Solar Freakin Roadways!

[Fox Fire]

This is old "news" and completely idiotic. Off the top of my head (and memory), major problems include:

 

Massively inefficient energy generation: Static solar panels have a maximum theoretical yield of 55% and the current ones that exist tend to only get ~30% efficiency at the top (and expensive) end. That's just regular solar panels which don't have a thick layer glass on top of it. Much better to use tracking panels which have a theoretical maximum yield of 85% and don't have a thick layer of glass on top.

Prohibitively expensive costs: The USA can barely afford to maintain it's asphalt highways (which is a "useless" product that we gain from oil conversion, guaranteeing massive amounts of it) whereas circuitry is massively expensive in comparison.

Weather: Assuming they can magically create efficient solar panels and pull money out of thin air, weather can and will completely nullify any benefits gained from it regularly. I don't know where you live but in Northern states we have something called snow. In order to prevent the snow from covering the roads and melting and freezing and all that jazz, we cover our highways in a layer of salt instead. I don't know if you know this but rock salt is also opaque and means any highways in the top half of the country are rendered ineffective for at least a third of the year. This is not taking into account storms or cloudy weather (or rush hour traffic )

LEDs: LED's strong enough to appear visible in daylight hours would eat up most, if not all, of the energy generated.

 

The USA is !@#$ empty, it's twice the size of the European Union and has only ~3/5th's of the population. There is legitimately no reason we need to do this when we have more than enough space to dedicate to efficient solar panels.

 

 

People are always !@#$ about how the government wastes money. This would be, hands down, the biggest waste in human history.

Nice try smart one, but Canada is my neighbor so I know how snow and ice works. 

I've already addressed pretty much all of this in previous comments.

As for space, we actually don't. The planet as a whole is pretty well out of !@#$ing space. Which is why everything on the planet is dying. Well that and all the unimaginable amounts of pollution we produce. I don't think this should be a government funded project to repave our roads with lights because we don't even know if it works as imagined. I do however think that this is worth an investment large enough to test on a larger scale and perhaps refine. Who funds it doesn't really matter but it seems pretty obvious to me this has better potential than what we see now. 

Would it be cost effective? If they are durable enough, then in the long term, no doubt. Even if they only get 15% efficiency it's free energy with no pollution. Despite everyones criticisms of how it should or would work, it contradicts the current results of small scale demonstrations. Perhaps it actually would prove to be unrealistic on large scales, but even then I think it still has realistic smaller scale applications.

Anyone who says this idea is idiotic has no respect for ingenuity. Even if it doesn't work, it's a damn creative idea. 

[Ayayay]

Nice try smart one, but Canada is my neighbor so I know how snow and ice works. 

I've already addressed pretty much all of this in previous comments.

As for space, we actually don't. The planet as a whole is pretty well out of !@#$ space. Which is why everything on the planet is dying. Well that and all the unimaginable amounts of pollution we produce. I don't think this should be a government funded project to repave our roads with lights because we don't even know if it works as imagined. I do however think that this is worth an investment large enough to test on a larger scale and perhaps refine. Who funds it doesn't really matter but it seems pretty obvious to me this has better potential than what we see now. 

Would it be cost effective? If they are durable enough, then in the long term, no doubt. Even if they only get 15% efficiency it's free energy with no pollution. Despite everyones criticisms of how it should or would work, it contradicts the current results of small scale demonstrations. Perhaps it actually would prove to be unrealistic on large scales, but even then I think it still has realistic smaller scale applications.

Anyone who says this idea is idiotic has no respect for ingenuity. Even if it doesn't work, it's a damn creative idea. 

1. We have tons of empty space with massive amounts of sunlight called deserts. These are perfect for solar farms and it's easier to use them for that then attempt to have people live there and pump water to them.

2. If the government doesn't fund it then who !@#$ will? Utilities and massive projects can only be funded by the government, their is very little cost-incentives for companies to strike out and create public works without government funding.

3. Again, not free energy, this is prohibitively expensive.

4. What results? The results are trash. They drove a tractor on it, big goddamn whoop.

5. The line between ingenuity and stupidity is startlingly thin. However, this falls well on the idiotic side.

 

Edit: Decided to actually read your past comments. You addressed jack !@#$ing shit. What an utter waste of time.

Edited January 1, 2016 by Metro

[Kemal Ergenekon]

Hey guys, I have an idea! I think we can build eco-friendly thermoelectric power plants! How, you may ask. Why, we will burn unicorn shit instead of coal or oil.

 

The only problem with my ingenious idea is that unicorn shit cannot currently be produced with our current technology. But throw enough money at my indiegogo, and who knows, maybe we will, and my project will save the environment!

[Fox Fire]

1. We have tons of empty space with massive amounts of sunlight called deserts. These are perfect for solar farms and it's easier to use them for that then attempt to have people live there and pump water to them.

2. If the government doesn't fund it then who !@#$ will? Utilities and massive projects can only be funded by the government, their is very little cost-incentives for companies to strike out and create public works without government funding.

3. Again, not free energy, this is prohibitively expensive.

4. What results? The results are trash. They drove a tractor on it, big goddamn whoop.

5. The line between ingenuity and stupidity is startlingly thin. However, this falls well on the idiotic side.

 

Edit: Decided to actually read your past comments. You addressed jack !@#$ shit. What an utter waste of time.

1. The funny part is that I live in a dessert and we produce our own water. But yeah, let's destroy even more land and habitat than we are already using to make solar farms that don't work either. 

2. Anyone. Like I said, funding seems like one of the biggest obstacles. I admitted in the OP itself that the initial investment for such a project would be considerably high. We definitely have more important things to spend money on and once again, it's not something we can do now. That however doesn't mean individual people and organizations can't contribute.

3. Free in the sense that it costs virtually nothing for it to sit there and suck up light. The question is whether or not one of these bricks will pay for itself in the span of 20 years.

4. Yeah, that's totally the only test they did. And what do you expect? They can't exactly pave a full road with the tiny funds they have now. Bringing me back to the point that this deserves at least enough funding for full scale testing and refinement.

5. Tesla was an idiot too?...

 

Edit: Could have just said you didn't have a response or something. 

 

 

Hey guys, I have an idea! I think we can build eco-friendly thermoelectric power plants! How, you may ask. Why, we will burn unicorn shit instead of coal or oil.

 

The only problem with my ingenious idea is that unicorn shit cannot currently be produced with our current technology. But throw enough money at my indiegogo, and who knows, maybe we will, and my project will save the environment!

You're funny. I like poptart catz and dragons but I'm not sure how imaginary creatures and their feces have any relevance to anything in this thread. But I just posted this comment to take up space and make you read it because I don't like you. 

[fistofdoom]

I'm actually agreeing with Fox Fire.

I hate you all for this.

[Doktor Avalanche]

People have invested in solar power in the High Desert/Mojave Desert in California. Guess who killed it? Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. Why? Both said it hurt the Desert Tortoise species and forced a shutdown. Guess which two had other investments in a competing Solar company? Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

[Ayayay]

It's been a while so I figure I may as well post some new information I found

 

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/worlds-first-solar-road-opens-in-france/

 

 

According to the Missouri department of transport (MoDOT), the small 12ft-by-20ft patch of solar road will cost $100,000 to install. That works out at $416 per square foot—about $4,500 per square metre, or $11.6 billion per square mile. Scott Brusaw, founder of Solar Roadways, says there's about 29,000 square miles of paved roads in the lower 48 US states, and he'd like to turn most of them into solar roads. He'll need one hell of a Kickstarter to raise $330 trillion—16 times the US national debt—though.

 

A company in France did a single lane of a 1km road for â‚¬5 million though and only hope to turn on a few thousand street lights. 

 

Back in 2014, a 70-metre solar bicycle path was built in the suburbs of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, at the utterly insane cost of â‚¬3 million. In its first year it produced about 3,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity—enough to power an average home. At the current wholesale price in the UK (about £40 per megawatt-hour), that same €3 million would've bought you about 65,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to power about 21,000 homes for a year.

The smallest nuclear reactor in America produces two and a half times more energy in a second than the â‚¬3 million dollar sinkhole in the Netherlands did in a year. A nuclear plant would need about 100 times more money to build, but it would produce nearly 1.5 million times more energy in any comparable time period. Edited December 24, 2016 by Malal

[Doktor Avalanche]

It's been a while so I figure I may as well post some new information I found

 

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/worlds-first-solar-road-opens-in-france/

 

 

 

A company in France did a single lane of a 1km road for â‚¬5 million though and only hope to turn on a few thousand street lights. 

 

The smallest nuclear reactor in America produces two and a half times more energy in a second than the â‚¬3 million dollar sinkhole in the Netherlands did in a year. A nuclear plant would need about 100 times more money to build, but it would produce nearly 1.5 million times more energy in any comparable time period.

I looked further into this after this thread was posted and the cost is beyond ridiculous and massively inefficient, even toxic to the environment to produce and once implemented. Other attempts to produce a similar product hit the same walls as well. 

 

This is not a bad idea but it is one which needs to jump over many roadblocks first and probably some new innovative development issues which need resolving before we see a more cost effective and safer invention.