http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, May 19th, 2014 1:11pm PDT - doublepromote requested by lurgee.

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Ok this is freakin awesome. If they could actually do this, it would be amazing.

I do wonder though about the total energy cost in manufacturing, installing and maintaining this. I'm not saying it's impossible to do, but when something sounds too good to be true, it generally is.

economy? meh! environment? meh!

Tron roadways? SOLD!

If this is the first time you heard about this, it's pretty cool.

Then the realities begin to set in.

Energy cost nothing. How about the cost in dollars. Sure any solar panel will eventually pay for itself, so why isn't every surface in the world covered in them yet?

Common sense, combined with the fact that he never in 7 minutes makes any mention of the fixed upfront cost, leads me to believe that this would be the boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Hell, even just burying our utility wires underground is too expensive for any but the richest or densest cities.

Energy costs nothing? Er, no. That is exactly wrong.

Energy is cost. Everything we do, make, buy... the only real measurable cost is energy. Currency is just a representation of the energy value we assign a good or service.

It will cost energy to get the materials. It will cost energy to manufacture, install and maintain the panels.

Progress has a sense of humor. Awesome. Of course these guys would like to see every square foot of north american asphalt replaced with this stuff, but I think that they are smart enough to know that that isn't going to happen any time soon.

What could happen, however, is that we all gradually adopt the technology. First we start with with the densely wealthy liberal eco-conscious places that have a cultural incentive to swallow the initial economic hurdles and lower overall manufacturing costs to a point where it starts to make sense to the wealthy conservative gas guzzling folks, and then slowly expand from there.

The concept is sound. At some point the hardware might just become cheap enough to be viable - it's an option worth exploring, at the very least.

And if you think that making really long roadways out of relatively expensive tiles is impossible, try telling that to the ancient Romans.

@shveddy, I agree that gradual adoption is really the only way this works.

I wonder which would make more sense: high density urban areas with lots of traffic and lots of expense in redoing the roads or some comparatively empty highways where there would be less traffic disruption?

The snow melting thing is highly exaggerated. The panels might generate enough juice to keep black ice from forming, but would need to draw power from the grid to do any significant melting, let alone somehow dealing with several inches from a sizable storm.

I do see huge advantages to having roads made of these. The cost would no doubt be enormous, but the long-term advantages could make them a reasonable investment. I don't have any of the numbers to reference, but would guess that we could replace a sizable portion of the US roadways with a fraction of the military's annual budget.

These roads would be 1 part of the solution. Cheap stable energy storage connected to "the grid" is the other part. Even if all the roads generate energy in the daytime, it has to be stored somewhere. Lead acid batteries have a good density/cost ratio, but require a lot of maintenance. Pumping water uphill or pressurizing underground cavity are other options in use today.

The biggest problem I see is dirt. The roads get dirty, they are less efficient. How much energy do we spend cleaning them?

Ok, The reality of replacing roads at this point is near impossible. the Gradual replacement makes sense. Consider starting with parking lots.
Parking lots, then the odd connection between parking lots, and then public spaces, (I like the Time Square idea). but the project has huge merit.

Forget about the small time claims, like melting snow. Think of real time uses, like Stadium parking, Shopping Malls, Playgrounds.... Fast food restaurants, Wall Mart Parking lots...

According to the American Road and Transport Builders Association, the upfront costs of current construction are pretty significant already:

"Construct a new 2-lane undivided road – about $2-$3 million per mile in rural areas, about $3-5 million in urban areas.

Mill and resurface a 4-lane road – about $1.25 million per mile.

Expand an Interstate Highway from 4 lanes to 6 lanes – about $4 million per mile."

So really you'd have to look at the replacement costs of a technology like this rather than just assigning all those initial costs to the category of boondoggle.

But this really points to a larger issue that makes this question very hard to quantify and is actually addressed by the Solar Roadways people:

"For an accurate cost comparison between current systems and the Solar Roadways system, you'd have to combine the costs of current roads (including snow removal, line repainting, pothole repair, etc.), power plants (and the coal or nuclear material to run them), and power and data delivery systems (power poles and relay stations) to be comparable with the Solar Roadway system, which provides all three. So the comparison is more like an apple to a fruit basket."

One further interesting note from their website is that the numbers they used for electricity generation of the solar roadway system came out of their testing. In Northern Idaho. In the dead of winter. In other words, the worst possible conditions for solar panel systems.

I really despise when people poo-poo this idea because of the "realities". Invariably they're talking about the realities of doing it on actual roads and highways. I think it's pretty obvious you'd start with parking lots and footpaths, then when things are working better you move to some test roadways, then when most of the bugs are worked out and economies of scale are in place you move to a full-scale roll-out.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Solar-Roadways
*related=http://videosift.com/video/TEDx-Scott-Brusaw-Solar-Roadways

Solar Roadways has been added as a related post - related requested by xxovercastxx.

TEDx: Scott Brusaw - Solar Roadways has been added as a related post - related requested by xxovercastxx.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Solar, roads, solar panel, electricity, power' to 'Solar, roads, solar panel, electricity, power, solar roadways' - edited by xxovercastxx

Part of the premise when this first surfaced a few years back is that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper to produce whereas asphalt, being a petroleum product, is getting more and more expensive.

It's only a matter of time before the upfront costs of this are cheaper before you even consider the returns.

Lets not forget that currently the nation spends a great deal of money on simple yearly road repair, and that is only short term as most roads need to be entirely re-milled and replaced once or twice a decade.

I think this technology may well begin to seep into more liberal states, as others have said with parking lots (especially electric vehicle recharging stations) or perhaps with big and wealthy businesses like fast food chains. If the tiles can stay relatively undamaged over decades, eventually it would become very cost effective.

Yes melting snow would be improbable until perhaps there were enough roads connected to say the national grid. But everything else is not only probably but plausible.

I really hope this technology is implemented, slowly but surely. But I fear things like this won't become a viable alternative until the world is so tapped for oil and natural gas that there IS no alternative but to go with solar and wind technologies as a primary resource. Sadly America is woefully behind much of Europe. Some nations in Eur-Asia plan to be oil free within 100 years. The US will be mired in wars over the last scraps of the limited resources by then if something doesn't change.

Parking lot that shows you -arrows on the ground- where the closest current spot is?

Cool.

I looked at their website.

They won't even tell you what these cost.

If they were anywhere near the ballpark of existing methods, they'd be crowing about it to anyone who would listen. If these things paid for themselves in 5 years or even 10 years, every city in the country would be lining up to float some bonds. This is a manufactured product, installed by hand trying to compete with a bucket of sludge dumped out of a truck. It's not going to be 50% more expensive. It's going to be 20 times more expensive.

I'm an environmentalist, but I'm not interested in projects that are so expensive that they'll never be implemented. That's a carbon savings of zero.

That's why it would never be a sudden mad dash to install and replace existing roadways. Maybe a few cities or even communities will get the idea to replace their roads and people will figure out the use over time, maybe. Its a gradual process, but it certainly would lead to an immediate adoption. Existing roads have already been bought and paid for, once their useful life runs out then inevitably the question of how to spend the road maintenance money comes up and that's when these things might be useful, after seeing it work, and are willing to change...maybe

Maybe not even start with roadways... what if they started with side-walks, greenbelts and parkways... much less abuse than roads also.

here's the problem I see with that...these things are initially going to be expensive. ideas like this only pay off when used widely. Sure I might be able to invest in making a driveway from these things and I might get a small return on my electric bill, but it just won't be very productive initially. standard catch 22.

but the bottom line is that we've got to invest in infrastructure...it's a necessity that we invest in technologies that show promise such as this. they won't get cheap until pretty much after we've invested in them.

but if they hold up, then it should work out. I figure that's probably going to be the biggest thing...how long are these individual hexes going to hold out? replacing a few here and there won't be a big deal, but replacing entire sheets of them for miles just won't work out long term.

Why would you put a FIXED price into a video for something that has multiple components and variable costs? Solar technology has become vastly cheaper than it was 10-20 years ago, and this trend will continue, along with increased efficiency. This does not make for a "fixed" cost that should be put into their promotional videos, and would only serve to misinform people with old estimates.

Still have a few questions about this, what if you build like 20 miles of this, and theres a faultline or heat causing two 10-mile halves to separate like 10 cm?, do you upend and move one half after the other?, or do you patch it in with cables and concrete? You might say earthquakes are rare, but even a change in heat can cause the road to expand. I have seen this first hand, I once worked on a bridgeproject on a 5km long bridge, and the edges moves quite a lot due to changes in temperature making the bridge expand or contract.

Im sure this modular concept works fine for building a porch, but making thousands of miles of road under all kinds of conditions, terrain etc is a whole new bag of problems.

I also worked in an office building once, that had these kinds of modular tiles for floors, buildt on stilts, so that you could stretch cables under there (the kind used in server-rooms) again, these things are fine for small server rooms/ilses etc, but when applied to large open office landscapes, they caused all kinds of havok and problems (they became wobbly, uneven, gaps formed etc.) And this was inside, in a brand new building, about as controlled an environment as you can get.

I would love to see these things becoming reality, but highly skeptical that its even doable.

There is also a whitehouse.gov petition now: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fund-solar-roadways-create-national-clean-energy-surplus-and-end-wintery-road-conditions/3hjb7XbS

This is just another "free-energy" style scam. Won't happen, doesn't even make sense...putting solar cells on roads is about the worst possible plan. Far more realistic and economical to use solar cells to replace shingles, and roof every building with them, but that won't capture the imagination of the gullible.

you're not wrong that rooftop solar panels would collect more energy. but this also kills many birds with one idea/stone. since asphalt is petroleum-based, the costs for roads is constantly going up, this solves that. this solves a lot of issues with electric vehicles, and snow plowing and many others that the video addresses.

but hey, even if this idea ultimately doesn't work out. any work done on this project can be spun off into a new project that could benefit us greatly.

so I've got zero problem investing in this, even if it ultimately it doesn't pan out, because this work will ultimately benefit someone else's work.

Asphalt may be petroleum based, but it's also one of the most recycled products ever...around 99% of all asphalt is recycled. The increasing cost of petroleum will take decades to make this a cheaper alternative.

It does -nothing- for electric vehicles, or for snowplowing. Those claims are nothing but the purest bullshit. The amount of electricity needed to melt more than a trace of snow is utterly prohibitive. Which is why you don't see heated roads...or any of the others that this video "addresses" (without providing any actual facts, of course).

Um, no...

Solar Roadways - Reality Check has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

The worlds first real solar roadway (bike path)
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/11/09/netherlands-is-the-first-country-to-open-solar-road-for-public/