- FOUR years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.
A solar panel lying under a road is at a number of disadvantages. As it’s not at the optimum tilt angle, it’s going to produce less power and it’s going to be more prone to shading, which is a problem as shade over just 5 per cent of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50 per cent.
You don't put solar panels flat on the ground. You don't put solar panels under obstructions that cause shadows. There is a reason you put these things on roofs or in empty fields.
- One of the first solar roads to be installed is in Tourouvre-au-Perche, northwest France. This has a maximum power output of 420kW, covers 2800sq m and cost €5 million ($8 million) to install. This implies a cost of €11,905 ($A19,230) per installed kW.
While the road is supposed to generate 800kWh/day (kilowatt hours per day), some recently released data indicates a yield closer to 409kWh/day, or 150,000kWh/yr.
For an idea of how much this is, the average home uses around 10kWh/day. The road’s capacity factor — which measures the efficiency of the technology by dividing its average power output by its potential maximum power output — is just 4 per cent.
YADONTFUCKINGSAY. But But But SOLAR! FREAKING! ROADWAYS! DUDE! For half the cost they could have done traditional installs and got double the power.
- And this is before we look at the actual data from the Sandpoint installation, which generated 52.397kWh in six months, or 104.8kWh over a year. From this we can estimate a capacity factor of just 0.782 per cent, which is 20 times less efficient than the Cestas power plant.
Indiana is a backwards Hick and Klan fueled shithole, and even THEY knew that Solar Roadways were a bad idea. Then again, Indiana roads are a series of potholes held together by asphalt. Idaho spent $3-4 Million on a test walkway. Total and epic failure You don't want to cover the panels preventing light from hitting them. You also need airflow around the panel to cool them and prevent overheating. And you don't want cars dripping oil, trucks dropping gravel and all the other bad things that happen to a road. Then you have the whole "how do I keep water from getting under the panels and making sinkholes and potholes"
- That said, it should be pointed out that this panel is in a town square. If there is one thing we can conclude, it’s that a section of pavement surrounded by buildings in a snowy northern town is not the best place to locate a solar installation.
Said everybody who has ever been involved in a solar plant installation. Said everyone who knew how solar panels worked. Said everyone who knew what the hell they were talking about. but fuck me, what do the so-called "experts" know anyway! SOLAR! FREAKING! ROADWAYS!
- However, perhaps there’s a bigger point — solar roads on city streets are just not a great idea.
Who the fuck would have guessed that! There is a reason asphalt and concrete are used for roads, and they are probably not going to be replaced anytime soon. Both materials can handle the abuse of a 60 ton truck slamming on its brakes. Both materials can be made water proof. Both materials are well understood and easy to recycle into new roadbed material. Note that when they tested the solar road, they used a digger with tracks, not tires. Tracked vehicles have a lower PSI on the road and can use the greater area of the contact with the road surface to stop and maneuver. Do that with a big SUV and let's watch those panels react.
Between this shit, Fontus, and some of the other flat out scams I see on Kickstarter and Indy-go-go I'm done with crowd-sourcing as a concept. It's a good idea for trivial and niche products that don't have a traditional concentrated market, like games, I guess. My Brother has a few Kickstarted boardgames and I can see the benefit of that way of marketing; build a dedicated fan base to pay for the first run, then use that popularity/profit to get your game in stores where most people still buy games. But then again, how else are you going to scam people into buying artificial gills?
Oh fuck this guy. A cellphone that requires you to carry a battery in a suitcase is not a great idea either. A wheeled vehicle in a country with no roads and horse trails is not a great idea either. An app that reduces public discourse to 140 characters is not a great idea either. A piece of software that allows the very few connected computers to talk to each other, is not a great idea either. Expecting your homemade rocket to revolutionize space flight on its first flight is not a great idea either. Taking on the entrenched auto manufacturers and the legislature of all 50 individual states and the battery industry and the gas and oil industry and public perception is not a great idea either. I could go on and on and on and on. Expecting the first prototype implementation of an audacious idea to be a commercial success is fucking moronic. It's amazing they got ANY power out of these panels. At all. Just finding a glassine surface that kinda worked... Just finding a way to store and distribute that power... Just finding a way to manufacture these panels in ANY quantity at all... Just finding the funding to build such a project... Just finding a municipality that was willing to take a chance on it... ALL of those are successes that would be lauded in ANY other context. Those are all significant technological, legislative, funding, and prototyping wins. Fuck this guy. I bet his next article will be about how stupid NASA was to test a rover in the Arctic. What a fucking tool. However, perhaps there’s a bigger point — solar roads on city streets are just not a great idea.
... and when you can simply pour Perovskites into your glass slurry, and turn it into a 60% efficient solar capturing mechanism, and you already have a town square and a road wired up, and all you need to do is replace the panels with a new type, and see how they work... Innovation happens. Some people are just better positioned to take advantage of these innovations when they come along.
And it's not just the positioning of the panels. Designing solar panels to withstand the abuse of a roadway means they're going to be way more expensive to produce. So even if roadways were somehow as good of a place for solar panels, it's still far less economical. The only way this makes sense is if you have nowhere else to put the panels, but in the areas where the has been tried (USA and Australia), there is an abundance of space for solar installations.
Yeah but... why roads? Why build solar roads specifically? Nobody is arguing against solar power. What benefit do solar roads provide that solar roofs don't? Because the roads will ALWAYS provide less power per square foot no matter what technology advancements happen.
The key benefit of solar roads is the reduction in toxic, non-reusable materials. Glass is just easier to get, form, and re-use than asphalt, which simply is toxic waste, temporarily held in semi-stasis in the form of a road. In the pacific islands they use shells for roads. Hard on the tires, but almost infinitely reusable for them. In India, they have thousands of miles of road made from recycled plastic waste. It's an improvement, but - over time - the road is just a temporary placeholder before the plastic makes it to its final home: unreducible waste.
If you are claiming glass is a better top surface than asphalt construction, you have a ways to go to show it. I couldn't find anything on shells in roads, but unless you are talking about something equivalent to a compacted gravel semi-improved road, I bet they use a binder, and I bet the binder is asphalt. Easier to form seems unlikely since asphalt melts a lot lower, and to render glass to give it some impact resistance requires tight temperate control. So you can't feed sand, lime, and soda into a paver and spit a tempered glass road surface out the back. If you want tempered, you make it in a plant and buy a brick paving machine if you don't want to lay your cobblestones by hand. You can feed asphalt and aggregate into and roll a lane's width of road that hardly needs more than striping. And re-use: when they resurface asphalt, the asphalt binding and the aggregate are reused. And another thing is pedestrian hazard - asphalt is petroleum, but at least it sticks to the aggregate mostly. Glass chips won't and thats a hazard, and if they grind small enough to blow around and breathe they're a worse hazard. And there is a trade-off between hardness and flexibility that goes into road surfaces- too flexible and the surface cracks, to stiff and any settling causes it to crack. Asphalt doesn't have some great combination of properties that makes everyone used it, it just wins out because it's easy enough to build and forgiving enough to roadbed prep and cheap enough (because you're using the same material over and over) and predictable and time tested enough. Glass as a road surface has a long uphill battle to fight.Glass is just easier to get, form, and re-use than asphalt