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The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

sciencealert.com

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Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#51

Post by rbongers »

buboard wrote: post #11

Help me understand the logic behind taking a PV and stepping on it in the worst possible way, leaving dirt , rubber etc, when every PV that is exposed only to the open air needs regular cleaning / maintainance. And its being frequently under the shade of cars

There is no logic behind it, only blind idealism. Unfortunately the couple who invented solar roads poured a lot of time and money into this idea and couldn't back down. Many people followed their enthusiasm. I think one of the most difficult things you can do as a person is to be honest with yourself and admit when something has failed or won't work and to abandon it, but stories like this are reminders to really self reflect.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#52

Post by bad_user »

toasterlovin wrote: post #27
Nextgrid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t see how it’s worth it at all compared to putting solar panels on top of buildings. Solar panels on buildings don’t need to be as rugged, don’t need to be cleaned daily, etc, and they also can be oriented towards the sun to maximize output. Solar roads are a solution looking for a problem. I can imagine they’d be useful to squeeze out an extra few % of output in a world where everything else is covered in…

And the craziest thing is that the sunniest parts of the planet are completely uninhabited, so land is plentiful and cheap. As opposed to urban areas, which are the most expensive real estate that exists.

Urban areas are also where electricity is needed.

What do you mean by the "sunniest parts of the planet"? You mean the deserts? Not all countries have that luxury and maintenance might prove challenging, depending on the desert.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#53

Post by kaybe »

Athas wrote: post #23
close04 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one in the Netherlands seems to be a 70m solar cycle lane. Cars will destroy a surface a lot faster than bikes. Maybe (dedicated) bike lanes would be a good place to start with this.

That sounds like a good idea. It would also give cities more incentive to keep the like lanes well maintained (even in bike-friendly cities, bike lanes are usually less well maintained than motorways). One problem is that bike lanes are often located close to shade-providing buildings or vegetation.

How great would it be to have a roof of solar cells above the city's bike paths. No problems with precipitation or sun and less maintenance.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#54

Post by rbongers »

doteka wrote: post #48
buboard wrote: post #11

Help me understand the logic behind taking a PV and stepping on it in the worst possible way, leaving dirt , rubber etc, when every PV that is exposed only to the open air needs regular cleaning / maintainance. And its being frequently under the shade of cars

I'm curious how you arrived at that conclusion? Common wisdom, at least a few years ago, was "cleaning isn't worth it". ( https://phys.org/news/2013-07-solar-panels-worth.html )

This is for rooftop panels though. Having regular activity on top of something is, I would assume, very different than just letting it sit.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#55

Post by nullwasamistake »

This was a PR stunt from the beginning.

We can't even make roads last 20 years with the most durable materials we can find. We make them out of rock and they still fall apart.

Car windshields are scratched to hell after a decade. Grocery checkout scanner windows are made of Sapphire, nearly as hard as diamond, and still need to be replaced.

Solar roads will never be a reality. Optically clear material hard and malleable enough seem a physical impossibly. Metals are the only suitable material and they cannot be made transparent due to hard physical constraints.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#56

Post by blunte »

filleokus wrote: post #38
blunte wrote: post #22

Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes. Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! We don't know exactly what they will lead to, but they often add to progress.

I agree that we as a society generally need to afford ourselves to be brave and fail sometimes. But... this seems like such a bad idea even in theory. Road surfaces have pretty specific and harsh needs, which currently can be mostly solved with really cheap solutions (concrete/asphalt). Photovoltaic cells on the other hand are comparably very expensive and fragile. Surely, land can't be that expensive in most places…

I can't speak much about other countries, but the US blows unfathomable amounts of money on incredibly narrow-sighted projects (particularly military). But yet, some of what is learned from those projects benefits science and technology.

I think what we might gain from this solar road experiment will be related to material science in the area of solar panels. Just look at mobile phones; surely the transition from old plastic in front of LCDs to "gorilla" glass has benefited other use cases. I'm just guessing here, but I bet there is something to learn which can be applied elsewhere.

I think flying cars are absolutely moronic and completely impractical. But who knows... maybe the brainpower spent trying to make them work will result in better traffic management or people transportation elsewhere.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#58

Post by WalterBright »

blunte wrote: post #22

Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes. Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! We don't know exactly what they will lead to, but they often add to progress.

> Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes.

Airplanes are not amenable to hackers designing them. Getting one to fly required a directed engineering effort, with a series of prototypes each targeted at solving a specific problem. I think it was the first such project that did so.

The Wrights are often dismissed as "bicycle mechanics", but if you take a closer look they were very competent engineers.

(The difference between an engineer and a mechanic is math. The Wrights did not try random things, they used math to arrive at solutions.)

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#59

Post by Erudite_Genius »

Solar roadways failed for the same reason Tesla will NEVER outsell gasoline cars: bad technology that's orders of magnitude worse than existing solutions.

That being said, a huge leap forward in technology would make BOTH viable.

A better road-based electricity generation plan would have been to use piezoelectric panels instead of photovoltaic ones.

Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

#60

Post by avip »

dghughes wrote: post #26

Most solar panels are very inefficient at converting the sun to electricity so they need all the help they can get. Two things solar panels require is to be clean and to be perpendicular to the sun. A solar road achieves neither of those things.

They also need to keep cool, another thing being under many running cars is not ideal for.
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