281–290 of 349 posts
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panels above urban tunnels, maybe powering some air filtering system ?
Aqueducts have been suggested as siting locations. Benefits: - Reduced evaporation losses. - Extant rights of way / property rights. - Extant technical infrastruction, including power transmission for pumps, etc. Not that this is the only siting location to consider, but it's a reasonable candidate.
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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.
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Or just put them above the road then? :P
Put them above the road and tall trucks can't go through anymore. Plus, the support structures needed suddenly become obstacles for cars to hit when making emergency maneuvers or drivers lose control, and now you've got tons of glass shards, electrified wires and steel supports falling down onto the freeway. Under the road is literally the only option, and it's a terrible option at that. Rooftops - or better yet, for…
The rest still stands, of course. If you absolutely do want to put solar panels in the same place as cars, starting with parking lots is clearly a better idea. Fewer problems with high speed collisions, the electricity is generated closer to where it's needed, and people will be thankful for having parking in the shade. (Still more expensive than putting panels on a roof or field of course.)
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Could you talk more concretely? What is the back of the napkin calculation for total power if some percent of all highways were solar?
Not OP, but I was curious: Let's assume a good solar panel yields 15 watts per square foot under direct sunlight. The DOT estimates about 1.5 million acres of interstate in the US. Without getting too complicated, let's assume we produce at our ideal wattage for 3 hours a day. Given our ideal solar panel, this is 2.94 billion kWh per day. Getting ideal conditions on a highway surface is unrealistic, so let's assume o…
There are 4,000,000km of paved roads. (https://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/features/featurethe-w...)
That puts your estimate out by a factor of maybe 25 or more (depending on road width) if all roads are converted to solar. And that's before the other paved areas like parking lots.
I'm not advocating solar roads. They're a strange idea with many, many flaws, but the inefficiency aspect isn't one of them. If you want to generate lots of electricity with solar you can have one very efficient array, or lots of inefficient arrays. Solar roads are the inefficient one.
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> 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.
There's this idea in economics called opportunity cost. The simple version is that if we fund bad ideas that can't possibly be good, we lose out on the good ideas we could have funded but didn't.
This is the reason you don't heat your house by burning paper money. You'd rather have rent and groceries and heat instead of really economically inefficient heat.
I’ve always wondered if there were some way to use the space above (as in you drive under them) the roads instead. Is there a mass-efficient-enough design to make putting panels above the road a profitable thing.
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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 ba…
I'll give you 1000:1 odds that we won't.
Still, power sourced from solar or wind in general and adequate to offset some of the "maintain speed" level of power draw? That seems more likely. If you have some way to provide maintenance levels of power during movement that may mean a significant savings in battery weight and overall cost, and if you don't think that matters take a look at the skirts under a lot of trucks designed to reduce drag.
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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.
only because reasonable opinion were downvoted to hell from the easily excitable crowd. I distinctly remember because I was amongst the downvoted, and dirt/rubber was one of the common concern, and it's weird to read in the article "engineers didn't think about the leaves" like, randos on internet could tell you that, what kind of cheap ass engineers were involved in the design and feasibility phase?
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…
Solar roads are not that kind of experiment. Even given an ideal execution solar roads would give you the combination of suboptimal roads with badly used solar panels.
Unless glas turns out to be a superior road surface (which I doubt) and unless solar panels perform better flat on the ground under a layer of dirt than raised above shadows and with a well adjusted angle (which helps the rain to clean the thing and increases efficiency) — unless all of that, putting solar panels on the side of the roads or roofa will be way more economical and ecological.
This is literally bad design: something that looks good or innovative on first glance, but is totally inpractical and maybe even destructive the longer you ponder about it.