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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

#251

This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea. It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't me…

It didn't appear to fail in interesting ways though. If it failed in all the obvious, predictable ways that's not a valuable experiment

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

#252
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ground pressure from a truck is around 150 PSI. A woman wearing high heels can match, and even exceed that. So the sidewalk would need to be just as strong as the road.

Common physics example, but it disregards how women actually walk and stand in heels. They walk on their forefoot, rather than balancing their weight on the heel. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-higher-the-heel-th... Shows less than 30 N/cm^2 (40 PSI) for women in heels - and higher heels result in lower heel pressure. Forefoot pressure is higher, despite the larger surface area.

Yeah, and a heel surface area of 32.3 +/- 4.4 cm^2. There are shoes with heel surface area of sub 1cm^2.

I don't think the study invalidates parents claim, if anything it more it less supports it.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing of the details here, so this is total speculation, but I can imagine value in going with a solution you know wont "succeed", if the data you get from the failure is valuable. Like, no need to spend money trying to fix the tractor problem if the leaf problem is too severe. If in practice the leaf problem only deteriorates things by 30%, that's different than 80%, etc. Spending the money to solve problem…

That's a pretty expensive experiment, and they could have tested each independently (install a few meters of panels near a tree and near a farm). Instead, they installed 1km of road and the minister of energy hoped to drastically increase the amount of these roads within a fairly short time frame (5 years), which tells me they didn't consider it an experiment (just a conservative rollout). This feels like fraud to me…

As a proof of concept trial it wasn't very expensive. Unrelated, but just for comparison it cost about a much as Uber lost every 2.5 hours in 2019Q2.

They built a Minimum Viable Product for a trial and found out that it wasn't actually viable and didn't provide the hoped for value. They probably also learned a lot with real world experience (that they wouldn't have been sure to have in a staged setup) and may come back with something different in the future.

Personally I'd be curious about the math on how much these panels pick up, whether some kind of contactless power transmission would be viable at highway speeds, and whether in 15-20 years we'll see interstates paved with these providing trickle power to fully automated electric trucks running as "road trains" across the country.

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

#254
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Panels at the side of the roads?

Median strips and easements are a possible siting location. Shade awnings over car parks another. The challenge with solar power really isn't sufficient area for siting. It's low-cost installation and low-disturbance environments which ensure long panel life and low maintenance costs. Solar panels have a useful lifetime of about 20 years, due to numerous degredation mechansims (it's not just one), from fogging of the…

numerous degredation mechansims (it's not just one), from fogging of the transparent surface to cracking, glazing from dust and sand, hail impacts, broken circuits, etc.

Hasn't a lot of research been focused around ways to capture incident light and focus it down onto the actual cell surface? Iirc a lot of that has been things like surface coatings but is there really a requirement that's such a surface actually be in contact with the cell? Could there be something that was effectively a replaceable capture top surface possibly with an air gap above the actual photovoltaic cells?

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

#255
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an experiment that can yield anything or teach us anything if there is no paper and no data. A fraudulent startup maybe.

How big is your laboratory? Is it a space you rent out, or is it all the known Universe and all of its history? We’ve been learning things by trial and error a lot longer than we’ve been practicing the Scientific Method. You don’t always get the data you want. You don’t always get someone to summarize the data in a nicely formatted paper published in a respected journal. You get what you get and if not quite like it,…

It’s simply a waste of money if we can do the maths and see that it’s always going to be vastly worse than putting them on roofs, on gantries over roads, or literally almost anywhere else but on a dirty, flat surface with huge pressures on what we already knew were fragile and durable cells.

There are several factors, each alone that make this idea a non-starter. All these were known from previous experimental results so this never needed to be done. For example - 1. Placing cells flat reduces the power output by 30% over putting it at an angle and facing north. The angle varies with how far you are from the equator. So putting solar in roads will always yield at least 30% less power than putting it in an appropriate location. 2. Roads are extremely dirty. There’s dirt, brake dust, rubber, etc., not to mention shading from buildings, the natural geography and cars while they are driving over it. This will mean at least another 10-20% less power per solar cell, which will degrade as it gets dirtier. So you’re probably throwing up to 40% of your power away unless you’re cleaning them every week or so.

Then factor in damage, etc... a basic engineering assessment shows that it is infeasable, and even with massive improvements, rooftop solar and solar farms will always be correspondingly better.

But since you seem to be so big on experimentation, do you want to send me a few million dollars and we’ll put solar on the biggest area of all - the sea floor? Think of how much space there is! I mean, we can calculate that basically no light reaches it, but that’s not important, right? It’ll be valuable data!

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

#256

This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea. It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't me…

it's like that kid who envisioned that we could clean the ocean of all the plastic by laying a long catching device. but they never bothered consulting people who actually build ships and other seagoing vessels. and they didn't bother consulting people who've actually worked on this problem. I believe the biggest issue is that the plastic tend to float under the surface of the water and this thing floated on top of the water. and then in the end this thing just bunched up after a day, so it never really caught any plastic.

this is the problem when you have rich people pick and choose which ideas gets implemented. rather than having people who are actually intelligent and have experience driving innovations you have a constant flow of bad ideas. inevitable something will work and these idiots will claim that their process actually works. no, it's more like they have the money to afford a lot of failures.

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

#257

This was obviously never going to work; I think it's far more interesting as a piece of morality theater and/or a psychological ink-blot test. Because who looks at a system like this (individual humans carted around extravagantly in an energy-intensive, 4,000-pound CO2-belching murder machine, on an expensive and space-intensive road created just for them ) and thinks, you know what's wrong with this system? It doesn…

This was obviously never going to work

Could be, and I suspect that a lot of the actual engineering folks involved would agree 100% on this point. They'd probably also tell you that 5 million for real - world experimental data on the exact ways in which it failed was very much worth it.

Was there anything else worth responding to in the wordy pseudo-psychological insults?

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

#258
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can deduce something from your current knowledge, you don't need to do an experiment for that. Certainly people knew that putting fragile semiconductors under roads isn't the best idea, but they went on and spent time and money. I would call this a waste.

Some people deduced one thing, and others deduced the other thing. There was plenty of excitement about this idea on this very site when it was first proposed. Seeing something once is better than hearing it a hundred times.

> There was plenty of excitement

The point is there shouldn't have been. Some people deduced and others hoped or willed themselves to ignorance.

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

#259

This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea. It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't me…

The trouble with this viewpoint is that there are an endless number of things we could be trying, and it's more or less a zero sum game. The idea was terrible on paper, easily falsified by back of the napkin math. The same amount of money could have been spent on, eg, testing the commercial viability of smoothing out grid loads by making ice off peak for cooling.

It’s never a zero sum game - we can try many things at once, some will work well, some will work poorly, some won’t work at all

Trying things helps us move forward

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Neither works right now, it's probably prudent to try as many interesting things as possible.

> Why not both? Neither works right now, it's probably prudent to try as many interesting things as possible. 1. Solar roadways is a terrible idea that will never be a good idea. It is strictly worse than building a roof over the road and putting solar panels on that. 2. Roughly half the renewable energy on earth comes from decaying isotopes and half comes from sunlight. If humans want more than that, they'll basical…

I don't understand why we can't pursue all of those options at the same time. Especially solar road vs laser energy from space.

Solar roads has the distinct advantage over covering all the roads in that it's not an eye sore and fits more seamlessly in the scenario we figure out the engineering.

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