or Southern California, where there is a shitload of barren desert that no one is using anyway and that gets approximately one million days of sunlight a year.

 See how easy that was? Just to make my final point, I decided to see what it would cost to cover my whole apartment’s parking lot in solar panels, both with the SR technique (stupid) and by building a giant carport with standard home panels on top.

 SR already told us it would cost $10,000 for 144 square feet of tiles, so my 180-by-180-foot parking lot (32,400 square feet) would cost about $2.3 million and generate 338 kilowatts of power, assuming full sunlight, which it won’t get because it’s a parking lot and it’s full of cars.

 Now for the not-stupid way. Solar carports already exist, and shade your car while generating electricity. According to Solar Electric Supply, I can get a carport setup that will cover roughly the same area and generate 500 kilowatts of power — way more than what SR’s system will give me — for around $750,000. That’s more power, shaded parking, and faster and easier installation, and I’d still have enough money left over to buy five or six condos. Plus, those panels will pay for themselves in 20 years. SR’s roads will take 90 years, and they don’t last that long. And you know what else is great about the carport panels?

 They won’t have fucking cars on them.

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 13 Thoughts

 1. Kill Bill says:
 July 18, 2016 at 3:03 pm

 You’re a fucking animal I love it

 Reply
 2. Pieter says:
 July 27, 2016 at 12:59 pm

 Very well written, funny and convincing!

 Reply
 3. Karl says:
 July 31, 2016 at 2:15 am

 You said “And do you really think that lawmakers are going to let electricity be the sole source of road lines?”. I don’t think you should underestimate how stupid people can be.

 Reply
 4. Michael says:
 September 3, 2016 at 4:20 am

 Been thinking the same things ever since I heard about it. Just to lazy to write about it. Good job! The traction is what gets me. Never underestimate the power of the stupid masses. Sadly, they about to elect one of their own to the presidency of the USA.

 Reply
 5. Pingback: 4.1 Solar Freakin’ Roadways – impossible things podcast
 6. urbantransportlibrary says:
 September 30, 2016 at 12:01 am

 Reblogged this on The Urban Transport Library and commented:
 Reblogged

 Reply
 7. Solar freaken Roadways! says:
 October 12, 2016 at 5:28 pm

 You should watch Thunderf00ts video that debunk Solar freaken Roadways on YouTube. They’re hilarious.

 Reply
 8. Solar freaken Roadways! says:
 October 12, 2016 at 5:35 pm

 You should watch Thunderf00ts videos on YouTube that debunk Solar freaken Roadways. This is what happens when the majority of society is scientifically illiterate.

 Reply
 9. Oleaginous Outrager says:
 November 1, 2017 at 10:31 am

 I don’t know about where you are, but round heah, we gots ourselves lots of semis. Lots of triple-trailer semis. How long is their pretty glass brick road going to survive that punishment?

 And another thing: what sort of roadbed would they be laid on? All that melting snow would make quite a muddy mess, and one must ponder how they would insure that these solar panels would remain supported and properly anchored, while being driven over by folks how don’t have much sense or notion of safety.

 Reply
 10. Al Archibald says:
 April 13, 2018 at 8:40 am

 And just look at the way pavement/sidewalk slabs get all uneven after a while, just with people walking on them.

 Reply
 11. Aquarius says:
 August 3, 2018 at 10:42 pm

 And if the ice melts there might be an electrical fuse (providing that there are cracks between the tiles, which they obviously will have, cause they’ll expand when heated)

 Reply
 12. Aquarius Gemini says:
 August 3, 2018 at 10:43 pm

 And there might be an electrical fuse if the ice melts and it has cracks in them

 Reply
 13. Pingback: 19 REASONS THIS “SURVIVAL” STORY SMELLS FISHY – Angus Bohanon | Writing Portfolio

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The idea of solar roadways has been around for a while, and I haven’t said anything about it because I thought it was self-evident how stupid it was. I was wrong. The Indiegogo page raised $2.2 million and recently, prototypes have been built, to much applause from the environmentally-minded. So now, instead of just being a moronic idea, this is a moronic idea that a lot of people are giving a lot of money to. And since I am sick and tired of the collective societal delusion surrounding this FLAMING GARBAGE PILE OF AN IDEA, I’ve decided to point out the myriad flaws with it.
 
First, let’s establish exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a solar panel that you put on the road. Actually, it replaces the road surface entirely. From their website:
Solar Roadways® (SR) is a modular system of specially engineered solar panels that can be walked and driven upon.
So now we know we’re on the same page. You install these instead of laying asphalt or concrete, and they generate power when exposed to the sun. According to their website, these solar panels also have built-in heating elements to prevent snow and ice buildup, built-in LEDs to display road lines and even warning signs and detours, sensors that allow them to detect wildlife, channels that allow them to collect water, enough strength to withstand the heaviest of trucks, and imperviousness to potholes.  Let’s get started, shall we?
1) Lighting
Solar Roadways (SR) says that their roads won’t need to be painted, because they’ll use LEDs to make their tiles display lines, like so.
 
To prove that that’ll work, they cite a study, saying “Solar Roadlite LED Road Studs™ in the UK have been shown to reduce nighttime accidents 70%.” Solar Roadlite is a different company, but they do indeed say that, and I can’t find any reason to believe they’re lying. The key there is nighttime accidents, though. Doesn’t say a damn thing about daytime. And I find it very hard to believe that these little lights are going to be sufficiently visible in broad daylight to make for a satisfactory road line. In fact, the company that makes Solar Roadlite lights (whose website is appalling) shows it exclusively used in conjunction with existing road lines. Even in areas of the southwestern United States where road reflectors are ubiquitous, there are still lines painted on the road. And do you really think that lawmakers are going to let electricity be the sole source of road lines? What if they fail? What if there’s not enough power to run the lights?
The second problem is that the LEDs in SR’s panels are pointed straight up, not toward cars like existing light and reflector systems. Not only will that increase light pollution, but it’s less effective at actually showing people the lines. Even if the little glass bumps on top of each panel scatter light sufficiently, it’s really hard to see an LED light on the road in broad daylight.
And finally, there’s the matter of power. SR says elsewhere that the LEDs will be powered by the grid, so really it’s just chipping away at the bottom line of energy production, but that’ll add up.
2) Heating
The power demands of the LED lighting, however, are nothing compared to the power demands of melting snow.
 
Just so I’m not accused of a straw-man argument here, I’ll tell you exactly what SR is saying about their panels:
Solar Roadways® panels have an integrated heating component. The heating system in Solar Roadways® maintains a temperature above freezing. This keeps the road free of snow and ice. Since more than 70% of the U.S. population lives in snowy regions, this system is crucial to maintain safe road conditions…The electronics in Solar Roadways® are divided into separate systems. Each panel’s heating element and LEDs are driven by the grid/storage system, not by the solar cells directly. The solar cells place the harvested energy on the grid/storage system. The systems are independent of one another. This is important because the heaters/LEDs must work at night when the solar cells are incapable of producing power…The heaters only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation. The panels will not be heated to the extent of being warm to the touch.
Ok, so the heating components are powered by the grid. And they’re only heated to the point of melting temperature, like a car’s rear windshield. They don’t have to evaporate water, they just have to melt ice. Let’s run some numbers, shall we?
Let’s assume it’s winter in Colorado. It’s 25 degrees out, and it’s night time so the sun isn’t helping. A storm has rolled in, and it’s snowing at a rate of about an inch per hour (I live in Colorado and can promise you that this will happen at least once a year, probably more). According to this worksheet from NASA, snow in those conditions is about 1/15 (6.7%) water. So that’s .067 inches of water per hour, or  158 cubic centimeters of water, per square foot, per hour. I switched units because specific heat capacity is always in metric and it’ll make the next bit of math easier. Some of you are having nervous tics as a result. Deal with it.
But of course, it’s not water. It’s frozen. 158 cubic centimeters of water weighs 158 grams, so really we’re working with 158 grams of ice, all of which has to be melted from a starting temperature of 25ºF (-3.9ºC). There are actually two components to this math problem: heating up the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC, and then melting it. I’ll go through them one at a time.
 There’s about to be a lot of math, so here’s a puppy. 
First, we need the specific heat capacity of ice, which is 203 joules, per degree of temperature change, per 100 grams of ice. Running the numbers on that gives us a result of 1,250 joules to get the ice from -3.9ºC to 0ºC. But it’s still ice. To melt it, we need something called heat of fusion. For water, that number is 333.55 joules per gram . You’ll notice that that’s far higher than the specific heat capacity of ice. That’s just one of the many magical results of water’s polar molecules. Anyway, that means that to melt our 158 grams of ice, we need another 52,700 joules, for a total of 53,950 joules of energy, per square foot, per hour to melt the snow as fast as it falls.
Now, it makes sense to think of this in terms of the size of each SR panel, since the roadways are supposed to be modular. According to their website, “Each of the SR full-size hexagonal panels covers an area of about 4.39 square feet.” So that means that to keep up with our hypothetical Colorado snowstorm, each panel will need to use 236,840 joules of energy per hour.
That’s a lot of energy. According to Wolfram|Alpha, my go-to utility for doing math I don’t want to do, it’s 65.79 watt-hours of energy. Since our original time frame was per hour, that handily works out to a sustained power output of 65.79 watts per tile, all of which is coming off the grid. For a standard 9’x18′ parking spot, it’s about 2660 watts, or the equivalent of two hair dryers running nonstop. For my apartment building’s 90-car parking lot, it’s 482,000 watts, or enough to power about 120 homes. And for one mile of four-lane road with shoulders (76 feet wide), it’s 6,621,000 watts.
Think about how big that number is. That’s enough power to run up to 2200 homes. It’s on par with train engines. It means that keeping my tiny 8-mile commute free of snow during that storm would require as much energy as is produced by two Los-Angeles-class nuclear submarines.
 This. But two of them. 
Do these numbers sound absurd? Good. They should sound absurd. They are absurd. And that’s from a relatively mild hypothetical storm. We had a storm in April that dropped forty-six inches of heavy snow on the highways in the mountains. Imagine those power estimates going up by a factor of about five. That is why, everywhere that snow falls regularly, NO ONE HAS EVER TRIED TO MELT IT. We shovel it and plow it and put gravel on top of it and make huge piles of it in parking lots and just deal with it until May, when the Sun finally takes care of it. Melting snow is a preposterously inefficient proposition. And given that peak power output for each panel is 46 watts, compared to the 65 they’ll have to burn, the roads are operating at a huge loss.
This is a promise that Solar Roadways absolutely, inarguably, unequivocally can not deliver on.
3) Cost and Time
Unsurprisingly, SR haven’t given us any numbers on cost. Here’s their official line:
Cost is still a moving target and will continue to come down over time as we take on more and more of the manufacturing in house.
So that’s useless. Their Indiegogo campaign didn’t mention costs either, which means that almost 50,000 people gave an average of $50 apiece to a company that has no idea what it’ll cost to actually make their product. The closest thing we have is an estimate from Scott Brusaw in 2010, when he estimated $10,000 for a 12-by-12-foot section of SR panels. Assuming he was including installation—and he probably wasn’t, given that all these panels will have to be wired into the grid as well as installed on the road—that’s roughly $16 million per mile of two-lane road. According to the Ohio Department of Transportation, paving costs for that same road would be roughly $240,000.
 You could literally pave a road in gold leaf for only about three times more than the cost of SR tiles. I checked. 
That means that it costs over 65 times as much to pave a road in SR panels as it does to use good old-fashioned asphalt. And then there’s the matter of timing. A mile of two-lane road is going to require over 50,000 panels, all of which have to be laid down and connected to each other and the grid. Even if there were a machine that could automate that process—there isn’t, and SR hasn’t mentioned plans to make one—the process will almost certainly take far longer than putting in asphalt roads.
I’ll do a very rough estimate. Recently, CDOT finished a project to replace roughly 30 miles of road from Denver to Boulder, eight total lanes wide. It took four years. If we assume that the project was underway for 3000 hours a year (12 hours a day, 50 hours a week), that’s 12,000 hours. To cover that same amount of area with SR panels would take 2.7 million panels, meaning they’d have to be laid at a rate of one panel, fully installed, every 16 seconds. There is simply no way in hell that’s possible. Even if they were as easy to install as LEGO bricks, it’d take a minute or two per panel to install, and that means that same project would have taken up to 30 years to complete.
And no matter how well-designed, they can’t just snap into place. Remember, they’re supposed to be “intelligent.” They can automatically warn drivers if there’s an accident ahead, or automatically re-route lane lines around construction or other obstacles. That means that some kind of central processing is going to have to know where every panel is in relation to every other, like pixels on a computer screen. You can’t draw a line down a row of panels unless you know which panels are next to each other.
 Sometimes, drawing a line on asphalt is hard enough. 
 
This is kind of important. Roads don’t pay for themselves, which SR are quick to point out. In fact, in the pros and cons column on their website, they make it abundantly clear that these roads are supposed to generate a net gain in energy. If they don’t, they’re kind of pointless.
 
We’ve already established that during a snowstorm, if they want to keep snow from building on the road, these tiles will have to operate at a huge loss, but that’s a pretty small percentage of the time. What about for the lifetime of a tile?
From Alpha Paving Texas, asphalt lasts an average of 25 years (call it 24 for the sake of easy math). We’ve already established that asphalt costs $240,000 per mile to lay down per mile for a two-lane road (44 feet wide). So the math is pretty simple. Each mile of road is costing $10,000 per year, and returning nothing. 
That road is a total of 232,320 square feet. At an area of 4.39 square feet per tile, that’s 52,920 tiles. How much energy will that generate? From SR’s own numbers, each tile will generate a peak of 46 watts, for about 4 hours a day (weather and such aside). We’ll run with this, even though it’s an absolute best-case scenario. So that’s 46 watts times 4 hours times 52,920 tiles times 365 days a year, for a total of 3,554 GWh generated per year. According to Cleantechnica, wholesale solar power costs five cents per kWh, so that’s how much money someone will be making back on it. It’s not really clear who’s going to be owning these panels, but it’s offsetting the cost of installation either way. At five cents per kWh, that’s a grand total ROI of $177,700 made back on these panels. So that road, assuming it lasts the same amount of time, is going to make about $4.3 million in its lifetime and cost $16 million. That’s an ROI of -73.13%, which is really shitty. Granted, the ROI of an asphalt road is -100%, but there’s a lot less money going in in the first place. All told, the net cost of the SR road is $585,000 per year. 
There are countless more issues that I won’t go much deeper into. How will you keep the tiles clean? Cars are constantly shedding tire dust, oil, water, and particulate pollution on to the road surface, not to mention tiny bits of trash and such that fall off of or are thrown out of vehicles. That stuff adds up, and due to the way solar panels are engineered, even a small obstruction has a disproportionate effect on the efficiency of the panel. What about traction? SR says that their glass tiles have passed traction tests in civil engineering labs, but look at it.
 
 
At this point, I feel like I’ve adequately explained why this won’t work. They’re too expensive, they’ll take too long to install, they don’t return any money for the cost of installing them, they can’t do what they’re supposed to do, etc. But all of this has been building to the single biggest question that SR and its proponents have failed to answer:
If you want to power the entire country with solar panels, why in the name of all that is good and pure would you want to put those solar panels UNDERNEATH CARS?
Seriously. Take a second and think about that. Of all the options for places to put solar panels, who in their right mind decided that the best place to put them would be in probably the most physically taxing location imaginable? SR says that there is roughly 33,000 square miles of roadway in the US, and bases their energy estimates on that number. But would you like to know what there is almost three million square miles of—almost a hundred times the area of all our roads put together?
 Open fucking space. 
That’s as of the 2000 Census, so that number will have gone down a tiny bit. And it includes national parks and other protected land, but even so, there is a shockingly large amount of space where we could build solar panels. And those solar panels would be vastly cheaper and easier to install and run, for a number of reasons:
No new R&amp;D required. We already know how to make solar panels.
Ability to angle them toward the Sun means more efficiency (almost two-thirds more, actually).
Ability to consolidate them near high-voltage inverters means more efficiency in adding power to the grid.
They’ll be easier to keep clean, since they won’t have cars on them.
They don’t have to be as durable, since they won’t have cars on them.
They’ll be easier to maintain, since they won’t have cars on them.
They’ll be exposed to sunlight for more hours of the day, since they won’t have cars on them.
They won’t have to light up or sense wildlife or melt snow, since THEY WON’T HAVE FUCKING CARS ON THEM.
Think of one piece of electronic equipment that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. Think of one thing, of any kind, in any context, that benefits from being run over by hundreds of cars a day. It doesn’t exist. Running hundreds of cars over a thing is one of the worst things you can reasonably do to that thing, and yet these people have spent the last decade trying to make delicate electronics that you can run hundreds of cars over. This is what I mean by a garbage fire of an idea. SR have needlessly introduced a massive obstacle to the problem of solar panels (ALL THE GODDAMN CARS), and then raised millions of dollars trying to fix that problem. That problem doesn’t exist. Don’t put the solar panels under the cars. Here are some far better ideas that took me zero seconds to come up with:
Put the solar panels OVER the roads
Put the solar panels NEXT TO the roads
Put the solar panels in Arizona or Southern California, where there is a shitload of barren desert that no one is using anyway and that gets approximately one million days of sunlight a year.
See how easy that was? Just to make my final point, I decided to see what it would cost to cover my whole apartment’s parking lot in solar panels, both with the SR technique (stupid) and by building a giant carport with standard home panels on top.
SR already told us it would cost $10,000 for 144 square feet of tiles, so my 180-by-180-foot parking lot (32,400 square feet) would cost about $2.3 million and generate 338 kilowatts of power, assuming full sunlight, which it won’t get because it’s a parking lot and it’s full of cars.
Now for the not-stupid way. Solar carports already exist, and shade your car while generating electricity. According to Solar Electric Supply, I can get a carport setup that will cover roughly the same area and generate 500 kilowatts of power — way more than what SR’s system will give me — for around $750,000. That’s more power, shaded parking, and faster and easier installation, and I’d still have enough money left over to buy five or six condos. Plus, those panels will pay for themselves in 20 years. SR’s roads will take 90 years, and they don’t last that long. And you know what else is great about the carport panels?
 They won’t have fucking cars on them.
4 REASONS SOLAR ROADWAYS ARE FUCKING STUPID
https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-reasons-solar-roadways-are-fucking-stupid/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/04/the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-solar-panels/
The Road To Hell Is Paved With Solar Panels – "Solar Road" fails miserably
2018-04-04
None
<div><div>
<p><em>$4.5 million project generates just $36.86 worth of electricity so far</em></p>
<p><b>Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach</b></p>
<p>Back in 2014, Anthony Watts <a href="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/04/solar-roadways-biggest-indiegogo-scam-ever/">pointed out an upcoming project called “Solar Roadways”</a>. This was a project to put solar panels on roads. Hey, what’s not to like? Plenty of roadway space, put it to double use, we get free energy from the sun, right?</p>
<p>Well, as Anthony presciently commented at the time …</p>
<blockquote>
<p><i>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.</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Since a few years have now passed, I thought I might update the information about the project. The first rule of investigations, of course, is <i>“follow the Benjamins”. </i>This saying comes from the fact that Benjamin Franklin appears on the US $100 bill … so here is the funding of the Solar Roadways project.</p>
<p>$100,000 – 2009 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) for a “Phase I feasibility study”.</p>
<p>$750,000 – 2011 SBIR grant from the DOT for Phase II to develop and build a solar parking lot. They put panels on a 12 x 36 foot (4 x 11 m) parking lot.</p>
<p>$2,200,000 – 2014 Indiegogo funding from the easily deceived.</p>
<p>$750,000 – 2015 SBIR contract for further research</p>
<p>$750,000 – 2016 SBIR contract for yet more research.</p>
<p>So to date, they have received $2,350,000 from you and I, the US taxpayers, and another $2,200,000 from mining that seemingly endless source called <i>“a fool and his money are soon parted”</i>, for a total of $4,550,000.</p>
<p>And what did we get for this four and a half megabucks of lavish private and taxpayer funding?</p>
<p>First, the solar parking lot. Here are the founders of the company with their monumental achievement …</p>
<p></p>
<p>Wow … that’s plenty impressive … dare I ask what happens to the electricity output when cars are parked on the parking lot, or is that just too practical a question?</p>
<p>Next, the solar test roadway, which is in Sandpoint, Idaho. Twenty-five of the first thirty test panels died within the first few weeks. They were replaced by panels that delaminated …</p>
<p></p>
<p>So the delaminated panels were replaced again. But to be fair, who would have ever guessed that driving loaded semi-trucks over solar panels might do some damage? … well, to be fair, you and I could have guessed that, but clearly they couldn’t. I suppose that’s why they needed so much funding.</p>
<p>In any case, the system has now been in operation with thirty panels for a couple of years. Being an inquisitive and curious sort of fellow, I went to their <a href="https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/pv/public_systems/V3vh1173801/overview">website</a> to see how well they are doing … I found the following:</p>
<p></p>
<p>On its best day, Tuesday, May 9, 2017, as shown in the graphic above the thirty panels generated a total of 1.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity … and on the most recent day, yesterday, it generated 0.25 kWh of electricity. On average, since it was started the production has averaged about 0.65 kWh per day.</p>
<p>The system went into operation on March 22, 2017. It has been in operation for 378 days, during which time it has generated about 246 kWhrs of electricity.</p>
<p>Now, my home electricity is expensive due to the asinine “renewable mandates” put into place by Governor Moonbeam here in Californistan. I pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, which is about double the cost charged in neighboring states where they haven’t drunk the green Koolaid.</p>
<p>And at that rate, the total of 246 kWhrs of electricity that cost <strong>$4,450,000</strong> is worth about <strong>$36.86</strong>.</p>
<p>Gotta love these green pipe-dreams … enjoy the sunshine, dear friends, it will do more good smiling down on you than it would by shining on solar panels on the roadways.</p>
<p>As always, my best regards to everyone,</p>
<p>w.</p>
<p><strong>My perennial request:</strong> When you comment, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. I get grumpy when people make unsubstantiated claims that someone is foolish for saying something somewhere sometime …</p>
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 * The Road To Hell Is Paved With Solar Panels – "Solar Road" fails miserably

 Climate News

 The Road To Hell Is Paved With Solar Panels – "Solar Road" fails miserably

 6 years ago
 Willis Eschenbach

 $4.5 million project generates just $36.86 worth of electricity so far

 Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

 Back in 2014, Anthony Watts pointed out an upcoming project called “Solar Roadways”. This was a project to put solar panels on roads. Hey, what’s not to like? Plenty of roadway space, put it to double use, we get free energy from the sun, right?

 Well, as Anthony presciently commented at the time …

 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.

 Since a few years have now passed, I thought I might update the information about the project. The first rule of investigations, of course, is “follow the Benjamins”. This saying comes from the fact that Benjamin Franklin appears on the US $100 bill … so here is the funding of the Solar Roadways project.

 $100,000 – 2009 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) for a “Phase I feasibility study”.

 $750,000 – 2011 SBIR grant from the DOT for Phase II to develop and build a solar parking lot. They put panels on a 12 x 36 foot (4 x 11 m) parking lot.

 $2,200,000 – 2014 Indiegogo funding from the easily deceived.

 $750,000 – 2015 SBIR contract for further research

 $750,000 – 2016 SBIR contract for yet more research.

 So to date, they have received $2,350,000 from you and I, the US taxpayers, and another $2,200,000 from mining that seemingly endless source called “a fool and his money are soon parted”, for a total of $4,550,000.

 And what did we get for this four and a half megabucks of lavish private and taxpayer funding?

 First, the solar parking lot. Here are the founders of the company with their monumental achievement …

 Wow … that’s plenty impressive … dare I ask what happens to the electricity output when cars are parked on the parking lot, or is that just too practical a question?

 Next, the solar test roadway, which is in Sandpoint, Idaho. Twenty-five of the first thirty test panels died within the first few weeks. They were replaced by panels that delaminated …

 So the delaminated panels were replaced again. But to be fair, who would have ever guessed that driving loaded semi-trucks over solar panels might do some damage? … well, to be fair, you and I could have guessed that, but clearly they couldn’t. I suppose that’s why they needed so much funding.

 In any case, the system has now been in operation with thirty panels for a couple of years. Being an inquisitive and curious sort of fellow, I went to their website to see how well they are doing … I found the following:

 On its best day, Tuesday, May 9, 2017, as shown in the graphic above the thirty panels generated a total of 1.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity … and on the most recent day, yesterday, it generated 0.25 kWh of electricity. On average, since it was started the production has averaged about 0.65 kWh per day.

 The system went into operation on March 22, 2017. It has been in operation for 378 days, during which time it has generated about 246 kWhrs of electricity.

 Now, my home electricity is expensive due to the asinine “renewable mandates” put into place by Governor Moonbeam here in Californistan. I pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, which is about double the cost charged in neighboring states where they haven’t drunk the green Koolaid.

 And at that rate, the total of 246 kWhrs of electricity that cost $4,450,000 is worth about $36.86.

 Gotta love these green pipe-dreams … enjoy the sunshine, dear friends, it will do more good smiling down on you than it would by shining on solar panels on the roadways.

 As always, my best regards to everyone,

 w.

 My perennial request: When you comment, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. I get grumpy when people make unsubstantiated claims that someone is foolish for saying something somewhere sometime …

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 185 Comments
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 View all comments
 ResourceGuy
 April 4, 2018 12:15 pm

 Millenials loved the concept of solar roadways and they have zero interest in finding out the outcomes, or performance, or cost. That is how things work in la la land with grant money to run it.

 0
 Willis Eschenbach
 Author
 Reply to ResourceGuy
 April 4, 2018 12:32 pm

 True, resourceguy, but you’d think that the folks who put up the Indiegogo money might be interested in the actual outcome …
 w.

 0
 Komrade Kuma
 Reply to ResourceGuy
 April 4, 2018 12:59 pm

 I haven’t bothered to go see it but I thought that movie La La Land was about solar roadways…….

 0
 Greg
 Reply to Komrade Kuma
 April 4, 2018 9:38 pm

 That name is so friggin stupid , I’m not even prepared to know what the film is about. Probably millennials on Prozac or something.

 0
 Bartemis
 Reply to Komrade Kuma
 April 5, 2018 10:05 am

 It’s a really good movie. Very talented cast and excellent music.

 0
 Quinn
 Reply to Komrade Kuma
 April 5, 2018 10:56 am

 The opening number was pretty good, but neither Emma Stone nor Ryan Gosling are very good singers or dancers, so the rest of the movie stunk.

 0
 Quinn the Eskimo
 Reply to Komrade Kuma
 April 6, 2018 3:30 am

 Quinn v. Quinn on La La Land. It’s true the neither Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone is a particularly great singer or dancer. I almost walked out in the first 15 minutes because I was measuring it against the likes of Astaire and Rogers. But I was with the fam and decided to lay back and think of England, as the saying goes. By the end, the story had swept me away, and I loved it. The music, the singing, the dancing and the story are all mutually reinforcing, and by the end you see how beautifully they are all woven together.

 0
 brian
 Reply to ResourceGuy
 April 4, 2018 8:38 pm

 Roto-Tilt the roadways to follow the sun.

 0
 James Bull
 Reply to brian
 April 5, 2018 1:10 am

 Now that would be worth paying to see traffic at sunrise and sunset with the road at its steepest, or maybe an East/West road with all the panels forming a series of ramps.
 James Bull

 0
 Greg
 Reply to ResourceGuy
 April 4, 2018 9:26 pm

 Anyone with the slightest experience in engineering or PV solar panels would see that this was a non starter before even sketching it out on the back of an envelope.
 Solar panels lose a lot of their efficiency when they are dirty or the front surface is damaged, so putting them in a situation where they will get both very dirty and very scratched is a non starter.
 Road surfaces need to be rough to provide grip during breaking and cornering and to provide a small scale paths for water to prevent aquaplaning. Again, totally contrary to what is provided by solar panels.

 Anyone who can not see that is either doing too many drugs or is just out to milk the available grants in the most cynical way, knowing that it is a non starter but they can make a quick killing.

 0
 RAH
 Reply to Greg
 April 5, 2018 10:09 am

 LOL! You can’t explain that kind of thing to the faithful. When this idea first came out I was over at my parents telling my sisters two kids why it wouldn’t work. That niece and nephew reflect their mothers silly and naïve social political views.
 It doesn’t take engineering experience to know it’s a non starter. This truck driver has seen what a 50,000 lb. coil of steel that gets loose from a flatbed does to a road surface. What vehicle fires and chemical spills do to the surface. Has seen the sparks fly from plows and chains being dragged along. Sees the black streaks and grooves worn into pavement by heavy truck traffic. Feels the shock wave of vibration that passes through the road bed and ground when a heavy truck goes by at highway speeds. Understands why expansion joints are installed in certain places.
 Then there is the question of traction. Traction requires texture and textured glass will both reflect and refract light and hold the rubber and dirt in the recesses.
 I might as well have been talking to a wall trying to explain this too those faithful though.
 So thank you Willis for keeping up on this farce and reporting on it’s lack of progress and wastefulness. I will make sure to ask my silly niece and nephew at the next family get together: “So how’s that solar road project coming along?”

 0
 Charmaine Taylor
 Reply to Greg
 April 8, 2018 1:10 am

 there was a really excitable video called ” solar freakin’ roadways’ a few years ago 2014 (see youtube link below) …it was so laughable me and friends were asking…”are they really trying to do this”? they play no snow, warns you if a (huge) bolder fell on the road ahead, or if a moose stepped..it got crazier, and OF COURSE the wonder of SAVING and making back $$$…insanely funny. enjoy watching- 6 minutes– has had 22 MILLION+ view… by
 Scott Brusaw Published on May 18, 2014 (video shows SAME exact small parking area that $4.4 M was spent on, and same two people shoveling recycled glass at one point… cause it’s ego grooves of course!

 0
 Tom Halla
 April 4, 2018 12:17 pm

 Not being able or willing to do math is a requirement for greens.

 0
 Ian H
 Reply to Tom Halla
 April 4, 2018 3:34 pm

 They love the concept of solar roadways so much because they plan to tax the shit out of motorists to pay for them; thereby making driving unaffordably expensive.

 0
 rocketscientist
 Reply to Ian H
 April 4, 2018 4:37 pm

 …and the solar roadways won’t receive any damage because nobody can afford to drive on them!
 Problem solved….now its just the governments problem on how to pay off the bonds issued to build the roads nobody is using and hence no tax revenue.

 0
 Greg
 Reply to Ian H
 April 4, 2018 9:42 pm

 Wait until they start getting sued for the amount of accidents caused by low friction surface and increased tendency to cause aquaplaning accidents.
 This surface should never have been approved as a road surface outside of closed research establishments. Using the public as crash test dummies is NOT allowed.

 0
 Stephen Richards
 April 4, 2018 12:24 pm

 There are at least two solar roads in western Europe for a total cost in excess of 4.000.000€. Not reports have been filed that i can find but the greenpiss supporters plough on spending our money.

 0
 Greg
 Reply to Stephen Richards
 April 4, 2018 9:36 pm

 There is one such road in the north of France. One thing I can guarantee is that the French will NOT make any data available about the energy actually produced.
 We have 3MW solar farm up the road from here and I went up there when it was just being finalised and got to talk to one of the engineers. He was very helpful and let walk around and take a few photos. I asked if there was a web site where I could watch the production. He said no, and neither would there be one. All data is a “commercial secret” of the company running it.
 Despite being billed as having 4MW installed capacity , they only have 3MW of inverters linking it to the grid. Due to the way the panels are orientated they will NEVER be perpendicular to the sun and this was clearly reflected in buying the inverter equipment. So the 4MW provided to the press is a lie , it is a 3MW installation.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Greg
 April 5, 2018 7:04 am

 If the inverters are rated at 3MW, it means they aren’t expecting to actually produce more than about 1.5 to 2.0MW at any given time.
 You never run electronics at it’s maximum rating for long. They burn out.

 0
 Doug
 Reply to Greg
 April 5, 2018 10:15 am

 I am a solar design engineer. The “4 MW” is the DC rating of the PV modules (which is always quoted by the solar developer), while the 3 MW is the rating of the inverters that connect to the grid (which is always quoted by the utility). Both are technically true — no one is lying. It is standard practice for the DC to be oversized by a factor of up to 1.5 — some of the energy is inevitably “clipped” during peak periods, but on an annual basis this type of system is more cost effective than one with a lower DC – AC ratio.
 As for the inverters running at full power, modern inverters are designed with sufficient margins so that they can run at full power continuously. In a system like this on a clear day, the inverters will probably be running maxed out for four hours around solar noon. The morning and afternoons are at lower power simply because there is less sun. Regarding panel orientation, steeper panel tilt (which might get to “perpendicular” ) requires more row spacing because of inter-row shading, which means less equipment on the same size field. So all of these are parameters that a solar engineer looks at carefully when designing a system.
 Finally — monitoring. Privately owned systems would typically report performance to the utility that is purchasing the power — no need for them to be public. There are many “community solar” arrays that publish real time output to their members, and some “research arrays” that publish real-time data on the web. You just have to look for them.
 As for the original topic — Solar Freakin’ Roadways — this was a goofy idea from the beginning, but I think the inventors were sincere, just hopelessly naive. But it is interesting to see how an idea like this can capture peoples’ minds (from the questions I got, it was definitely not just millennials). I have to admit, I almost put in $40 so I could get a SFR hat …

 0
 Arthur Gevart
 Reply to Stephen Richards
 April 5, 2018 12:32 pm

 Here it is : https://www.lemoniteur.fr/article/route-solaire-wattway-un-an-apres-35146727
 They hit 53% of the estimated results, it’s just 17 times the price of standard photovoltaic
 electricity …and they had to replace only 5% of the cells in one year. A total success story.
 [ “On est très satisfait” Indeed! With expectations such as those, how could one not be happy with the results. -mod]

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Arthur Gevart
 April 5, 2018 4:55 pm

 Mais si l’on ne prend en considération que les dalles qui ont fonctionné en continu (certaines ont par exemple disjoncté lors d’un orage), l’objectif est atteint à plus de 85%, selon Wattway.
 If we only consider the modules that worked all the time…
 If we only consider those planes that could land safely, no plane accident happened in the world last year?

 0
 gunsmithkat
 April 4, 2018 12:24 pm

 They need to make their solar panels out of cement. That should do it.

 0
 Tim.
 Reply to gunsmithkat
 April 4, 2018 2:53 pm

 They tried that on the M6 and M1 in the UK. The panels all crumbled over time and had to be expensively dug out and replaced with tarmac. They didn’t generate electricity either being just concrete!

 0
 Greg
 Reply to Tim.
 April 4, 2018 9:44 pm

 Yes, A12 east coast road into London is concrete and it awful to drive on. Very noisy and bumpy.

 0
 RAH
 Reply to gunsmithkat
 April 5, 2018 10:46 am

 Tuesday night this truck driver pulled his rig into the parking area just off I-90 W about 14 miles west of Buffalo, NY. The Angola Service Area was full so I used that small rest area a few miles west of the service area. As with any other time I park to take my 10 hour break in a place just off the interstate I laid there in the sleeper feeling the shock waves as heavy trucks went by on I-90 at highway speeds. One can feel those waves despite the fact that the cab of the truck is mounted on rubber air bladders. Really kind of relaxing just as the winds in the early morning hours which gently rocked my truck were.
 It was a good thing to get a nice sleep because Wednesday was a bear up there. I had to go to Rochester first then come back to Tonawanda then get back to the terminal in Anderson, IN. Wednesday night. Winds were gusting over 60 mph. Frequent snow squalls. Ice was piled up along the east shore of the lake because of the heavy west winds. The snow didn’t stick but when you hit one of those squalls the visibility got very poor. Many 1,000s up there lost power. Lots of trees down. Two trucks blown over. Those kind of conditions make truck driving damned hard work. I arrived back at the terminal in Anderson having drove 668 mi in 11 hours and 1 minute of driving time that day. And that despite hitting the Cleveland afternoon rush hour at it’s height. Kind of proud of that. Wouldn’t have been possible if the predominate wind direction had been out of the north. But thankfully my primary directions of travel were East and then West so I was dealing with mostly headwinds or tail winds. If the wind had been out of the north or south I would have probably had to just park it and wait it out because the 22,000 lbs. of freight I had in the trailer wouldn’t have been enough to allow for safe driving in those winds.

 0
 Jeff in Calgary
 April 4, 2018 12:29 pm

 Would it be cheaper to just harvest some energy from the heat produced by sunlight hitting black asphalt?

 0
 Y. Knott
 Reply to Jeff in Calgary
 April 4, 2018 1:05 pm

 – As was pointed-out in detail at the time these guys became press-hogs, if they really want to put solar panels on roadways, they’d be far, far smarter to mount them on stilts ABOVE the roadway – from a safety standpoint alone, glass is not a very tractive surface and vehicles leave dirt behind, which would quickly degrade solar returns particularly in winter. Likewise, solar panels above the roadway could be pointed more-or-less at the sun, whereas roadways are pretty flat so most of the sunlight would reflect off them. The whole scene falls-under the “Are we really THAT desperate?” headline.

 0
 Bryan A
 Reply to Y. Knott
 April 4, 2018 2:17 pm

 I don’t know but apparently the Greenies are That Disparate when compared to actual intelligent humans

 0
 TheLastDemocrat
 Reply to Y. Knott
 April 8, 2018 6:27 am

 This is close to my idea. I love shady parking spaces. You create covered parking in a shopping area, such as a mall or strip shopping center. Solar panels on nearly 100% of the cover. Run the electricity straight to the mall to power a set handful of items: lights, security cameras, Muzac.
 Shoppers appreciate the shade, and so prefer your shopping strip versus the one down the street.
 When the shoppers are done, and get in their car, they do not have to run the A/C anywhere near as much, since their car has not experienced the [genuine] green house effect. This is an incidental benefit that can legitimately be added in to the cost-benefit calculation, unlike most of the side benefits people claim in these scenarios.
 If the panels fail, you are really not in too bad a shape – the panels would not be the main power source for the entire complex, and so you just draw a bit more from the main power.
 It is easy to get to the panels and wires to check on them.
 This is a situation where you might actually hit your return-on-investment mark. If it does’t work, you allow the panels to go into failure one by one, and you still have covered parking. Not too shabby.

 0
 PUMPSUMP
 Reply to Y. Knott
 April 9, 2018 1:00 am

 Yep, car park solar panel shades, as seen at airports such as Perpignan in France. In 20 years time the panels will only be sunshades of course….

 0
 Steve Zell
 Reply to Jeff in Calgary
 April 4, 2018 4:44 pm

 I’ve often wondered why solar enthusiasts are so obsessed with generating electricity, when the process is at best 15% efficient. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to circulate water (or some other fluid) through black tubes, which could be heated by sunlight on sunny days, then stored and used as a heat source at night or on cloudy days? The process could be made more efficient by using tubes which are black on the side facing the sun, and transparent below, with a reflective surface below the tubes.

 0
 Komrade Kuma
 Reply to Steve Zell
 April 4, 2018 9:16 pm

 Way too 19th century, dude.
 No marketing angle, no NEW TECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH headline for the spruikers and media morons.
 Common sense just don’t sell in the cafes and uber eateries of either Inner Hipsterville or Outer Nerdistan.

 0
 John Hardy
 Reply to Steve Zell
 April 5, 2018 12:41 am

 bY Steve Zell: thermal energy collection is an idea worth investigating

 0
 monosodiumg
 Reply to Steve Zell
 April 5, 2018 9:57 am

 Thermal solar collectors on rooftops for domestic hot water production are ubiquitous in spain. Typically with a 200 to 300L tank, convection driven (the tank is usually at the top). No electrics. Very simple and reliable technology. Only moving part is the water. Works even on cloudy days. I estimate the collecting surface to be approx 3m^2. An owner tells me he needs supplementary heating just a few days a year. I don’t understand why that’s not much more widespread.

 0
 Greg61
 April 4, 2018 12:30 pm

 The sad thing about this example is that it’s only one of the more egregious examples of stupidity. This is like a local shop compared to Walmart – the small shop may waste more on a percentage basis, but the big solar and wind companies make it up in volume

 0
 Clyde Spencer
 Reply to Greg61
 April 4, 2018 1:43 pm

 Greg61,
 Perhaps these kinds of antics speak to the intellectual capacity of those advocating them, and why they are supporters of the Green religion. More green Kool Aid, please.

 0
 Stephen Rasey
 Reply to Clyde Spencer
 April 4, 2018 6:52 pm

 They got the money, didn’t they? The problem is with the people giving out the money, and the laws that (allow/require) them to find stupidly uneconomic ideas.

 0
 Mumbles McGuirck
 April 4, 2018 12:37 pm

 Wouldn’t it make more sense to place the solar panels on a roof OVER the parking lot. That way, you are not shading, driving over, or crushing the panels .and. you are providing shade for the cars.
 What a bunch of maroons.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Mumbles McGuirck
 April 4, 2018 12:45 pm

 Also good for hail protection.
 Of course hail will not be good for the solar cells, but what the heck, don’t broken windows improve the economy?

 0
 Mumbles McGuirck
 Reply to MarkW
 April 4, 2018 12:49 pm

 That is the old “broken window fallacy” or I guess “broken solar panel fallacy” now.
 https://mises.org/library/broken-window-fallacy
 You could use the energy from the panels to provide illumination of the darkened parking lot below. That’s the “circular thinking” fallacy.

 0
 Bryan A
 Reply to MarkW
 April 4, 2018 2:18 pm

 They might propose putting a Roof over the Solar Panels to protect them from Hail

 0
 Anna
 Reply to Mumbles McGuirck
 April 4, 2018 12:48 pm

 With the added benefit that you can angle them towards the Sun…

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 1:52 pm

 Morning or afternoon?

 0
 Anna
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 2:59 pm

 If you are at mid UK latitudes, and you define the energy you’d get from tracking the Sun with your solar panel as100% optimal efficiency, then a fixed installation titled at the correct angle for your latitude is about 60-70% efficient and a solar panel lying down flat will be about 30-35% efficient. Ie you can get about twice as much energy out of a solar cell if you tilt it upwards at the Sun rather than lying it down flat and tracking the Sun throughout the day could get another 50% (ish)
 [NB numbers are a bit rough depends on latitude at the equator the optimum angle to tilt is flat horizontal for a fixed installation, further from the equator you want a steeper angle and you can also do circa 15% better with a fixed installation by adjusting the angle twice a year]

 0
 Greg
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 9:53 pm

 Having designed a built a couple of solar tracker systems , I can confirm Anna’s estimations. Nice succinct , bottom line summary.

 0
 jorgekafkazar
 Reply to Mumbles McGuirck
 April 4, 2018 1:34 pm

 I believe a college in South Los Angeles did that. AFAIK, the solar panels are just sitting there, with no electricity being generated.

 0
 Andrew
 Reply to jorgekafkazar
 April 4, 2018 8:05 pm

 Athens airport was producing a massive 300W from its roof when I arrived.

 0
 John F. Hultquist
 Reply to jorgekafkazar
 April 4, 2018 8:17 pm

 I did not realize solar panels can be turned off.
 How do they do that?

 0
 Scott Frasier
 April 4, 2018 12:38 pm

 what happens when the weather is overcast, snowing etc… and snow plows, ???? I have a perspiring mind..

 0
 HotScot
 April 4, 2018 12:39 pm

 One of the more beneficial attributes of sunlight is the generation of vitamin D in the human body.
 Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, a British GP blogs about the huge benefit to the human heart naturally produced vitamin D has in combating heart disease. He is the medical equivalent of CAGW sceptics.
 I suspect the money wasted on these childish project could be channelled to him to provide some worthwhile results from the use of sunlight.
 Mind you, he would probably say, as he does now, get out and sunbathe, just don’t torch yourself.
 That’s got to be worth………Hmmmmmm, let me think………£5 worth of common sense.

 0
 drednicolson
 Reply to HotScot
 April 4, 2018 7:03 pm

 Cases of rickets and other conditions caused by vitamin-D deficiency are on the rise again, in part because well-intentioned parents took the “too much sun = skin cancer” meme in the 90s to heart and slathered their kids in excessively strong sunblock.

 0
 Phil Rae
 Reply to HotScot
 April 4, 2018 8:08 pm

 Vitamin D deficiency has also been implicated in numerous other immune system modulated diseases, like Multiple Sclerosis, in recent years. It’s well-known that there is higher incidence of MS in individuals born & raised in high latitudes and that living nearer the equator, while young, is protective. Scotland & Canada have amongst the highest incidence of MS in the world.

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Phil Rae
 April 5, 2018 5:01 pm

 Yes, although the very recent explosion of MS is linked to a vaccine, not lack of sun.

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Phil Rae
 April 5, 2018 7:03 pm

 There was no increase in children drinking milk. There was an increase in hep B vaccination.

 0
 Henryp
 April 4, 2018 12:42 pm

 True. Solar panels are a waste. Must admit that. How are Anthony’s panels doing on his roof?

 0
 Bob Smith
 Reply to Henryp
 April 4, 2018 1:34 pm

 The subject of this post is solar panels embedded in roadways. Nice try at switching the subject.
 IIRC, one reason Mr. Watts installed solar panels on his roof is to protect himself from the ever-increasing rates of the blinded-by-greenies electric company.

 0
 Anna
 April 4, 2018 12:43 pm

 Thunderf00t has done a series of videos on the problems with Solar Roadways that are well worth a watch – latest one here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIuiZh5t9_Y . He’s also looked into other projects proposing to use plastics for roads etc… which also have fundamental issues.
 When I first heard of it, I found it really hard to believe anyone is even considering building a road out of solar panels. For starters, the glass will surely scratch horribly when it has 1 ton cars rubbing stones across it. Asphalt is amazing material for roads very difficult to beat – cheap, practically 100% recyclable, easy to lay smoothly, no glare, durable, easy to repair etc…

 0
 Clyde Spencer
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 1:47 pm

 Anna,
 No glare? Since when? And it only gets worse when it is wet, especially when driving into the sun.

 0
 Anna
 Reply to Clyde Spencer
 April 4, 2018 3:05 pm

 Fair point, I was thinking about asphalt in comparison to glass; I work opposite a glass skyscraper and get dazzled by the reflection on every slightly sunny day.

 0
 KRM
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 1:48 pm

 Not to mention the decades of research that have gone into improving long term skid resistance. Many aggregates are polished by traffic making the road slippery and their use is controlled by tight specifications. I very much doubt these panels would match the performance of aggregates, and safety would therefore be affected. Expect lawsuits if they ever get used on roads.

 0
 deebodk
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 2:44 pm

 While Thunderf00t has put out some good videos covering various subjects, unfortunately he has drank the AGW Kool-Aid. It’s really amazing how otherwise smart and inquisitive individuals just lose the plot when it comes to global warming/climate change.

 0
 Don K
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 3:37 pm

 “Asphalt is amazing material for roads very difficult to beat – cheap, practically 100% recyclable, easy to lay smoothly, no glare, durable, easy to repair etc.”
 Asphalt doesn’t do all that well in cold climates. Unless one spends a LOT of time and money on the substrate it grows frost heaves that degrade into huge potholes that have to be “fixed” with patches that develop frost heaves that, in turn, degrade into huge potholes. Commonwealth Avenue in Boston used to be the canonical example of “More pothole than pavement”. I assume that it still is. A few decades ago a VW fell into a pothole in the Woodrow Wilson Bridge (Interstate95) over the Potomac in Washington DC anded up with all four wheels spinning in the air.
 Not that glass would be any better. Plus which a glass surface with sufficient texture to allow tires to grip in Winter weather probably wouldn’t be a very good light transmitter.
 Although city dwellers find it hard to believe. Most rural roads in Vermont are unpaved out of practicality rather than miserliness. Dirt works better than pavement on roads with light traffic for about 355 days a year. And it’s much easier to maintain. The remaining ten days — “mud season” are a different story of course. Mostly, we try not to travel the back roads during mud season..

 0
 Clyde Spencer
 Reply to Don K
 April 4, 2018 6:35 pm

 Don K,
 You forgot to mention that those rural roads are essentially ‘paved’ with packed snow in the Wintertime.

 0
 drednicolson
 Reply to Anna
 April 4, 2018 7:11 pm

 And much like the ethane used to make plastic shopping bags, there’s not much other use for it.

 0
 arthur4563
 April 4, 2018 12:46 pm

 The idea of solar parking lots always grabbed my fancy – I presume these morons would know to panel only the parts of the parking lot where, you know, cars didn’t park and block the sun. But I wonder – how infinite is their ignorance? I’ve heard of notions of laying solar panels on Interstate highways but could never understand why they didn’t just install the panels on the median strips
 and any unused land bordering the highway. Cars travelling over the highway, you know, block the sun from reaching the road surface. . The whole idea seemed impractical and stupid. Now some
 charging stations are errecting roofs over the area and putting their solar panels up there, which makes sense.

 0
 Chris Marrou
 Reply to arthur4563
 April 4, 2018 1:37 pm

 “…but could never understand why they didn’t just install the panels on the median strips
 and any unused land bordering the highway.”
 I thought of that dealing with food once. In Texas the entirety of Interstate 10 (800 miles) has a median area of about 10,000 acres and could yield 1 1/2 million bushels of corn worth $5 million. Of course, planting, cultivating, spraying and irrigating it each year would cost that much or more, especially if done by the government…

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to arthur4563
 April 4, 2018 1:55 pm

 The columns supporting the panels could present a safety hazard for any car that leaves the roadway at high speed.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to MarkW
 April 4, 2018 1:58 pm

 It took them decades to figure out how to make break away sign and light poles that didn’t kill drivers that crashed into them.
 Beyond that, if the drivers knocked down a bunch of panels that then fell on their car, during the middle of the day, the panels would still be generating high voltage.
 I can just see the fire dept on arriving at the accident scene, telling the driver to stay in his car until the sun goes down.

 0
 Davidq
 Reply to MarkW
 April 4, 2018 3:39 pm

 Sadly, a leaking gas tank, sparking solar panel….

 0
 drednicolson
 Reply to MarkW
 April 5, 2018 3:01 pm

 In one town in this area, they grew tired of replacing the breakaway stop signs at the main intersection, so they poured big concrete columns around them.

 0
 Bill Rocks
 April 4, 2018 12:48 pm

 Very useful report. Thank you.

 0
 Chimp
 April 4, 2018 12:48 pm

 Why do so many people want expensive, unreliable energy sources rather than cheap and reliable, with the added benefit of more plant food in the air?

 0
 AGW is not Science
 Reply to Chimp
 April 5, 2018 4:11 am

 THANK YOU!!!

 0
 Hugs
 April 4, 2018 12:52 pm

 And at that rate, the total of 246 kWhrs of electricity that cost $4,450,000 is worth about $36.86.

 … but it is not nearly that valuable, as the grid needs other types of power plants to back up.
 Solar is so cheap it’s nearly worthless, but very expensive in terms of taxpayer’s money.

 0
 Mark from the Midwest
 Reply to Hugs
 April 4, 2018 1:29 pm

 That’s $38.36 at retail electricity rates in expensive states. In Michigan that’s about $6.70 cents wholesale, and actually zero $ today, since we just received 8 more inches of snow

 0
 John Bell
 April 4, 2018 12:54 pm

 About 14 years ago i moved to Michigan to work on the hydraulic hybrid UPS truck, another BIG waste of money, the fed put millions in to it and it had no commercial viability, par for the course.

 0
 old engineer
 Reply to John Bell
 April 4, 2018 8:17 pm

 John Bell- I have always thought a hydraulic powered vehicle was an interesting concept. Why did it fail? Was the pressure required for the high pressure storage too high? Was the low pressure receiver volume too large? Controls too complex? what?

 0
 ralfellis
 Reply to old engineer
 April 5, 2018 4:37 am

 Hydraulic motors are not very efficient. You would be better kff with a diesel-electric setup, which js why trains (and ships) use that system.

 0
 Tom
 Reply to old engineer
 April 7, 2018 7:24 pm

 The biggest advantage of an hydraulic accumulator is that it can be charged with energy at a very high rate – much much better than a battery. The down side is that they are bulky and heavy. On an energy stored per unit mass, or unit volume, they are much much worse than a battery. The result is, for any driving cycle other than maybe a garbage truck, they are simply not feasible.

 0
 chadb
 April 4, 2018 12:57 pm

 The only dumber place I can think of to put a solar panel is inside a tunnel. I’ve seen parking lots that have covers over the parking spots in order to keep the cars cool.
 As for highways, seriously? Where do you put the transmission lines?

 0
 Michael Jankowski
 Reply to chadb
 April 4, 2018 5:35 pm

 The end concept is that roads made of panels will charge/power the cars driving on them in real-time…lol

 0
 Justin McCarthy
 Reply to chadb
 April 7, 2018 12:13 am

 These are big in the desert, Coachella Valley, CA (Palm Springs Area). Shaded parking areas are already common. So addition of solar panels made some sense. However, it is pretty dusty in the desert.

 0
 Sparky
 April 4, 2018 1:06 pm

 At $0.15/kWh you have Moonbeam’s best price for electricity. I live 20min from Sacramento and his house – I pay $0.36/kWh peak, $0.30 off-peak in the summer. Annual blended cost is $0.29/kWh. Almost European rates! Germany here we come!!!! From greatness to power poverty for a dream without reality.

 0
 chadb
 April 4, 2018 1:17 pm

 What would be really fun would be to take those delaminated panels, cover them with snow, toss ice on top, and then run some more trucks over them. Oh yeah, and connect them to the local electric grid. Then maybe just for fun park a Tesla on top and set it on fire to simulate a disaster scenario.

 0
 chadb
 Reply to chadb
 April 4, 2018 1:22 pm

 Dang it, I meant cover it with snow and toss SALT on top, then drive over it with trucks. Yep, just toss a little salt water inside the protective covering while power is being generated and see what happens.

 0
 J Mac
 April 4, 2018 1:19 pm

 Whoo Boy! Those are going to work great on I41 in Wisconsin!
 After heavy snow falls, icing, salting to melt ice, snow plow scraping, sanding for traction, heavy equipment loads, studded snow tires, freeze/thaw cycles, thermal expansion/contraction from -34F winter to +104F summer temps, and a smattering of ammoniated compounds from cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, horses, and wild bird droppings, those panels will be performing at 110%!

 0
 MikeN
 April 4, 2018 1:19 pm

 Willis
 Only $.15 per kilowatt hour in California? This is less than Massachusetts and comparable to many states. Are you sure you haven’t listed only part of the bill?

 0
 Willis Eschenbach
 Author
 Reply to MikeN
 April 4, 2018 3:14 pm

 Mike, that’s just the start, “Tier 1”. Tier 2 is $0.18/kWhr, and so on. We use very little electricity and we sometimes end up in Tier 2. From there it can go up as high as $.80 per kWhr where there is time-of-day pricing …
 w.

 0
 Clyde Spencer
 Reply to Willis Eschenbach
 April 4, 2018 6:37 pm

 It looks like California is a state onto itself in the west — not that it wasn’t obvious in other ways as well!

 0
 John F. Hultquist
 Reply to MikeN
 April 4, 2018 8:35 pm

 We live in Washington State east of the Cascades. A Public Utility District (PUD) buys power and distributes it locally. Our residential rate is of two parts;
 Residential rate, monthly for last year – – – as of end of March, this year are the 2nd numbers:
 Facilities Charge . . . . . $19.00 . . . . . . . . . . . $21.25
 Energy Charge … . . . . $0.0897/kWh . . . . . $0.0908
 The facilities charge is paid to support the local grid, so even a house with lots of solar but on the grid will pay the $21.25/month.
 There are other service types, but these are the small home rates.

 0
 stinkerp
 April 4, 2018 1:22 pm

 I think you’re looking at it the wrong way around. Sure, it’s a boondoggle, but that should have been obvious. The first clue is Sandpoint, Idaho, one of the most gorgeous places on the planet and populated with eccentric characters and free-thinkers who like living off the grid, much like yourself, Willis. Just ask Patrick McManus, the humorist who gave us memorable characters like the crotchety woodsman, Rancid Crabtree, drawn from McManus’ childhood experiences growing up in Sandpoint. This is a place where Sasquatch is as real as aliens crashing at Area 51. Sandpoint only gets an average of 175 sunny days per year, not exactly an ideal testbed for solar technology, which any pencil pusher in Washington, DC should have been able to figure out.
 I don’t know if the guy in the picture is responsible for this Golden Fleece (hat tip to the late Sen. William Proxmire), but I think he should be lauded for his creativity in supporting himself with rather lavish funding from the government and the generous donations of likeminded dreamers. Of course it’s crazy, but you’ve got to admire the guy behind the curtains.

 0
 phaedo
 April 4, 2018 1:24 pm

 What will happen when a Tesla catches fire on one of these roadways?

 0
 BruceC
 Reply to phaedo
 April 4, 2018 9:37 pm

 Or if a suspension component breaks or a wheel falls off;
 http://teslabears.club/t/new-thread-keefs-complaints-with-photographs/107/1
 BTW, 123,000 Tesla Model S cars have been recalled as they could be fitted with steering bolts that could suffer from excess corrosion. In some cases they may crack or completely fail.
 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/tesla-recalls-almost-half-cars-it-ever-built-shares-tank-n861421

 0
 Thomas Homer
 April 4, 2018 1:45 pm

 Can we derive some metrics to work with? For example, how much square area of solar panel would be required to power the transport of 1 pound 1 foot (or the metric of your choice)? I know there will need to be several (many) assumptions to get started, like the energy output of solar panel by area. But, at least we could throw some math at it. If it takes X surface area of solar panel to power a passenger vehicle Y distance, we could recognize viability pretty quickly. How well would those metrics scale to moving a freight train?
 There are other major hurdles with this application, like embedding ‘solar panels’ in asphalt, and night-time. But having a roadway extract energy from the sun is a noble goal (just maybe not over 4 million worth of noble).

 0
 Bruce Anderson
 Reply to Thomas Homer
 April 4, 2018 4:45 pm

 Isolation is about 1 KWm^-2 at noon at the equator in clear weather. That’s 1.34 horsepower. It essentially falls as the cosine of the latitude and cosine of the time until noon, worse in winter, better in summer. Solar panels are roughly 20% efficient. That’s all you need to know to solve these solar energy problems Fermi-style. I love Fermi problems.
 200 watts per square meter, under perfect conditions, falling to 140 W at the latitude of New York in the fall and spring, and falling again to 98 W by three in the afternoon there. Call that 100 W per square meter in a typical application. One sixth of a horsepower per square meter.
 A Ford Escort, not the noblest of transportation options, is a hundred-horsepower car. Collect sunshine on a square meter (again, New York at three o’clock near an equinox) for six hundred hours, and it will run for one hour (assuming no battery loss, but also assuming max consumption for the hour). Collect the sun on six hundred square meters for an hour, and it will run for an hour.
 Wikipedia tells me a Ford escort is 4.44 x 1.70 m in length and width, about 7.5 square meters. It needs 40 parking spaces besides the one it is sitting on to power it for the length of time it is parked (not counting nighttime, of course).

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Bruce Anderson
 April 5, 2018 7:17 am

 Closer to 10% efficient.

 0
 Caligula Jones
 April 4, 2018 1:57 pm

 Well, when they run out of ‘merican tax dollars, they’ll inevitably end up here in Ontario, Canada, where our Liberal government will borrow a few billion (or ten) and give them some.
 Luckily, there is an election in June, and the Progressive Conservative (really, that’s a real party here), might form the government.
 Worse case scenario, however, is that the New Democratic Party (which is neither new, nor particularly democratic) might also be elected. Think Green Party, but not quite as dumb.

 0
 Gunga Din
 April 4, 2018 1:58 pm

 Sorry, I didn’t read the whole thing, but the test driveway was in Idaho? Maybe it snowed and solar panels don’t like snow shovels or salt?
 I missed just where the actual road test was done but I doubt it would hold up to an actual city snow plow…at least not until we can pave all our roads with transparent aluminum!

 0
 Philip Mulholland
 April 4, 2018 2:06 pm

 Follow the yellow brick road!

 0
 Cam
 April 4, 2018 2:10 pm

 The Sandpoint, Idaho test bed wasn’t even on a road. It was on a sidewalk at some sort of town square. It couldn’t even stand up to the wear and tear of people walking on it. I imagine it would have broken down even quicker if it had been on an actual road.

 0
 A C Osborn
 April 4, 2018 2:13 pm

 Mr Eschenbach, so that is $36.86 or 0.0975c per day of Electricity at approximately $18,000 per Kw/h.
 That is an absolute bargain., it should pay for itself in about 124,000 years

 0
 AGW is not Science
 Reply to A C Osborn
 April 5, 2018 4:20 am

 Unfortunately it probably won’t last FIVE years, so better “recalculate.”

 0
 Alasdair
 April 4, 2018 2:14 pm

 Is it not about time there was a class action against those institutions that provided the finance for these sort of projects? At least we would get to see the thinking behind the assessment reports and the asinine logic behind it all.

 0
 James Fosser
 April 4, 2018 2:26 pm

 Does all the rubber from my tyres just bounce off to the side of the road or stick to the road surface?
 I suppose if it is to the side of the road then eventually the black hedges will be 50 feet tall, 50 feet thick and impenetrable (Sections could be cut out and set up along the Rio Grande).

 0
 ristvan
 April 4, 2018 2:28 pm

 We need a WUWT project to crowd source many more such silly examples. Swansea tidal lagoon, wave generators, extra natural gas to power CSP plant Ivanpah, Solyndra, … Could make a whole ridicule book of essay examples crafted from guest posts like this one. I could edit, solicit a nice foreword from a prominent energy exec or two, and get published as another illustrated ebook as my publisher guaranteed followthru on all subsequent ebooks after my first acceptance. Would predonate all royalty proceeds to WUWT. Would be a nice payback to Anthony.
 Very sharp post, Willis. Reminds me of Einstein’s aphorism: ‘Only two things seem infinite, the universe and human stupidity. But I am not sure about the universe.’

 0
 Sobaken
 April 4, 2018 2:29 pm

 Still no mention of Thunderfoot? Come on.

 0
 tom s
 April 4, 2018 2:38 pm

 Um, why at least did they not just put the panels on the highway shoulders instead? Much less wear/tear. But I digress….

 0
 usurbrain
 April 4, 2018 2:48 pm

 I have an even better idea. Place coils under the blacktop and connect them to batteries, then place permanent magnets under the front and rear of each vehicle. Then as the cars drive down the road they will intercept each coil and create an electrical current. (Sarc off)
 Ask any traffic light designer why the quit using coils in the pavement. THEY BREAK. The construction of “Solar” roads that have even a five year lifetime will be even more expensive than the projects. One only need consider how soon and how frequently potholes, heat cracks/heaving, and all of the other problems highways and roads have, and how much the material that could withstand these problems would cost to realize it is just too expensive to consider.
 How about a solar panel as the top of a bridge? That would even keep rain and snow off of the bridge. Great Idea, right? Now consider the fact that a bridge, the entire bridge, was stolen right off of the foundation, overnight just a few miles from my home.

 0
 Max Photon
 April 4, 2018 3:00 pm

 “there’s a sucker born every minute”
 I think you mean swallower.

 0
 Anthony Watts
 Admin
 April 4, 2018 3:03 pm

 Thanks Willis for the update and reference to my prescience. I updated the post title and subtitle a bit.

 0
 Willis Eschenbach
 Author
 Reply to Anthony Watts
 April 4, 2018 3:17 pm

 Thanks, Anthony. Your judgment on these matters is always good, whether it’s solar roads or post titles …
 w.

 0
 RiHo08
 April 4, 2018 3:19 pm

 To me at least, one needs to separate parking lot solar panels from roadway solar panels because, there is a way to put solar panels above the cars; ie, on stilts instead of under cars with their drip drip oil leaks. Of course, when one elevates solar panels, it’s best to install them at a latitude where it doesn’t snow or there are a lot more sunny days than cloudy days. Otherwise, when the subsidies go away, so does the reason for installing solar panels.
 Putting solar panels on roadways is really hare brain as glass, when wet, is really really slick. A number of years ago when recycling enthusiasm was just getting started, a solution to the over abundance of glass bottles…ah…wine, beer, and liquor, some road commissions thought that adding crushed glass to asphalt would be a win-win situation, that is, until the road traffic wear polished the glass. Then the rains came and the only people making money were the car wrecker companies who set up shop adjacent to bends in the road and made a “killing”. After multi-vehicle wrecks and some dead bodies did the whole highway portion made of glass get torn up and repaved, without glass asphalt.

 0
 eric
 April 4, 2018 3:19 pm

 Living relatively close to Sandpoint, I can see a few problems–mainly lack of sunlight..
 Lots of clouds, rain, snow and ice, but a wonderful ski hill close to town.

 0
 Robert from oz
 April 4, 2018 3:29 pm

 Have to check a solar roof installation nearby for something that I’ve only just noticed , all panels are touching edge to edge but there is a 2″ pong pipe protruding through the panels and I’m wondering how they did it without cutting the panel .

 0
 Nick Werner
 April 4, 2018 3:32 pm

 There’s a fine line between greenius and insanity.

 0
 Michael Cox
 Reply to Nick Werner
 April 4, 2018 9:15 pm

 Nah, it’s not that fine.

 0
 Gary Pearse
 April 4, 2018 3:44 pm

 At least they might have discussed this at the outset with an engineer or two (or even a thinking person from any walk of life!). The idea was not bad, but the design was terrible. They needed a checker board of raised inert supports that the tires could run over without abrading the surface or solar surfaces like the bottoms of bottles recessed in concrete to get the same protection. Maybe you could reduce the inert supports to about a third of the area of the roadway and make up some additional area by panels on stilts along the roadway.
 Having limited access roads would be sensible with automatic tire washers at the approaches. It would be pricey but would require at least a breakeven situation, probably with a toll. Perhaps the power could be sold in charging electric cars. Having said all this, it doesn’t meet my requirements as an investment opportunity yet.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Gary Pearse
 April 4, 2018 5:16 pm

 Raised supports just create lots of pockets that will quickly fill with dust, polen and worn rubber.

 0
 Willis Eschenbach
 Author
 Reply to Gary Pearse
 April 4, 2018 5:17 pm

 Gary Pearse April 4, 2018 at 3:44 pm

 At least they might have discussed this at the outset with an engineer or two (or even a thinking person from any walk of life!).

 Yeah, but that discussion would have cost them 4.5 megabucks, so I’d have to say they were wise to avoid it …
 Follow the Benjamins!
 w.

 0
 Bill Treuren
 Reply to Willis Eschenbach
 April 4, 2018 6:47 pm

 can you imagine their lifestyle over the last years, any fool can see that its a scam.
 Any fool? Correct that.

 0
 matthewrmarler
 April 4, 2018 3:50 pm

 Now, my home electricity is expensive due to the asinine “renewable mandates” put into place by Governor Moonbeam here in Californistan.
 The renewable mandates were passed by the legislature and not repealed when put to the vote in a referendum. I’m sure Gov Brown supports them, but he is hardly solely responsible.
 Thank you for the update!

 0
 Willis Eschenbach
 Author
 Reply to matthewrmarler
 April 4, 2018 5:24 pm

 matthewrmarler April 4, 2018 at 3:50 pm

 Now, my home electricity is expensive due to the asinine “renewable mandates” put into place by Governor Moonbeam here in Californistan.

 The renewable mandates were passed by the legislature and not repealed when put to the vote in a referendum. I’m sure Gov Brown supports them, but he is hardly solely responsible.

 Actually, the 2008 referendum in favor of renewable standards (50% renewable by 2025) was voted down by nearly 2 to 1 …
 Despite that, Governor Moonbeam and his tame Democratic legislature keep pushing the mandate higher and higher.
 Brown is a huge force behind the push for the mandates, I will not absolve him one iota.
 w.

 0
 Davidq
 April 4, 2018 3:54 pm

 Son, that is not lightning! It is the pavement arcing. …
 Children, DON’T play on the roadway when it is wet.
 Mom, can you come pick me up at school? The roads are wet.
 “Nightly News Special” — A new hazard to wildlife and record number of road kill…..
 “Nightly News Special” — Road kill, a new, safe food source! Follow the BBQ fragrance and find a fresh electrocuted BBQ road kill!
 “Nightly News Special, #3” — Neighborhoods are banding together to find safe passages through backyards as roads are deemed an electrocution hazard. Kids, dogs and joggers discover new backyard friendships!

 0
 Astrocyte
 Reply to Davidq
 April 4, 2018 6:57 pm

 Wonder what will happen when a lightning strike nearby those ground mounted solar pannels? You known, solar cells are diodes, and require electrical wiring, and lightning bolt by virtue of the di/dt induce HV in nearby conductors. Experiences have shown that more damages are done at surface/underground by lightning strike.

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Astrocyte
 April 6, 2018 10:49 pm

 As quoted in another message:

 Mais si l’on ne prend en considération que les dalles qui ont fonctionné en continu (certaines ont par exemple disjoncté lors d’un orage), l’objectif est atteint à plus de 85%, selon Wattway.

 https://www.lemoniteur.fr/article/route-solaire-wattway-un-an-apres-35146727
 Some modules failed during a thunderstorm.
 (how many? are we even allowed to know?)
 Next step: outlaw lightning?

 0
 Pat Lane
 April 4, 2018 4:00 pm

 Here’s an idea: Pave roads under street lights to capture the light then use the energy captured to power the street lights!
 Quick, give me a grant. Sorry, that won’t be enough

 0
 DC Cowboy
 Editor
 April 4, 2018 4:01 pm

 I think they’re doing it the wrong way. Put the solar panels along the median or elevated over the road. If they do that people save money on gas because the cars/trucks are shaded and don’t use as much A/C AND they could use those new ‘wireless chargers’ to charge the battery operated cars while they are driving. Imagine unlimited range for an electric. Jobs galore! Win-Win!
 /end stupidity

 0
 stormy223
 April 4, 2018 4:10 pm

 They could tile the parking lot out behind the building. The only person who drives back there is Jack with his ’69 Chevelle.

 0
 kramer
 Reply to stormy223
 April 4, 2018 6:03 pm

 I wonder how many tornados and other bad weather that burnout caused?

 0
 TerryS
 April 4, 2018 4:48 pm

 For $4.5 million I’ll cycle 4 hours a day and generate more than they do.
 I’ll even produce my electricity on demand.
 https://newatlas.com/the-pedal-a-watt-stationary-bike-power-generator-create-energy-and-get-fit/13433/

 0
 lisaginnz
 April 4, 2018 4:49 pm

 WOW… I mean the donations and the “inventors”… talk about a bunch of MAROONS with absolutely NO FRIGGIN’ common sens whatsoever…. yikes.

 0
 Joe Skonue
 April 4, 2018 5:09 pm

 Prison. Why are they not in prison?

 0
 https://luegenpresse2.wordpress.com/
 April 4, 2018 5:44 pm

 I think i read in the Netherlands they wanted to do the same on the street,but only for bikes.

 0
 Dan Pangburn
 April 4, 2018 6:16 pm

 Eventually, inability to see the obvious can no longer masquerade as ignorance and becomes recognized as stupidity.

 0
 drednicolson
 Reply to Dan Pangburn
 April 4, 2018 7:38 pm

 Once is ignorance, twice is stupidity, three times or more is mendacity.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to drednicolson
 April 5, 2018 7:21 am

 3 times or more is psychosis.

 0
 Betapug
 April 4, 2018 6:29 pm

 Sadly the true believers have no memory and don’t care when claims are demolished anyway. Faith will overcome reality, Thunderf00t’s comprehensive debunking regardless. https://youtu.be/P90Y71ThfQs

 0
 Stephen Singer
 April 4, 2018 7:20 pm

 Sandpoint, ID??? Why not someplace in a southern location where they get decent sun year round?
 Yes I know where Sandpoint,ID is I go camping/fishing about 60mi west of there every summer.

 0
 Joel O’Bryan
 April 4, 2018 7:25 pm

 Solar Road fails miserably…. in other words…
 It performed as expected.

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Joel O’Bryan
 April 6, 2018 7:47 pm

 The solar road is “performance art”. The actors performed as expected.

 0
 Curious George
 April 4, 2018 8:28 pm

 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/worlds-first-solar-road-opens-in-france/
 https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/news/a19362/france-planning-over-600-miles-solar-panel-roads/
 https://www.ecowatch.com/this-solar-road-will-provide-power-to-5-million-people-1882163208.html
 All these French solar road articles date from 2016. I could not find anything from later years.
 Albert Einstein: Only the Universe and human stupidity are infinite, and I am not sure about the Universe.

 0
 s-t
 Reply to Curious George
 April 6, 2018 10:01 pm

 Ségolène Royal, the enviro-lunacies ministry (and mother of his children) of former Président François Hollande, who promoted that solar road BS, is now “ambassadrice pour les pôles arctique et antarctique”.
 You read that right, she is OFFICIALLY ambassador for the poles. (We call her ambassador for the pingouins and the polar bears.)
 Ségolène Royal named ambassador at the Arctic and Antarctic poles
 – Who is she?
 – A bipolar.

 0
 philsalmon
 April 4, 2018 8:58 pm

 It’s a general feature of research that all the focus is on the next great idea but there is almost no scrutiny of past funding. What happened to those millions given in past grant awards. Universities frequently purchase equipment worth hundreds of k or even millions of dollars / euros etc. It fails to work as expected or simply proves to hard to operate or unreliable. So it just gets abandoned and gathers dust. Meanwhile the same researchers get busy and excited with the next megabuck grant application. The funding agencies seem to look only forward, never back in time to check the productivity of previous research awards.

 0
 philsalmon
 April 4, 2018 9:31 pm

 A much more robust technology is needed to exploit solar energy in road surfaces. One possibility might be to bioengineer a photosynthetic cyanobacteria or an alga that would live in the asphalt of a road and do something useful. For instance there is research interest in the green alga Botryococcus braunii which secretes hydrocarbons. Something like this could maybe be bioengineered to lay down heavy long chain hydrocarbons.
 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07388550290789513
 Why would this be useful? What would be the deliverable of such an organism making roads green? It would not be electricity. But it might be a self-repairing road. If a crack ot pothole appeared in the road, the green road-bug could secrete long chain hydrocarbons which would mix with and bind to dust and dirt to make new asphalt, and in time fill up the hole.
 Also if the resident single celled organism made the road into a pleasing shade of green, that could be psychologically soothing to drivers (especially in California) and maybe even reduce stress and road-rage in drivers.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to philsalmon
 April 5, 2018 7:23 am

 A bacteria in the roadway that produces oil.
 Now there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

 0
 ggm
 April 4, 2018 9:56 pm

 A perfect example of what happens when you combine the stupidity of government, with the ingenuity of shysters.

 0
 philsalmon
 Reply to ggm
 April 4, 2018 10:24 pm

 You might have just found the single sentence that correctly describes 99% of human economic activity.

 0
 R2Dtoo
 Reply to philsalmon
 April 5, 2018 8:29 am

 OPM is the world’s greatest resource.

 0
 fred
 April 4, 2018 11:37 pm

 Inspirational. I might start a solar assault rifle company with some research projects into solar bump stocks and green tipped ammo.

 0
 oppti
 April 5, 2018 12:22 am

 The change of albedo with solar panels will heat the surroundings.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to oppti
 April 5, 2018 7:23 am

 Compared to blacktop?

 0
 Raymond Horstman
 April 5, 2018 12:45 am

 The results could have be much better if they had placed the solarpanels not on the road but above them as a kind of roof. The panels would not this easy be destroyed. If would have cost less en generate more electricity. It could work well for roofs of parking garages. But pannels on the road? This is what you get if a bussiness plan is just based on subsidies. I have seen more crazy plans. In a new housing project they place solar pannels on the northside of the roof. It must be very nice to live on taxpayers money.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to Raymond Horstman
 April 5, 2018 7:24 am

 How do you plan on suspending these panels?
 If by roadside pillars, how do you plan on protecting the pillars from cars, without killing the drivers in an accident?

 0
 OldGreyGuy
 Reply to Raymond Horstman
 April 8, 2018 12:01 pm

 Placing solar panels on the northside of buildings works where I live, in the northern hemisphere, not so much.
 Maybe they based their designs on an Australian research project.

 0
 willhaas
 April 5, 2018 1:36 am

 For a long time they have been building solar pannel covers in parking lots that provide covered parking and solar eletric energy. I assume that the solar panels on the covers last a lot longer because they are not run over all the time and they are better at producing energy because they are not covered by parked cars all the time. Because of much better alternatives already in production and use, the effort should have not gone further than the first phase I study. Who ever reviewed the phase one study and approved a phase II should be fired for being incopetent.

 0
 George Lawson
 April 5, 2018 3:16 am

 Does anyone ever check the companies accounts to ascertain how the $4.5 million has been spent to achieve such poor results.? Are their accounts for the last four years available for public scrutiny?

 0
 Gene Walker
 April 5, 2018 3:43 am

 I have a solar road in front of my house.
 It is asphalt.
 It gets very hot in the summer.
 It doesn’t produce any electricity either but at least cars can drive on it.
 Perhaps I should start an Indiegogo page.

 0
 Ian Macdonald
 April 5, 2018 4:24 am

 Thing is, this solar roads concept has been thoroughly dismissed as nonsense a long time back, yet it STILL gets new funding. That is worrying. It means that the various administrations can’t spot a scam even when it jumps up and bites them.

 0
 Coach Springer
 Reply to Ian Macdonald
 April 5, 2018 4:59 am

 It’s almost like fear, politics, misinformation and selective vision make for bad decisions..

 0
 Master of the Obvious
 April 5, 2018 5:04 am

 It’s got me thinking. If I install my roof solar panels under the roof sheathing (i.e.: in the attic), it would have multiple benefits:
 Protect the panels from falling debris, hail, high winds.
 Eliminate any potential roof system leaks from brackets and other penetrations.
 Eliminate the esthectic impact on the house.
 And as a bonus, I can save on the project costs by value engineering out the wiring since that’ll result in only a neglible reduction in power output.
 It’s all in how you think about it! I’ve got that grant application form around here somewhere…..

 0
 Bernie
 April 5, 2018 5:52 am

 As a bridge engineer (I have to know a few things about roads) I could add that pavements are something that a huge amount of effort goes into. Asphalt vs. Concrete, the type and exact asphalt mix, the design of each component is designed specifically per project based on environmental, traffic loading, traction requirements and other factors. States pay a lot of money for asphalt mix design. Therefore, replacing asphalt with an inferior (significantly) wearing surface is a tough sell. The electric cars will slip and slide on glass like they’re playing hockey. And the politicians will have to answer for the number of dead people on roads. Glass is never going to be a road material. Ever.

 0
 Astrocyte
 Reply to Bernie
 April 5, 2018 11:49 am

 How much time will it take to turn a glass like material on a road surface, into a dirty matte surface? Even if coated CVD diamond.

 0
 JCalvertN(UK)
 Reply to Bernie
 April 8, 2018 8:28 am

 A lot of the effort you describe, goes into making the surface quieter and less prone to surface-water build-up (and the resultant aquaplaning) in wet weather. There is now a porous asphalt which solves both these problems. Unfortunately (AFAIK) it is not as hard-wearing and needs to be replaced more frequently.
 Glass roadways with anti-slip surfaces will be incredibly noisy and extremely dangerous in wet-weather.

 0
 David Ipperciel
 April 5, 2018 5:55 am

 It would probably be cheaper to have panels 10 feet over the parking lot, less potential damage risk, with the added benefit of shade against the sun (and protection from rain). I’m giving away this idea for free, no grants needed.

 0
 MarkW
 Reply to David Ipperciel
 April 5, 2018 7:27 am

 Semi’s are a lot taller than 10 feet.
 On occasion, even taller loads are transported on flatbeds.

 0
 RAH
 Reply to MarkW
 April 5, 2018 12:15 pm

 Standard height is 13′ 6″. In most states/areas the measurement posted on the signs of overpasses and bridges are the height of what will safely pass under. IOW if the sign says 13′ 6″ it means that a load with a maximum height of 13′ 6″ can pass under it safely.
 But that doesn’t go for everywhere. NYC for example posts their clearances based on curb height. I have driven under the raised rail running over Broadway in Brooklyn pulling a 13′ 6″ high trailer when the clearance signs said 12′ 10″. I’ve been told they do this to allow for snow on the road but I really don’t know for sure why they do it differently than every place else.
 As a driver an OTR driver of a big truck one HAS to learn to read the signs and understand how to interpret them. Places like NY make that harder. Not only are clearances measured differently in NYC their mile markers and exit numbers do not follow the standards used in almost all the other states.
 I have never “topped” a trailer but there have been times I’ve had my head out the window looking up to see if I’m going to clear as I creep under and the issue is in doubt. One has to be very careful and know that on most trailers the rear of the trailer will ride slightly higher than the front. I have had to go under arched stone overpasses where I had to go down the middle of the road to clear a few times. It was the only way to get to where I had to go.

 0
 marque2
 April 5, 2018 6:19 am

 Wow – where do you live in California? I pay closer to 22 cents per. You must be ignoring “transmission fees.”

 0
 Luke of the D
 April 5, 2018 6:36 am

 Every time I fly in an airplane I look down and marvel and how tiny humans footprint really is. Roads are not terribly visible from 30,000ft. But giant factories and warehouses roofs sure are! Why not put solar fields up on top of those roofs? That sure as hell makes more sense than paving roads and parking lots with solar panels (as others have pointed out, it isn’t good to crush or scratch a solar panel nor block the sun from it by parking over it)! And it makes much more sense than destroying a forest or desert ecosystem by putting up mammoth solar arrays or wind mills our in a pristine park! Stop destroying nature to create “renewable” energy, damnit! We in the petroleum industry have a far smaller footprint than any damn “green energy” company! Put your stupid solar panels on ROOFS, damnit! Use that wasted space, don’t take up more!

 0
 BernieG
 April 5, 2018 6:39 am

 I thought driving trucks over solar panels was just dandy. Same goes for Agilent and Tektronix equipment. What better place than roads cold there possibly be for solar panels? Roofs? No way, you can’t see them.

 0
 Peta of Newark
 April 5, 2018 7:06 am

 And I genuinely haven’t a clue about the USA (I could call upon that little yellow dangly man inside a Google map maybe) but in the UK, roadside verges are always so very verdant and strong growing. So much better growing than the fields just behind them normally. And on quiet roads how the verge creeps across the tarmac/concrete whatever
 Despite all the Agri-Tech lavished on the fields.
 (As a peasant, now retired, it was my Professional Duty to notice these things. Old habits etc etc)
 Why the extra strong greenery next to all those dreadfully polluting cars?
 Possibly nitrogen oxides from vehicle exhausts but the verge would get hit by overshoot from the farming activity. Extra CO2?????
 I’d guess organic compounds from old asphalt/bitumen being broken up by UV & traffic plus tyre/rubber dust.
 Ever left an old car tyre out-of-doors for a decade or more? They go green, mouldy and disintegrate don’t they. What’s eating them? Somebody makes a feast there’s no doubt.
 All of which increase soil organic matter which feeds the soil bacteria – hence the plants.
 Also not least, ordinary (mineral/rock) dust being ground into ever finer particles by moving traffic. Then Humic Acid produced by the bacteria attacks the dust and the plants are in foody heaven.
 Would that sort of thing happen with glass roads and electric cars?
 How much carbon oxide is being captured by all that greenery?
 How much (extra) water does it transpire. Does it offset the heating effect of the black asphalt?
 Do folks pushing all this ultra clean super tech know these things, do they even notice?
 Do they even think?
 sigh. So many questions
 Here’s some good science to do regarding asphalt.
 On a summer evening, at sunset plus/minus an hour, visit your local town/city park.
 Take shoes and sox off and take those ten happy little thermometers cross country. They”ll luvvit.
 Take them over grassy areas (shaded and in-the-open), the kid’s sandpit, tennis court maybe, cement flags and also tarmac and concrete paths.
 Without spoiling your fun, let’s just say that those who insist that asphalt has a (global) heating effect may have some thinking to do on the way home…………… with regard UHI and how/what causes it.

 0
 Berényi Péter
 April 5, 2018 8:16 am

 Ah. Problem solved. In theory.
 October 2012
 Characterization of Solar Roadways Via Computational and Experimental Investigations
 Rajesh Kanna Selvaraju
 The University of Western Ontario
 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2220&context=etd

 0
 ccscientist
 April 5, 2018 9:01 am

 My nuclear-generated home electric bill is $.05/kwh.
 Every single road anywhere gets beat up by vehicles within a few years. Sure, let’s cover them with sensitive electronics. How about using up the roof space first (of course roofs have their own issues…).

 0
 mellyrn
 April 5, 2018 9:15 am

 What I want is shopping-center parking lots with roofs against, for example, snow in its season, and rain, and summer sun turning my car into a solar cooker. Put solar panels up there! Use the power to run some amount of the shopping center’s needs! Take the energy that would otherwise go into frying my butt (!!) and put it to better use.

 0
 KLohrn
 April 5, 2018 11:05 am

 If money were real (Silver and Gold) these types of unrealistic bills simply would not pile up to begin with.
 We can all still dream.

 0
 VM Systems
 April 5, 2018 11:52 am

 I enjoyed the article. I’m a real fan of solar and we have a number of small sites. One of our systems produces 0.65 kwh on the shortest ,cloudy winter day in Canada. And it cost under $5000.
 Clearly we need better marketing people.

 0
 tadchem
 April 5, 2018 12:39 pm

 Thunderfoot (British scientist Phil Mason) has devoted considerable effort to investigating this scam: https://www.google.com/search?q=thunderfoot+solar+roadways&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS782US782&oq=thunderfoot+solar&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57.7786j1j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 0
 Astrocyte
 April 5, 2018 3:10 pm

 Thieves in China Steal Section of Newly Installed Solar Road.
 https://interestingengineering.com/thieves-in-china-steal-section-of-newly-installed-solar-road

 0
 KLohrn
 Reply to Astrocyte
 April 6, 2018 9:51 am

 Free energy!

 0
 5c077m
 April 5, 2018 7:54 pm

 Ill admit, I thought it was a good idea. Surely they could have approximated the output before they built the thing, shouldn’t they have been able to figure out it wouldnt be worth all that money?

 0
 Jonathan
 April 6, 2018 3:52 am

 Let me get this straight! A bunch of years ago some very clever people in the UK worked out metrics for the correct degree of roughness for road surfaces for safety and water runoff……and here you have a slick road surface? OK I know the electrical output is an insult but are these people out of their minds? I think I just answered my own question!

 0
 Stephen Stoddard
 April 6, 2018 9:52 pm

 If only I could a grant like this to put a small windmill here at my house. Id never have to buy electricity again. I appreciate your taking the time to show the taxpayers how their money been wasted. Nice picture of the solar parking lot that the company’s owner’s wouldn’t even stand on, but they REALLY wanted someone to believe that a car could park on it??? Please tell me who are the uneducated people who passed out the grant money, and what is the address. I’m sure I can dream something up.

 0
 JCalvertN(UK)
 April 8, 2018 8:14 am

 I wonder what it would be like to crash a bike on this stuff? What sort of “road-rash” would result?

 0
 Joel Sprenger
 April 8, 2018 5:08 pm

 Why did thy actually build something that proves the idea is stupid? If your company is in the business of selling new ideas, whether to government or individual suckers, you should never spend money implementing the idea. That is just money lost. To maximize your profit spent the money on ‘salaries’ and ‘expenses’ and of course on getting the next government grant.When the money runs out apply for more. Never actually build something that works. If necessary build something that doesn’t work and then claim that if only you had more money you could make it work.

 0
 Murphy Slaw
 April 11, 2018 9:08 am

 I think we have our own boondogle up here in SE BC. It’s called the Kimberly Sun Mine.

 0
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$4.5 million project generates just $36.86 worth of electricity so far 
 Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach 
Back in 2014, Anthony Watts pointed out an upcoming project called “Solar Roadways”. This was a project to put solar panels on roads. Hey, what’s not to like? Plenty of roadway space, put it to double use, we get free energy from the sun, right?
Well, as Anthony presciently commented at the time …
 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. 
Since a few years have now passed, I thought I might update the information about the project. The first rule of investigations, of course, is “follow the Benjamins”. This saying comes from the fact that Benjamin Franklin appears on the US $100 bill … so here is the funding of the Solar Roadways project.
$100,000 – 2009 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) for a “Phase I feasibility study”.
$750,000 – 2011 SBIR grant from the DOT for Phase II to develop and build a solar parking lot. They put panels on a 12 x 36 foot (4 x 11 m) parking lot.
$2,200,000 – 2014 Indiegogo funding from the easily deceived.
$750,000 – 2015 SBIR contract for further research
$750,000 – 2016 SBIR contract for yet more research.
So to date, they have received $2,350,000 from you and I, the US taxpayers, and another $2,200,000 from mining that seemingly endless source called “a fool and his money are soon parted”, for a total of $4,550,000.
And what did we get for this four and a half megabucks of lavish private and taxpayer funding?
First, the solar parking lot. Here are the founders of the company with their monumental achievement …
 
Wow … that’s plenty impressive … dare I ask what happens to the electricity output when cars are parked on the parking lot, or is that just too practical a question?
Next, the solar test roadway, which is in Sandpoint, Idaho. Twenty-five of the first thirty test panels died within the first few weeks. They were replaced by panels that delaminated …
 
So the delaminated panels were replaced again. But to be fair, who would have ever guessed that driving loaded semi-trucks over solar panels might do some damage? … well, to be fair, you and I could have guessed that, but clearly they couldn’t. I suppose that’s why they needed so much funding.
In any case, the system has now been in operation with thirty panels for a couple of years. Being an inquisitive and curious sort of fellow, I went to their website to see how well they are doing … I found the following:
 
On its best day, Tuesday, May 9, 2017, as shown in the graphic above the thirty panels generated a total of 1.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity … and on the most recent day, yesterday, it generated 0.25 kWh of electricity. On average, since it was started the production has averaged about 0.65 kWh per day.
The system went into operation on March 22, 2017. It has been in operation for 378 days, during which time it has generated about 246 kWhrs of electricity.
Now, my home electricity is expensive due to the asinine “renewable mandates” put into place by Governor Moonbeam here in Californistan. I pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, which is about double the cost charged in neighboring states where they haven’t drunk the green Koolaid.
And at that rate, the total of 246 kWhrs of electricity that cost $4,450,000 is worth about $36.86.
Gotta love these green pipe-dreams … enjoy the sunshine, dear friends, it will do more good smiling down on you than it would by shining on solar panels on the roadways.
As always, my best regards to everyone,
w.
 My perennial request: When you comment, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. I get grumpy when people make unsubstantiated claims that someone is foolish for saying something somewhere sometime …
Article Rating
The Road To Hell Is Paved With Solar Panels – "Solar Road" fails miserably
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/04/the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-solar-panels/
https://solarroadways.com/
Home - Solar Roadways
2021-04-05
None
<div><div>
	<main>
	
<article>
	<div>
	<h2>Welcome to Solar Roadways®</h2>
<p></p>
<p>This video, Solar Freakin Roadways, was created in 2014 by a wonderful volunteer. It’s had over 22 million views! The images are now out of date and it doesn’t mention things like how Solar Roadways can provide a convenient delivery system for dynamic charging of Electric Vehicles AND provide more safety for Autonomous Vehicles – but otherwise, it’s still an awesome introduction!</p>
<h2>News:</h2>
<p>In January 2022, Solar Roadways received both FCC (US) and ISED (Canada) approval!</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>The FCC (Federal Communications Commission)</strong> regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in the US. The ISED does the same in Canada.</p>
<p>Our Solar Road Panels have small internal radios. That’s how they “talk” wirelessly.</p>
<p>This is one of the things paid for by the funds we raised on StartEngine. Our campaign is closed but you can still get on the Waitlist <a href="https://www.startengine.com/solar-roadways">here</a>.</p>
<p>We are working toward getting UL approval as well and designing SR5.</p>
<p>If you would like to receive our general Newsletter to be personally informed of Solar Roadways News, please email <a href="mailto:Newsletter@SolarRoadways.com">Newsletter@SolarRoadways.com</a></p>
<p>If you are an interested customer and would like to be personally notified as Solar Road Panels become available, please email <a href="mailto:Customers@SolarRoadways.com">Customers@SolarRoadways.com</a>.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
	<th><u><strong>SURFACE FEATURES</strong></u></th><th><u><strong>SOLAR ROADWAYS</strong></u></th><th><u><strong>CONCRETE</strong></u></th><th><u><strong>ASPHALT</strong></u></th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
	<td>Flat place to walk and drive</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/blue-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/pink-btn-transparent.png"></a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Provides parking</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/blue-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/pink-btn-transparent.png"></a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Provides traction</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/blue-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/pink-btn-transparent.png"></a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Doesn't soften at high temperatures</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/blue-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Generates energy</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Intelligent</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>LED lights for lines and signage</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Remains snow/ice free</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Impervious to potholes</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Can protect animals</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Modular for faster maintenance</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Requires no paint</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Has ROI</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Facilitates energy independence</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Can charge EVs with clean energy</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Water can be stored, treated or moved</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Provides a "home" for cables, wires</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Can provide emergency warning system</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>Expandable Technology Package</td><td><a href="https://solarroadways.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/green-btn-transparent.png"></a></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<div><br />
<div>
	<p>
	</p><h3>Connect with Us</h3>
	<h4>We have a variety of email addresses and email is the best way to reach us. Click to find the best email to use to sign up for our Newsletter, join the Notification List for interested Customers, become a Distributor, and much more.</h4>
	<p></p>
	</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>Testimonials</h3>
<br />
[ditty_news_ticker id=”2298″]</div>
	</div>
	
</article>
	</main>
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 * 
 * 
 * 

 Welcome to Solar Roadways®

 This video, Solar Freakin Roadways, was created in 2014 by a wonderful volunteer. It’s had over 22 million views! The images are now out of date and it doesn’t mention things like how Solar Roadways can provide a convenient delivery system for dynamic charging of Electric Vehicles AND provide more safety for Autonomous Vehicles – but otherwise, it’s still an awesome introduction!

 News:

 In January 2022, Solar Roadways received both FCC (US) and ISED (Canada) approval!

 The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in the US. The ISED does the same in Canada.

 Our Solar Road Panels have small internal radios. That’s how they “talk” wirelessly.

 This is one of the things paid for by the funds we raised on StartEngine. Our campaign is closed but you can still get on the Waitlist here.

 We are working toward getting UL approval as well and designing SR5.

 If you would like to receive our general Newsletter to be personally informed of Solar Roadways News, please email Newsletter@SolarRoadways.com

 If you are an interested customer and would like to be personally notified as Solar Road Panels become available, please email Customers@SolarRoadways.com.

 SURFACE FEATURES SOLAR ROADWAYS CONCRETE ASPHALT
 Flat place to walk and drive 
 Provides parking 
 Provides traction 
 Doesn't soften at high temperatures 
 Generates energy 
 Intelligent 
 LED lights for lines and signage 
 Remains snow/ice free 
 Impervious to potholes 
 Can protect animals 
 Modular for faster maintenance 
 Requires no paint 
 Has ROI  
 Facilitates energy independence 
 Can charge EVs with clean energy 
 Water can be stored, treated or moved 
 Provides a "home" for cables, wires 
 Can provide emergency warning system 
 Expandable Technology Package 
 


 Connect with Us

 We have a variety of email addresses and email is the best way to reach us. Click to find the best email to use to sign up for our Newsletter, join the Notification List for interested Customers, become a Distributor, and much more.

 Contact Us

 Testimonials


 [ditty_news_ticker id=”2298″]

 Ways To Help

 We are so thankful for the supporters who have heard about Solar Roadways’ vision and decided to share this journey with us. We are dedicated to putting all of our energy into bringing Solar Roadways to the world on a grand scale and to make it a greener and safer place for everyone.
 Learn More Here

 Read more about how SolarRoadways can help power the planet! Contact us to learn more about what we can do!

 Contact Us

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 Solar Roadways, Inc. 721 Pine Street Sandpoint, ID 83864
 Contact Us
 Copyright © 2023 Solar Roadways All rights reserved. Theme: Flash by ThemeGrill. Powered by WordPress
 Site Design By: webwritedesigns.com
Welcome to Solar Roadways®
 
This video, Solar Freakin Roadways, was created in 2014 by a wonderful volunteer. It’s had over 22 million views! The images are now out of date and it doesn’t mention things like how Solar Roadways can provide a convenient delivery system for dynamic charging of Electric Vehicles AND provide more safety for Autonomous Vehicles – but otherwise, it’s still an awesome introduction!
News:
In January 2022, Solar Roadways received both FCC (US) and ISED (Canada) approval!
 
 The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in the US. The ISED does the same in Canada.
Our Solar Road Panels have small internal radios. That’s how they “talk” wirelessly.
This is one of the things paid for by the funds we raised on StartEngine. Our campaign is closed but you can still get on the Waitlist here.
We are working toward getting UL approval as well and designing SR5.
If you would like to receive our general Newsletter to be personally informed of Solar Roadways News, please email Newsletter@SolarRoadways.com 
If you are an interested customer and would like to be personally notified as Solar Road Panels become available, please email Customers@SolarRoadways.com.
	  SURFACE FEATURES     SOLAR ROADWAYS     CONCRETE     ASPHALT  
	Flat place to walk and drive            
	Provides parking            
	Provides traction            
	Doesn't soften at high temperatures          
	Generates energy        
	Intelligent        
	LED lights for lines and signage        
	Remains snow/ice free        
	Impervious to potholes        
	Can protect animals        
	Modular for faster maintenance        
	Requires no paint        
	Has ROI        
	Facilitates energy independence        
	Can charge EVs with clean energy        
	Water can be stored, treated or moved        
	Provides a "home" for cables, wires        
	Can provide emergency warning system        
	Expandable Technology Package        
 
	
	 Connect with Us
	We have a variety of email addresses and email is the best way to reach us. Click to find the best email to use to sign up for our Newsletter, join the Notification List for interested Customers, become a Distributor, and much more.
	 
	
Testimonials
[ditty_news_ticker id=”2298″]
Home - Solar Roadways
https://solarroadways.com/
https://interestingengineering.com/science/6-examples-of-solar-powered-roads-that-could-be-a-glimpse-of-the-future
6 Examples of Solar Powered Roads That Could Be a Glimpse of the Future
2019-08-13
Christopher McFadden
<div><div><div><p>The roads, sidewalks and cycle paths of the future might well be able to generate electricity from the power of the sun as well as provide surfaces for us to travel around on. At least that's what the developers of the <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/the-whole-of-the-u-s-could-be-powered-by-solar-roads">following solar roads</a>, sidewalks and cycle paths hope.</p><p>Since the ground space is already in use, this strategy makes complete sense - <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/solar-roadways-engineering-failure">as long as it's safe</a>! Although mostly-experimental at present, it is not out of the question that they may, one day, <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/culture/john-loudon-mcadam-the-father-of-the-modern-road">replace traditional asphalt</a> for paving our way. </p></div><div><div><p><a href="https://interestingengineering.com/science/china-is-almost-ready-to-unveil-its-new-solar-highway"><strong>RELATED: CHINA IS ALMOST READY TO UNVEIL ITS NEW SOLAR HIGHWAY</strong></a></p><h2>How much would solar roadways cost?</h2><p>The cost of <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/solar-panel-highway.htm">solar roadways</a> depends entirely on the system installed and the area it covers. While there are few examples around the world today, and most are experimental, we do have some example data.</p><p>For example, one of the first ones in the world, a small <strong>1-km</strong> stretch in a French village, cost <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/culture/france-opens-worlds-first-solar-panel-road"><strong>5 million Euros</strong></a> to develop and install. </p><p>Another example, built by Solar Roadways, was installed in Jeff Jones Town Square in Sandpoint, Idaho. This <strong>14 m<sup>2</sup></strong> installation cost somewhere in the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Roadways#cite_note-14"> region of<strong> $60,000</strong></a>. </p><h2>Can LED light charge a solar panel?</h2><p>Yes, they can, but they are not a replacement for solar energy. Any artificial light source <a href="http://minerva.union.edu/newmanj/Physics100/Light%20Production/producing_light.htm">produces photons</a> that can then be harnessed by the solar cell.</p><p></p><p>But if you were using LEDs or any other artificial light source, as a means of generating electricity you would receive a net loss from the electricity consumed by the bulb and other system losses.</p><p>Most current solar panels also have an efficiency of around 15% or so. This means that 85% of the light they receive is effectively wasted. </p><p>LEDs are also not 100% efficient for their conversion of electricity to light.  The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics">Second Law of Thermodynamics</a> also means that no matter how good technology gets, neither of these devices will ever be 100% efficient.</p><p>In some small portable calculators and other electronics, <a href="https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/recycling-light-solar-5735/">amorphous solar cells</a> are used in place of batteries to recycle energy from artificial lighting and, of course, harness power from direct/indirect sunlight.</p><figure>
<figcaption>Source: <em><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Route_solaire_de_Tourouvre_2.jpg">Kumkum/Wikimedia Commons</a></em></figcaption>
</figure><h2>Will solar panels melt snow?</h2><p>For solar roads to be safe to use in all weather it will be necessary for them to be able to deal with precipitation of all kinds safely - not just snow. But there are some specific examples in development that have been designed to be able to melt snow in winter. </p></div><p>Most Popular </p></div><div><p>One example is from an Idaho-based company called <a href="http://www.solarroadways.com/">Solar Roadways</a>. Their modular solar road tiles contain heating elements that are able to prevent snow and ice accumulation. </p><p>These tiles are also made from tempered glass that has a specially designed tractioned surface that is equal to traditional asphalt. </p><h2>7 interesting solar roads around the world</h2><p>Here are some examples of solar roads from around the world. The following list is not exhaustive and in no particular order.</p><h3>1. France opened a 1 km solar road in 2016</h3><p></p><p>Consisting of somewhere in the region of <strong>2,880 m<sup>2</sup> </strong>of solar panels, this solar road in France was one of the first in the world. It was built using Colas' <a href="http://www.wattwaybycolas.com/">Wattway</a> tech and runs for <strong>1-km</strong> in <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4058752/France-unveils-world-s-solar-panel-road-0-6-mile-stretch-provide-energy-power-entire-village-s-street-lights.html">Tourouvre-au-Perche.</a> </p><p>Colas are part of the giant french telecoms group Bouygues and was financed by the state.</p><p>This pioneer in solar roadways is said to be able to generate enough power to keep street lights on within the small village. It cost around<strong> 5 million Euros</strong> and is used by around <strong>2,000</strong> motorists a day. </p><h3>2. Wattway's solar roads have also been installed in Georgia</h3><figure>
<figcaption>Source: <em><a href="https://theray.org/tech/solar-paved-highway/">theray</a></em></figcaption>
</figure><p>After the success of the Wattway's installation in France, another test stretch was installed near the Alabama and Georgia border. The <a href="http://www.raycandersonfoundation.org/https://theray.org/tech/solar-paved-highway/">Ray C. Anderson Foundation</a> helped fund a <strong>50 m<sup>2</sup></strong> of the first Wattway pilot in the United States.</p><p><a href="https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/News/solar-powered-roads-are-now-reality">The pilot</a> formed part of the foundation's <a href="http://theray.org/">The Ray</a> project which is a <strong>29-kilometer</strong> living laboratory for testing renewable tech. This project also includes bioswales and a solar-powered electric car charging station. </p><p>"Wattway debuted with a pilot site in France in 2015, and through a partnership with Hannah Solar and Georgia DOT... The energy generated from The Ray’s Wattway powers the Georgia Visitor Information Center adjacent to the project." - <a href="https://theray.org/tech/solar-paved-highway/">theray.org</a>. </p><h3>3. China has built an entire solar expressway</h3><p></p><p>Back in 2018, China completed works on a <strong>1-km</strong> stretch of an expressway in Jinan. Developed by <a href="http://www.qljfjt.com/">Qilu Transportation Development Group</a> it consists of three distinct layers.</p></div><div><p>Its base is made primarily of insulation, with solar panels in the middle layer, and transparent concrete capping the lot.  The <strong>1-km</strong> stretch makes up around <strong>5875 m<sup>2</sup></strong> over two lanes and one emergency lane. </p><p>This solar road was designed to be able to generate around <strong>1 million kilowatt-hours</strong> per year. </p><p>Funnily enough, soon after construction, some parts of the solar road appear to <a href="https://inhabitat.com/someone-stole-a-chunk-of-chinas-new-solar-roadway/">have been robbed out</a>. However, the panels wouldn't have had much commercial value so it is thought they were taken to reverse engineer. </p><h3>4. This bike path in The Netherlands was another pioneer</h3><figure>
<figcaption>Source: <em><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solaroad8.JPG">Blueknight/Wikimedia Commons</a></em></figcaption>
</figure><p>Installed in <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/12/dutch-solar-bike-path-solaroad-successful-expanding/">Krommenie, The Netherlands</a>, a bike lane has been covered in special solar panels. As interesting as this is alone, the project actually surpassed all expectations from its designers. </p><p>The solar bike path runs for around <strong>70 meters</strong> and each panel is protected from physical damage with <strong>1 cm</strong> of protective coating. </p><p>Over a one year period, the solar cycle path was able to generate <strong>70 kilowatt-hours</strong> per squared meter. That's enough to power around three houses. </p><p>It was built using <a href="http://www.solaroad.nl/">SolaRoad,</a> and according to the designers TNO, most users don't even notice the difference to normal-tarmac. </p><h3>5. This solar sidewalk can actually charge electric cars</h3><figure>
<figcaption>Source: <em><a href="https://www.platio.cc/">Platio</a></em> </figcaption>
</figure><p>A company called <a href="https://www.platio.cc/">Platio</a> recently installed a<strong> 4.6 m<sup>2</sup></strong> stretch of sidewalk with solar panels. Made from recycled plastic, the sidewalk serves a dual purpose.</p><p>Pedestrians can safely traverse it while it generates electricity to charge electric vehicles.  </p><p>Platio installed the <strong>720-watt</strong> peak capacity system at a Prologis facility in Budapest. The complete installation process only took one day. </p><p>When the solar sidewalk isn’t busy charging EVs, the energy it generates helps power a nearby office building.</p><h3>6. Solar Roadways hope to roll out across the U.S.</h3><p></p><p>An Idaho-based company, <a href="http://www.solarroadways.com/">Solar Roadways</a>, hopes to roll out solar-powered roads across the United States. Their hexagonal solar road tiles not only generate electricity but can be used as digital driving surfaces using LEDs that can be controlled remotely.</p></div><div><div><p>Each tile consists of three discrete layers. A base recycled material layer that contacts the ground, a middle section that contains all the electronics, and an upper layer of reinforced glass that can support the weight of <strong>113-tonne (13,000 kgs)</strong> truck. </p><p>The power generated by the tiles could be used to power EVs through induction technology, stored or connected directly into the national grid for use by nearby infrastructure, towns, and cities. </p><p>"We have completed three funding contracts with the U.S. Department of Transportation. People from all over the world decided to help speed our progress via our Indiegogo Campaign which you can read more about on our <a href="http://www.solarroadways.com/Research/Funding">Funding</a> page. Our goal is to modernize the infrastructure with modular, intelligent panels while producing clean renewable energy for homes and businesses." - <a href="http://www.solarroadways.com/">Solar Roadways</a>.  </p></div><nav><ol><li><a href="/">Home</a></li><li><a href="/science">Science</a></li></ol></nav><div><p>For You </p><div><p><a href="/innovation/space-cannon-could-fire-mach-20"></a><a href="/innovation/space-cannon-could-fire-mach-20"></a></p><div><p><a href="/innovation">innovation</a><a href="/premium"></a></p><p>Green Launch's hydrogen impulse launcher could fire payloads to orbit in 10 minutes at 20 times the speed of sound.</p></div></div><div><div><p><a href="/culture/blockchain-skills-soared-despite-crypto-crash"></a></p></div><div><p><a href="/science/moon-keeps-drifting-away-from-earth"></a></p></div></div></div></div></div>||||I|||| Trending
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 6 Examples of Solar Powered Roads That Could Be a Glimpse of the Future

 Could you imagine a future where the very roads you drive on are generating power from the sun? Well it might be here.
 Christopher McFadden
 | Aug 13, 2019 01:58 AM EST
 Created: Aug 13, 2019 01:58 AM EST
 science
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 Kumkum , theray

 The roads, sidewalks and cycle paths of the future might well be able to generate electricity from the power of the sun as well as provide surfaces for us to travel around on. At least that's what the developers of the following solar roads, sidewalks and cycle paths hope.

 Since the ground space is already in use, this strategy makes complete sense - as long as it's safe! Although mostly-experimental at present, it is not out of the question that they may, one day, replace traditional asphalt for paving our way.

 See Also

 RELATED: CHINA IS ALMOST READY TO UNVEIL ITS NEW SOLAR HIGHWAY

 How much would solar roadways cost?

 The cost of solar roadways depends entirely on the system installed and the area it covers. While there are few examples around the world today, and most are experimental, we do have some example data.

 For example, one of the first ones in the world, a small 1-km stretch in a French village, cost 5 million Euros to develop and install.

 Another example, built by Solar Roadways, was installed in Jeff Jones Town Square in Sandpoint, Idaho. This 14 m2 installation cost somewhere in the region of $60,000.

 Can LED light charge a solar panel?

 Yes, they can, but they are not a replacement for solar energy. Any artificial light source produces photons that can then be harnessed by the solar cell.

 But if you were using LEDs or any other artificial light source, as a means of generating electricity you would receive a net loss from the electricity consumed by the bulb and other system losses.

 Most current solar panels also have an efficiency of around 15% or so. This means that 85% of the light they receive is effectively wasted.

 LEDs are also not 100% efficient for their conversion of electricity to light. The Second Law of Thermodynamics also means that no matter how good technology gets, neither of these devices will ever be 100% efficient.

 In some small portable calculators and other electronics, amorphous solar cells are used in place of batteries to recycle energy from artificial lighting and, of course, harness power from direct/indirect sunlight.

 Source: Kumkum/Wikimedia Commons

 Will solar panels melt snow?

 For solar roads to be safe to use in all weather it will be necessary for them to be able to deal with precipitation of all kinds safely - not just snow. But there are some specific examples in development that have been designed to be able to melt snow in winter.

 Most Popular

 One example is from an Idaho-based company called Solar Roadways. Their modular solar road tiles contain heating elements that are able to prevent snow and ice accumulation.

 These tiles are also made from tempered glass that has a specially designed tractioned surface that is equal to traditional asphalt.

 7 interesting solar roads around the world

 Here are some examples of solar roads from around the world. The following list is not exhaustive and in no particular order.

 1. France opened a 1 km solar road in 2016

 Consisting of somewhere in the region of 2,880 m2 of solar panels, this solar road in France was one of the first in the world. It was built using Colas' Wattway tech and runs for 1-km in Tourouvre-au-Perche.

 Colas are part of the giant french telecoms group Bouygues and was financed by the state.

 This pioneer in solar roadways is said to be able to generate enough power to keep street lights on within the small village. It cost around 5 million Euros and is used by around 2,000 motorists a day.

 2. Wattway's solar roads have also been installed in Georgia

 Source: theray

 After the success of the Wattway's installation in France, another test stretch was installed near the Alabama and Georgia border. The Ray C. Anderson Foundation helped fund a 50 m2 of the first Wattway pilot in the United States.

 The pilot formed part of the foundation's The Ray project which is a 29-kilometer living laboratory for testing renewable tech. This project also includes bioswales and a solar-powered electric car charging station.

 " Wattway debuted with a pilot site in France in 2015, and through a partnership with Hannah Solar and Georgia DOT... The energy generated from The Ray’s Wattway powers the Georgia Visitor Information Center adjacent to the project." - theray.org .

 3. China has built an entire solar expressway

 Back in 2018, China completed works on a 1-km stretch of an expressway in Jinan. Developed by Qilu Transportation Development Group it consists of three distinct layers.

 Its base is made primarily of insulation, with solar panels in the middle layer, and transparent concrete capping the lot. The 1-km stretch makes up around 5875 m2 over two lanes and one emergency lane.

 This solar road was designed to be able to generate around 1 million kilowatt-hours per year.

 Funnily enough, soon after construction, some parts of the solar road appear to have been robbed out . However, the panels wouldn't have had much commercial value so it is thought they were taken to reverse engineer.

 4. This bike path in The Netherlands was another pioneer

 Source: Blueknight/Wikimedia Commons

 Installed in Krommenie, The Netherlands, a bike lane has been covered in special solar panels. As interesting as this is alone, the project actually surpassed all expectations from its designers.

 The solar bike path runs for around 70 meters and each panel is protected from physical damage with 1 cm of protective coating.

 Over a one year period, the solar cycle path was able to generate 70 kilowatt-hours per squared meter. That's enough to power around three houses.

 It was built using SolaRoad, and according to the designers TNO, most users don't even notice the difference to normal-tarmac.

 5. This solar sidewalk can actually charge electric cars

 Source: Platio

 A company called Platio recently installed a 4.6 m2 stretch of sidewalk with solar panels. Made from recycled plastic, the sidewalk serves a dual purpose.

 Pedestrians can safely traverse it while it generates electricity to charge electric vehicles.

 Platio installed the 720-watt peak capacity system at a Prologis facility in Budapest. The complete installation process only took one day.

 When the solar sidewalk isn’t busy charging EVs, the energy it generates helps power a nearby office building.

 6. Solar Roadways hope to roll out across the U.S.

 An Idaho-based company, Solar Roadways, hopes to roll out solar-powered roads across the United States. Their hexagonal solar road tiles not only generate electricity but can be used as digital driving surfaces using LEDs that can be controlled remotely.

 Each tile consists of three discrete layers. A base recycled material layer that contacts the ground, a middle section that contains all the electronics, and an upper layer of reinforced glass that can support the weight of 113-tonne (13,000 kgs) truck.

 The power generated by the tiles could be used to power EVs through induction technology, stored or connected directly into the national grid for use by nearby infrastructure, towns, and cities.

 " We have completed three funding contracts with the U.S. Department of Transportation. People from all over the world decided to help speed our progress via our Indiegogo Campaign which you can read more about on our Funding page. Our goal is to modernize the infrastructure with modular, intelligent panels while producing clean renewable energy for homes and businesses." - Solar Roadways .

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The roads, sidewalks and cycle paths of the future might well be able to generate electricity from the power of the sun as well as provide surfaces for us to travel around on. At least that's what the developers of the following solar roads, sidewalks and cycle paths hope. Since the ground space is already in use, this strategy makes complete sense - as long as it's safe! Although mostly-experimental at present, it is not out of the question that they may, one day, replace traditional asphalt for paving our way.       RELATED: CHINA IS ALMOST READY TO UNVEIL ITS NEW SOLAR HIGHWAY   How much would solar roadways cost? The cost of solar roadways depends entirely on the system installed and the area it covers. While there are few examples around the world today, and most are experimental, we do have some example data. For example, one of the first ones in the world, a small 1-km stretch in a French village, cost  5 million Euros  to develop and install.  Another example, built by Solar Roadways, was installed in Jeff Jones Town Square in Sandpoint, Idaho. This 14 m2  installation cost somewhere in the region of $60,000 .  Can LED light charge a solar panel? Yes, they can, but they are not a replacement for solar energy. Any artificial light source produces photons that can then be harnessed by the solar cell.   But if you were using LEDs or any other artificial light source, as a means of generating electricity you would receive a net loss from the electricity consumed by the bulb and other system losses. Most current solar panels also have an efficiency of around 15% or so. This means that 85% of the light they receive is effectively wasted.  LEDs are also not 100% efficient for their conversion of electricity to light.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics also means that no matter how good technology gets, neither of these devices will ever be 100% efficient. In some small portable calculators and other electronics, amorphous solar cells are used in place of batteries to recycle energy from artificial lighting and, of course, harness power from direct/indirect sunlight. 
Source:  Kumkum/Wikimedia Commons  
 Will solar panels melt snow? For solar roads to be safe to use in all weather it will be necessary for them to be able to deal with precipitation of all kinds safely - not just snow. But there are some specific examples in development that have been designed to be able to melt snow in winter.   Most Popular    One example is from an Idaho-based company called Solar Roadways. Their modular solar road tiles contain heating elements that are able to prevent snow and ice accumulation.  These tiles are also made from tempered glass that has a specially designed tractioned surface that is equal to traditional asphalt.  7 interesting solar roads around the world Here are some examples of solar roads from around the world. The following list is not exhaustive and in no particular order. 1. France opened a 1 km solar road in 2016   Consisting of somewhere in the region of 2,880 m2 of solar panels, this solar road in France was one of the first in the world. It was built using Colas' Wattway tech and runs for 1-km in Tourouvre-au-Perche.  Colas are part of the giant french telecoms group Bouygues and was financed by the state. This pioneer in solar roadways is said to be able to generate enough power to keep street lights on within the small village. It cost around 5 million Euros and is used by around 2,000 motorists a day.  2. Wattway's solar roads have also been installed in Georgia 
Source:  theray  
 After the success of the Wattway's installation in France, another test stretch was installed near the Alabama and Georgia border. The Ray C. Anderson Foundation helped fund a 50 m2  of the first Wattway pilot in the United States.  The pilot formed part of the foundation's The Ray project which is a 29-kilometer living laboratory for testing renewable tech. This project also includes bioswales and a solar-powered electric car charging station.  "Wattway debuted with a pilot site in France in 2015, and through a partnership with Hannah Solar and Georgia DOT... The energy generated from The Ray’s Wattway powers the Georgia Visitor Information Center adjacent to the project." - theray.org.  3. China has built an entire solar expressway   Back in 2018, China completed works on a 1-km stretch of an expressway in Jinan. Developed by Qilu Transportation Development Group it consists of three distinct layers.   Its base is made primarily of insulation, with solar panels in the middle layer, and transparent concrete capping the lot.  The 1-km stretch makes up around 5875 m2  over two lanes and one emergency lane.  This solar road was designed to be able to generate around 1 million kilowatt-hours per year.  Funnily enough, soon after construction, some parts of the solar road appear to have been robbed out. However, the panels wouldn't have had much commercial value so it is thought they were taken to reverse engineer.  4. This bike path in The Netherlands was another pioneer 
Source:  Blueknight/Wikimedia Commons  
 Installed in Krommenie, The Netherlands, a bike lane has been covered in special solar panels. As interesting as this is alone, the project actually surpassed all expectations from its designers.  The solar bike path runs for around 70 meters and each panel is protected from physical damage with 1 cm of protective coating.  Over a one year period, the solar cycle path was able to generate 70 kilowatt-hours per squared meter. That's enough to power around three houses.  It was built using SolaRoad, and according to the designers TNO, most users don't even notice the difference to normal-tarmac.  5. This solar sidewalk can actually charge electric cars 
Source:  Platio  
 A company called Platio recently installed a 4.6 m2  stretch of sidewalk with solar panels. Made from recycled plastic, the sidewalk serves a dual purpose. Pedestrians can safely traverse it while it generates electricity to charge electric vehicles.   Platio installed the 720-watt peak capacity system at a Prologis facility in Budapest. The complete installation process only took one day.  When the solar sidewalk isn’t busy charging EVs, the energy it generates helps power a nearby office building. 6. Solar Roadways hope to roll out across the U.S.   An Idaho-based company, Solar Roadways, hopes to roll out solar-powered roads across the United States. Their hexagonal solar road tiles not only generate electricity but can be used as digital driving surfaces using LEDs that can be controlled remotely.    Each tile consists of three discrete layers. A base recycled material layer that contacts the ground, a middle section that contains all the electronics, and an upper layer of reinforced glass that can support the weight of 113-tonne (13,000 kgs) truck.  The power generated by the tiles could be used to power EVs through induction technology, stored or connected directly into the national grid for use by nearby infrastructure, towns, and cities.  "We have completed three funding contracts with the U.S. Department of Transportation. People from all over the world decided to help speed our progress via our Indiegogo Campaign which you can read more about on our Funding page. Our goal is to modernize the infrastructure with modular, intelligent panels while producing clean renewable energy for homes and businesses." - Solar Roadways.       Home   Science     For You           innovation    Green Launch's hydrogen impulse launcher could fire payloads to orbit in 10 minutes at 20 times the speed of sound.
6 Examples of Solar Powered Roads That Could Be a Glimpse of the Future
https://interestingengineering.com/science/6-examples-of-solar-powered-roads-that-could-be-a-glimpse-of-the-future
https://www.engineersgarage.com/solar-roadways-a-brighter-future/
Solar Roadways – A Brighter Future
2021-06-13
Shalem Pravas
<div><article><div><p>Life has existed for millions of years before electricity was ever developed. All thanks to the giant Nuclear Fusion reactor at the center of our solar system, ‘The Sun’. The Sun generates energy from its core where Hydrogen atoms fuse to create a Helium atom producing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. This energy is essential to life on earth. The sunlight is used by plants to produce food which is directly or indirectly the food source to all living things; it is responsible for seasons; its heat maintains water in its liquid form which is primary for life to exist; sunlight is an essential source of vitamin D to the human body and many more life supporting processes which are either directly or indirectly choreographed by the sun.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>Its energy can also be harnessed and converted into electricity and heat. Solar panels consisting of arrays of ‘Photovoltaic cells’ (photodiode semiconductors) which work on the principle of “photoelectric effect”. This effect produces the motion of electrons when light falls on the cell. The movement of electrons produces current giving rise to a potential difference and therefore electricity. Then there are solar concentrators which concentrate a portion of the suns energy into a smaller area by using lenses or mirrors. The heat obtained from these devices is used to heat water to produce steam and run turbines to generate electricity.</p>
<p>Solar Roadways is a currently trending innovation which focuses on replacing the common roads with structurally engineered solar panels which can withstand the weight of vehicles as well as tough out other environmental conditions. They consist of solar cells placed under hardened glass. The energy received from these roads can power road lights, traffic lights, signs and also local dwellings. If successful, the entire roadway system (if not, a majority) of a country can be turned into a solar power plant. It can also provide a source of electricity to charge electric cars on the go as an added advantage. Solar roads can cut harmful emissions of a country by at least 50% which is a number which cannot be ignored keeping in mind the alarming rate of increase in Global Warming. SolaRoad in Krommanie, Netherlands, is the first solar powered bike path laid in the world which was opened in November, 2014. In this article, we will discuss the economics of solar energy and the technology that goes into the making of the solar roadways.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<h2>1 Solar Energy – Statistics</h2>
<p>The earth receives a fraction of sun’s energy every day, which we know as solar energy. In full sun, the earth receives 100 Watts of solar energy per square foot. Assuming about 12 hours of sun in a day for 365 days in a year, the annual energy from the sun is around 438KW-Hrs per square foot. There are 10,760,000 square feet per square kilometer which makes the energy available, 4.7 Terawatt-hours per square kilometer annually. India covers about 3,000,000 square kilometers. The total electricity consumption in India for the fiscal year 2014-15 is about 850 TW-hours which is equivalent to the solar energy received by mere 180 square kilometers (approximately two and a half times the size of Mumbai). From this we can concur that the sun provides us with about 15,000 times more than the average use.</p>
<p>So, what do these numbers mean? It shows that the sun gives us more energy than we actually need to survive without the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. But why hasn’t the world already jumped at this? The answer to this lies in the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms we cannot convert the entire energy we receive from the sun into usable electricity. Current technology is limited in its efficiency failing to provide a larger profit, which is deciding factor in a country’s economy. Nevertheless, it is a global objective to develop cleaner resources of energy which motivates countries to step into the solar race, flowing funds into research and development to make solar energy a more feasible alternative.</p>
<h2>2 Solar Roadways</h2>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>As mentioned earlier, solar roadways are interlinked structurally engineered solar panels (which are roughly 12’x12’ each) which replaces the conventional asphalt roads, parking lots and driveways. These can power small businesses, homes, traffic signs, intelligent roads and also act as data signal carriers (high speed internet, cable TV and Telephone). This technology could replace the otherwise deteriorating power grids currently in the country. The solar roads provide power to embedded LED lights which could display messages, light up the roads, display warning messages when over speeding or close proximity to impact, road closed ahead, etc. In case of snow in northern climates, the solar roads can heat themselves to melt the snow and clear the roads. This will also increase the feasibility of using electric cars by providing charging stations. These intelligent roads once installed, will pay for themselves, heal themselves, and provide profits to an economy by removing dependency on fossil fuels. Using 15% efficient solar panels as the standalone electricity source will provide 3 times the required power capacity.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<h2>2.2    Layers of Solar Panels</h2>
<p>The solar panels are layered in three basic units</p>
<p>1.      Road Surface Layer</p>
<p>2.      Electronics Layer</p>
<p>3.      Base Plate Layer</p>
<p>The topmost Layer will consist of the photovoltaics in hardened glass. The important characteristics required are transparency (translucent), hardness and roughness. The roughness is required to provide traction for the vehicle tires to turn without slipping. Each individual solar panel is bolted into the linkage with the bottom layer. This will make it easily serviceable. The LEDs and the heating element will go into this layer. The next most important unit is waterproofing to avoid water leakage into the electronics unit below.</p>
<p>The Electronics layer consists of the microprocessor with supporting circuitry (measuring, feedback and control units). This will control the heating elements (snow sensing), load (pressure gauges), lighting, communications and monitoring. The micro processing units will be fitted every 12 feet distance making it a truly ‘intelligent road’.</p>
<p>The base plate layer is the power transmission layer. The energy captured by the solar panels and collected by the electronics layer is distributed by the base plate layer. The data signals are also transmitted through this layer along with the power to all the homes and businesses connected to solar roadways. This layer is also waterproofed and weatherproofed to prevent electronic layer damage.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<h2>2.3    Advantages and Disadvantages</h2>
<p>– The main advantage of the solar roadways is that it is a renewable and clean source of energy.</p>
<p>– Solar panels have a life span of 30 to 40 years while the conventional asphalt roads have a life span of about 7 to 10 years (without monsoon damage).</p>
<p>– Can provide electricity access to remote areas which are far away from power plants.</p>
<p>– It can also be laid near environmentally sensitive areas.</p>
<p>– It will provide on the go charging to electric cars if coupled with an induction plating.</p>
<p>– It will create a new industry generating employment.</p>
<p>– It will cut down immensely on harmful emissions (by at least 50%).</p>
<p>– It will provide an intelligent means of managing traffic (reducing accidents and traffic jams).</p>
<p>– High installation and initial maintenance costs.</p>
<p>– Low average efficiency of solar panels.</p>
<p>– Difficult for implementation in poorer countries due to high start-up cost.</p>
<p>– Accumulation of tire rubber (due to frictional wear) could block sunlight.</p>
<h2>3 Is There a Better Future in Store for Us?</h2>
<p>At the present rate of fossil fuel consumption we can hardly last for a few decades. If we don’t do something about it the human civilization will go back to the dark ages and as an added wound, our environment will be irreparably be damaged. Ice caps will melt, Oceans will rise, Forests will die out, Ozone layer will get depleted, the planet will heat up, drought, famine and numerous other problems will shorten the span of human existence on the planet. Oil and coal is present in few pockets of the planet causing countries to fight wars over possession of these resources. At this point in time we have to turn to nature to search for answers, as it can hold complex answers in the most trivial places. The sun has led to our existence and can very well sustain our existence in the future.</p>
<p>Roads provide connectivity to different parts of the world and cover a large area of a land mass (even over water as bridges). When there aren’t any cars going on them they just lie there gathering dust and withering away. Replacing an old idea (of connectivity) with a new necessity (self-sustenance) is what solar roads are all about. Technology will develop with time to lower the disadvantages and raise the advantages of solar power. As technology improves, solar panels will become cheaper (like 3D printed solar panels) and efficiency will become higher forcing the countries to turn their attention towards our home star. As a long term investment, solar roads will help maintain the society as opposed to asphalt roads which are dependent on constant maintenance, which will quite basically pay for themselves. So let’s drive our way into a cleaner and brighter future.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<hr/><p><br/></p><hr/><hr/>
<nav>
<h2>Next Article</h2>
</nav><hr/></div></article></div>||||I|||| Continue to Site

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 Solar Roadways – A Brighter Future

 By Shalem Pravas

 Life has existed for millions of years before electricity was ever developed. All thanks to the giant Nuclear Fusion reactor at the center of our solar system, ‘The Sun’. The Sun generates energy from its core where Hydrogen atoms fuse to create a Helium atom producing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. This energy is essential to life on earth. The sunlight is used by plants to produce food which is directly or indirectly the food source to all living things; it is responsible for seasons; its heat maintains water in its liquid form which is primary for life to exist; sunlight is an essential source of vitamin D to the human body and many more life supporting processes which are either directly or indirectly choreographed by the sun.

 Fig. 1: A Representational Image of Solar Roadway Artist Rendition 

 Its energy can also be harnessed and converted into electricity and heat. Solar panels consisting of arrays of ‘Photovoltaic cells’ (photodiode semiconductors) which work on the principle of “photoelectric effect”. This effect produces the motion of electrons when light falls on the cell. The movement of electrons produces current giving rise to a potential difference and therefore electricity. Then there are solar concentrators which concentrate a portion of the suns energy into a smaller area by using lenses or mirrors. The heat obtained from these devices is used to heat water to produce steam and run turbines to generate electricity.

 Solar Roadways is a currently trending innovation which focuses on replacing the common roads with structurally engineered solar panels which can withstand the weight of vehicles as well as tough out other environmental conditions. They consist of solar cells placed under hardened glass. The energy received from these roads can power road lights, traffic lights, signs and also local dwellings. If successful, the entire roadway system (if not, a majority) of a country can be turned into a solar power plant. It can also provide a source of electricity to charge electric cars on the go as an added advantage. Solar roads can cut harmful emissions of a country by at least 50% which is a number which cannot be ignored keeping in mind the alarming rate of increase in Global Warming. SolaRoad in Krommanie, Netherlands, is the first solar powered bike path laid in the world which was opened in November, 2014. In this article, we will discuss the economics of solar energy and the technology that goes into the making of the solar roadways.

 Fig. 2: Image of First Solar Powered Solar Road in Krommanie, Netherlands ,November 2014 

 1 Solar Energy – Statistics

 The earth receives a fraction of sun’s energy every day, which we know as solar energy. In full sun, the earth receives 100 Watts of solar energy per square foot. Assuming about 12 hours of sun in a day for 365 days in a year, the annual energy from the sun is around 438KW-Hrs per square foot. There are 10,760,000 square feet per square kilometer which makes the energy available, 4.7 Terawatt-hours per square kilometer annually. India covers about 3,000,000 square kilometers. The total electricity consumption in India for the fiscal year 2014-15 is about 850 TW-hours which is equivalent to the solar energy received by mere 180 square kilometers (approximately two and a half times the size of Mumbai). From this we can concur that the sun provides us with about 15,000 times more than the average use.

 So, what do these numbers mean? It shows that the sun gives us more energy than we actually need to survive without the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. But why hasn’t the world already jumped at this? The answer to this lies in the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms we cannot convert the entire energy we receive from the sun into usable electricity. Current technology is limited in its efficiency failing to provide a larger profit, which is deciding factor in a country’s economy. Nevertheless, it is a global objective to develop cleaner resources of energy which motivates countries to step into the solar race, flowing funds into research and development to make solar energy a more feasible alternative.

 Solar Roadways

 2 Solar Roadways

 Fig. 3: Image Showing Solar Roadways Inc. a Startup from Idaho, USA 

 As mentioned earlier, solar roadways are interlinked structurally engineered solar panels (which are roughly 12’x12’ each) which replaces the conventional asphalt roads, parking lots and driveways. These can power small businesses, homes, traffic signs, intelligent roads and also act as data signal carriers (high speed internet, cable TV and Telephone). This technology could replace the otherwise deteriorating power grids currently in the country. The solar roads provide power to embedded LED lights which could display messages, light up the roads, display warning messages when over speeding or close proximity to impact, road closed ahead, etc. In case of snow in northern climates, the solar roads can heat themselves to melt the snow and clear the roads. This will also increase the feasibility of using electric cars by providing charging stations. These intelligent roads once installed, will pay for themselves, heal themselves, and provide profits to an economy by removing dependency on fossil fuels. Using 15% efficient solar panels as the standalone electricity source will provide 3 times the required power capacity.

 Fig. 4: Image Showing Hardened Glass Cover with Rough Finish for Traction in Solar Roads

 2.2 Layers of Solar Panels

 The solar panels are layered in three basic units

 1. Road Surface Layer

 2. Electronics Layer

 3. Base Plate Layer

 The topmost Layer will consist of the photovoltaics in hardened glass. The important characteristics required are transparency (translucent), hardness and roughness. The roughness is required to provide traction for the vehicle tires to turn without slipping. Each individual solar panel is bolted into the linkage with the bottom layer. This will make it easily serviceable. The LEDs and the heating element will go into this layer. The next most important unit is waterproofing to avoid water leakage into the electronics unit below.

 The Electronics layer consists of the microprocessor with supporting circuitry (measuring, feedback and control units). This will control the heating elements (snow sensing), load (pressure gauges), lighting, communications and monitoring. The micro processing units will be fitted every 12 feet distance making it a truly ‘intelligent road’.

 The base plate layer is the power transmission layer. The energy captured by the solar panels and collected by the electronics layer is distributed by the base plate layer. The data signals are also transmitted through this layer along with the power to all the homes and businesses connected to solar roadways. This layer is also waterproofed and weatherproofed to prevent electronic layer damage.

 Fig. 5: Image Explaining Basic Structure of Solar Roads 

 2.3 Advantages and Disadvantages

 – The main advantage of the solar roadways is that it is a renewable and clean source of energy.

 – Solar panels have a life span of 30 to 40 years while the conventional asphalt roads have a life span of about 7 to 10 years (without monsoon damage).

 – Can provide electricity access to remote areas which are far away from power plants.

 – It can also be laid near environmentally sensitive areas.

 – It will provide on the go charging to electric cars if coupled with an induction plating.

 – It will create a new industry generating employment.

 – It will cut down immensely on harmful emissions (by at least 50%).

 – It will provide an intelligent means of managing traffic (reducing accidents and traffic jams).

 – High installation and initial maintenance costs.

 – Low average efficiency of solar panels.

 – Difficult for implementation in poorer countries due to high start-up cost.

 – Accumulation of tire rubber (due to frictional wear) could block sunlight.

 3 Is There a Better Future in Store for Us?

 At the present rate of fossil fuel consumption we can hardly last for a few decades. If we don’t do something about it the human civilization will go back to the dark ages and as an added wound, our environment will be irreparably be damaged. Ice caps will melt, Oceans will rise, Forests will die out, Ozone layer will get depleted, the planet will heat up, drought, famine and numerous other problems will shorten the span of human existence on the planet. Oil and coal is present in few pockets of the planet causing countries to fight wars over possession of these resources. At this point in time we have to turn to nature to search for answers, as it can hold complex answers in the most trivial places. The sun has led to our existence and can very well sustain our existence in the future.

 Roads provide connectivity to different parts of the world and cover a large area of a land mass (even over water as bridges). When there aren’t any cars going on them they just lie there gathering dust and withering away. Replacing an old idea (of connectivity) with a new necessity (self-sustenance) is what solar roads are all about. Technology will develop with time to lower the disadvantages and raise the advantages of solar power. As technology improves, solar panels will become cheaper (like 3D printed solar panels) and efficiency will become higher forcing the countries to turn their attention towards our home star. As a long term investment, solar roads will help maintain the society as opposed to asphalt roads which are dependent on constant maintenance, which will quite basically pay for themselves. So let’s drive our way into a cleaner and brighter future.

 Fig. 6: LED Illuminated Solar Path in Shade 

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Life has existed for millions of years before electricity was ever developed. All thanks to the giant Nuclear Fusion reactor at the center of our solar system, ‘The Sun’. The Sun generates energy from its core where Hydrogen atoms fuse to create a Helium atom producing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. This energy is essential to life on earth. The sunlight is used by plants to produce food which is directly or indirectly the food source to all living things; it is responsible for seasons; its heat maintains water in its liquid form which is primary for life to exist; sunlight is an essential source of vitamin D to the human body and many more life supporting processes which are either directly or indirectly choreographed by the sun.
 
 
Its energy can also be harnessed and converted into electricity and heat. Solar panels consisting of arrays of ‘Photovoltaic cells’ (photodiode semiconductors) which work on the principle of “photoelectric effect”. This effect produces the motion of electrons when light falls on the cell. The movement of electrons produces current giving rise to a potential difference and therefore electricity. Then there are solar concentrators which concentrate a portion of the suns energy into a smaller area by using lenses or mirrors. The heat obtained from these devices is used to heat water to produce steam and run turbines to generate electricity.
Solar Roadways is a currently trending innovation which focuses on replacing the common roads with structurally engineered solar panels which can withstand the weight of vehicles as well as tough out other environmental conditions. They consist of solar cells placed under hardened glass. The energy received from these roads can power road lights, traffic lights, signs and also local dwellings. If successful, the entire roadway system (if not, a majority) of a country can be turned into a solar power plant. It can also provide a source of electricity to charge electric cars on the go as an added advantage. Solar roads can cut harmful emissions of a country by at least 50% which is a number which cannot be ignored keeping in mind the alarming rate of increase in Global Warming. SolaRoad in Krommanie, Netherlands, is the first solar powered bike path laid in the world which was opened in November, 2014. In this article, we will discuss the economics of solar energy and the technology that goes into the making of the solar roadways.
 
 
1 Solar Energy – Statistics
The earth receives a fraction of sun’s energy every day, which we know as solar energy. In full sun, the earth receives 100 Watts of solar energy per square foot. Assuming about 12 hours of sun in a day for 365 days in a year, the annual energy from the sun is around 438KW-Hrs per square foot. There are 10,760,000 square feet per square kilometer which makes the energy available, 4.7 Terawatt-hours per square kilometer annually. India covers about 3,000,000 square kilometers. The total electricity consumption in India for the fiscal year 2014-15 is about 850 TW-hours which is equivalent to the solar energy received by mere 180 square kilometers (approximately two and a half times the size of Mumbai). From this we can concur that the sun provides us with about 15,000 times more than the average use.
So, what do these numbers mean? It shows that the sun gives us more energy than we actually need to survive without the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. But why hasn’t the world already jumped at this? The answer to this lies in the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms we cannot convert the entire energy we receive from the sun into usable electricity. Current technology is limited in its efficiency failing to provide a larger profit, which is deciding factor in a country’s economy. Nevertheless, it is a global objective to develop cleaner resources of energy which motivates countries to step into the solar race, flowing funds into research and development to make solar energy a more feasible alternative.
2 Solar Roadways
 
 
As mentioned earlier, solar roadways are interlinked structurally engineered solar panels (which are roughly 12’x12’ each) which replaces the conventional asphalt roads, parking lots and driveways. These can power small businesses, homes, traffic signs, intelligent roads and also act as data signal carriers (high speed internet, cable TV and Telephone). This technology could replace the otherwise deteriorating power grids currently in the country. The solar roads provide power to embedded LED lights which could display messages, light up the roads, display warning messages when over speeding or close proximity to impact, road closed ahead, etc. In case of snow in northern climates, the solar roads can heat themselves to melt the snow and clear the roads. This will also increase the feasibility of using electric cars by providing charging stations. These intelligent roads once installed, will pay for themselves, heal themselves, and provide profits to an economy by removing dependency on fossil fuels. Using 15% efficient solar panels as the standalone electricity source will provide 3 times the required power capacity.
 
 
2.2    Layers of Solar Panels
The solar panels are layered in three basic units
1.      Road Surface Layer
2.      Electronics Layer
3.      Base Plate Layer
The topmost Layer will consist of the photovoltaics in hardened glass. The important characteristics required are transparency (translucent), hardness and roughness. The roughness is required to provide traction for the vehicle tires to turn without slipping. Each individual solar panel is bolted into the linkage with the bottom layer. This will make it easily serviceable. The LEDs and the heating element will go into this layer. The next most important unit is waterproofing to avoid water leakage into the electronics unit below.
The Electronics layer consists of the microprocessor with supporting circuitry (measuring, feedback and control units). This will control the heating elements (snow sensing), load (pressure gauges), lighting, communications and monitoring. The micro processing units will be fitted every 12 feet distance making it a truly ‘intelligent road’.
The base plate layer is the power transmission layer. The energy captured by the solar panels and collected by the electronics layer is distributed by the base plate layer. The data signals are also transmitted through this layer along with the power to all the homes and businesses connected to solar roadways. This layer is also waterproofed and weatherproofed to prevent electronic layer damage.
 
 
2.3    Advantages and Disadvantages
– The main advantage of the solar roadways is that it is a renewable and clean source of energy.
– Solar panels have a life span of 30 to 40 years while the conventional asphalt roads have a life span of about 7 to 10 years (without monsoon damage).
– Can provide electricity access to remote areas which are far away from power plants.
– It can also be laid near environmentally sensitive areas.
– It will provide on the go charging to electric cars if coupled with an induction plating.
– It will create a new industry generating employment.
– It will cut down immensely on harmful emissions (by at least 50%).
– It will provide an intelligent means of managing traffic (reducing accidents and traffic jams).
– High installation and initial maintenance costs.
– Low average efficiency of solar panels.
– Difficult for implementation in poorer countries due to high start-up cost.
– Accumulation of tire rubber (due to frictional wear) could block sunlight.
3 Is There a Better Future in Store for Us?
At the present rate of fossil fuel consumption we can hardly last for a few decades. If we don’t do something about it the human civilization will go back to the dark ages and as an added wound, our environment will be irreparably be damaged. Ice caps will melt, Oceans will rise, Forests will die out, Ozone layer will get depleted, the planet will heat up, drought, famine and numerous other problems will shorten the span of human existence on the planet. Oil and coal is present in few pockets of the planet causing countries to fight wars over possession of these resources. At this point in time we have to turn to nature to search for answers, as it can hold complex answers in the most trivial places. The sun has led to our existence and can very well sustain our existence in the future.
Roads provide connectivity to different parts of the world and cover a large area of a land mass (even over water as bridges). When there aren’t any cars going on them they just lie there gathering dust and withering away. Replacing an old idea (of connectivity) with a new necessity (self-sustenance) is what solar roads are all about. Technology will develop with time to lower the disadvantages and raise the advantages of solar power. As technology improves, solar panels will become cheaper (like 3D printed solar panels) and efficiency will become higher forcing the countries to turn their attention towards our home star. As a long term investment, solar roads will help maintain the society as opposed to asphalt roads which are dependent on constant maintenance, which will quite basically pay for themselves. So let’s drive our way into a cleaner and brighter future.
 
 
     
Next Article
Solar Roadways – A Brighter Future
https://www.engineersgarage.com/solar-roadways-a-brighter-future/