91–100 of 349 posts
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.
Panels at the side of the roads?
You know, I always wondered why they didn't go for solar covered sidewalks, which would provide shade to pedestrians and power to everything that needs it. Roads seem like a better place for pressure-based generation (of anything, frankly). Still, just for the enthusiasm they garnered and the continued push toward making renewable energy generation interact with the everyday, the idealists should be commended. The en…
Solar roads and sidewalks are a PR stunt. Abrasion is no joke, nothing optically transparent survives on the ground. You can see this easily in the cellar "pavement lights" common in NYC and other old cities. Light still passes through after a century, but maybe 20% and very diffuse. Bad for solar panels. Roads don't absorb enough energy to generate power, they're not flexible enough. They're designed to not absorb e…
Solar roofs on car parks seem good to me; better than using pasture land converted to solar farms which I'm seeing more and more in UK.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! No they are not. Solar roads do not make sense, not for a looooong time anyway. So far, all of the currently failed solar road projects have failed in utterly predictable ways[1][2][3], and I'm certain nothing novel has been learned. There are so many better places to put solar panels than beneath roads. If anything they should put w…
> they should put water pipes to utilize the heat Missed by most people is that roads flex under the weight. (Stand next to the train tracks when a train goes by, you'll be startled at how much the ground moves.) Flexing of the roads it the primary cause of road maintenance - cracking and crumbling. Silicon chips in the roadbed, wires, pipes, etc, are all very vulnerable to cracking under bending loads. Putting water…
Solar roads seem like a really cool technology. Like, if they worked great and were affordable and everything, then awesome! But, practically speaking, they seem to violate the [single responsibility principle]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principl... ). By coupling a solar panel to a road, we're forcing the physical entity to comply with competing objectives. Seems like the future's prone to…
> Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels. if you can drive that precisely, why even put anything in the gaps?
I mean, once the road is dominated by self-driving cars, presumably we can implement new driving requirements beyond what human drivers could implement.
For roads, we might want cars to drive over load-bearing parts, if that's optimal. Or if it's more efficient to have the wear-and-tear distributed, then cars can drive in staggered formations, much like a wear-leveling strategy in solid-state drives (SSD's).
But, there's no reason to design a transportation system around the premise that self-driving cars can't control their patterns just because human-driven cars couldn't.
Which isn't to say that we should assume that self-driving cars will be perfect or infallible, just that we can assume best-effort strategies. For example, we shouldn't assume that self-driving cars would never drive over a gap with a solar panel, but we can design a system in which self-driving cars try to avoid driving over the solar panels.
Seems like you'd be much better off floating them on a lake. There was a project a few years ago to do this both for power and to reduce evaporative loss in reservoirs, but I don't know if anything has come of it.
Wouldn't you kill the lake, unless you only covered a small proportion of it.
https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2019/5/23/why-are-96000000...
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 )
It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it. Hopefully something like this comes to fruition and we learn more and more with every iteration. Solar roads are a great idea. Maybe it means it needs daily sweeping with electric vacuum trucks or something but if it’s producing enough electricity then it’s worth it.
The problem with solar roads is it's plainly worse than the obvious alternative: putting solar panels next to roads, or above carparks.
And innovations that made them more plausible as a road surface are also going to make for a better regular road surface, or a better mounted solar panel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think putting a roof on streets (on a relatively light aluminium/carbon fiber scaffold) for the panels is less outlandish than trying to fix "solar roads" by adding maintenance vehicles (or solar roads themselves, really). It keeps away rain (which improves driving), doesn't expose the panels to the weight of tractors, has similar safety properties (the panels need to react quickly on any accident related impact an…
> but who argued against solar roads because of leaves killing the efficiency? I had my concrete driveway pressure washed recently. It looked really good for about a week. Then leaves fell on it, and the leaves stained it brown again. All the engineers had to do was look at flat concrete.
If you coat your driveway with a resin cover, the stains will probably disappear every time it rains.
But nevertheless, it wasn't a talking point before - of course, with enough observation you can think of all possible failure modes beforehand. Sometimes it's easier to just try things out.
Solar roads do not make any sense whatsoever, as you wrote pretty much any other place is better for panels.