Too good to be true?

[tabbiewolf]

So fenris_lorsrai linked to this project: Solar Roadways. It appears to be AWESOME, the idea of powering America with its highways and parking lots.

However, despite the 8 or so years of research (including government sponsorship), I'm getting major "too good to be true" vibes.

Outside of the general "No one will ever pay for this because there's too many people in Congress who don't want to spend that kind of money," can anyone come up with the various reasons this WON'T work?

Because this is basically what we're getting instead of flying cars, and in all honesty, I'm pretty damn cool with the concept.

(Flying cars would be an utter disaster anyway, as cool as they would look.)

Comments

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

The major issue is efficiency of solar cells. Since these are flat, they don't hit max efficiency very often. and any dust or oil is going to interfere with that efficiency. Plus scratches to glass. It depends on the strength of the glass.

depending on how glass is designed however, you may be able to groove it to focus it a bit better and odd angles. It really depends on the trade off with the strength and scratch resistance. You MAY be able groove the underside so as to increase the surface area so its actually got more "surface" that's coated with solar cell than it appears to, which may make up for some of the loss of efficiency with it being at a suboptimal angle.

Now, you have a bit of a trade off here with technology. The more demand for solar cells, the cheaper and more efficient they're likely to become, so this may help drive development of next gen materials which may have much higher efficiency, lower cost. You're starting to see that right now.

I'd say the jump to ROADS is probably a good goal but not realistic for first gen of these things. SIDEWALKS seems much more likely. Or driveways. Things with much lower wear and tear and that can be a little more carefully monitored and adjusted.

again you have issue with the low efficiency due to debris, so I'd say doing walkways where you can switch the pitch between each cell so they have a very slight slope that dumps water to a drainage channel between cells would probably help. You don't need a steep pitch, a half degree might be steep enough to drain it and remove light dust. You might still need to actually WASH them sporadically depending on local conditions and actual surface texture.

2nd or third gen would probably have solved more of the wear and tear and maintenance issues.


I think they seem to be being fairly reasonable about what they want to do is hire some material and systems engineers to iron out exactly those details. There's a hell of a lot going on with materials science right now and a lot of it is AMAZING and really fast moving. Most of the aerospace companies are switching to 3D printing of metal parts for next gen engines. (I'm sure Spotweld can squee over that in more detail) a Chinese firm can now print HOUSES.

so what we can make, how cheaply, and quickly change the design is changing very very rapidly. So that they took several years to get to this point fiddling around on their own and now are ready to go explore all the current technologies available makes perfect sense.

That they might have trouble getting an normal backer because of how rapidly technology is changing and that they are looking at doing road work... which has VERY SPECIFIC government regulations... which are often way the hell out of date. So while the idea might be sound, looking at ROADS is probably not right application. They might have an AWESOME product, but because of the way government works, all the steps involved in approval, they might go out of business before they got approval.

You also have the issue of totally different regulations regarding feeding into power grid in each state. Oklahoma is introducing a monthly fee on people that install solar or wind turbines for NOT using the power grid. (http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/16/3427392/oklahoma-fee-solar-wind/)

So high risk on them being disallowed, banned, or requiring a total redesign to be used in each state.

Regulation is the killer here.

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

I wrote a novel apparently.

TLDR: the materials science is PROBABLY there but they need to work out some technical issues... which is what they're trying to get money to do to build that full size parking lot and address the real world issues. Long term, the red tape may doom the project.

I gave 'em $10. At worst the attempt to do a full scale parking lot fails but all the unknown unknowns and the known unknowns get revealed in attempt and next try is harder.

It's like the space race. We had a lot of rockets fall over and shoot sideways off the landing pad. Even failure in energy tech is interesting and useful at this point. and this is one that can't actually EXPLODE if it catastrophically fails.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

Cool idea. and if the engineering and the economics work, then it would be awesome to see them roll out. But, like Fenris said, the challenges are not small. Road surfaces take an enormous amount of abuse. and these things would need to be able to stand up to them. All the different weather conditions, random dousing with gasoline and oils, tire residue (conductive dust), an overloaded truck with a blown tire rolling on the rims, and this is just the start of the engineering challenges. The political and regulatory issues with public roads are huge and intractable.

I'd like to see the snow-melting versions being deployed on my front walk, so I never have to shovel it again.

[silent-o.livejournal.com]

Flying cars would be a suicide bomber's wet dream.
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Meh. Solar is certainly one way to go but I'm more a fan of subcritical fission (compact and uses up nuclear waste that otherwise would be buried to poison the land for millenia)and, hopefully someday, fusion.

Photovoltaics are fairly inefficient. One could power the majority of the nation with wind farms covering the uninhabited portions of North Dakota (it's north dakota, nobody lives there) and solar-thermal plants scattered about the southwest. Supplement with hydroelectric wave generators on the coast.

Our nation's infrastructure is currently a wreck and the cost of updating to support something like "solar roads" would be prohibitive for the foreseeable future.

Too many other problems that need solving first. Domestic problems. That affect Americans. Not rival tribes halfway around the world who hate and/or want to kill us for rejecting their Bronze Age god and ideals.
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That said I could see private citizens and economic entities making use of the solar windows quite easily.

[tabbiewolf.livejournal.com]

I may be a bit snarky here, just as a warning.

You've said both "I'm more a fan of subcritical fission" and "photovoltaics are fairly inefficient" in the same comment. You DO realize that subcritical fission is about as existent as fusion -- or hell, cold fusion -- as an energy source right now, right? It's basically a theoretical -- and not in the same scientific way that evolution and gravity are theories. More in the "yeah, uh, we have a vague idea how it might work, we MAY be able to do that, uh...ask after we work through the whole Higgs-Boson thing."

Meanwhile, I've linked a project that is entirely developed. They have a product to present, and comment that they are trying to raise funds for making the solar cells more efficient. The cost of making photovoltaics -- a product that already exists, a technology that we know how it works and can build and improve on with more money and time -- more effective will cost SUBSTANTIALLY LESS just because we've already produced them. There's already a base to work from, and that base has already been improved a fair bit since it first came around.

To use a simile, you've basically just compared a 737 to Da Vinci's thoughts about human flight. And not even his actual sketches of gliders or helicopters, but the idea that lead him to sketching and writing notes on the concept of human flight.

Don't get me wrong: ideas are fucking amazing, but it takes a helluvalot of manpower to make those ideas a reality, and while a 737 and the concept of flight do correspond, they are nowhere near the same thing. I sadly cannot sit in an idea and fly across the country, as cool as that would be, though it makes for an interesting metaphor or song lyric. But making modified versions of a 737, or a newer version of it -- those are things that are way easier (and already happening) and far less costly because the product is already there.

Am I saying subcritical fission and fusion are bad energy choices? Well, I'm sure that in a century or two we may have actually figured them out (possibly less time for fusion, just because it's something that's actually being worked on) but right now they aren't really viable.

And I'm not quite sure where our nation's infrastructure comes into the fact that I think this is a really neat project, outside of I guess that I personally think it would be a benefit to American society?

[silent-o.livejournal.com]

Americium and Thorium

Quite viable as power generation. Being worked on right now.

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This is what happens when you mix my rambling, unorganized thought processes with a desire to play "advocatus diaboli".

Lupercus and I throw ideas like this around all the time and then provide criticisms just to weigh the pros and cons.

[tabbiewolf.livejournal.com]

I'm still at a loss for how your first comment -- or this one -- actually answers the question I asked in this journal, which is more or less the reason to actually leave a comment. It's not a criticism so much as expressing that vaguely similar ideas concerning an energy production method that you are enthusiastic about and is completely and utterly unrelated to the one I was talking about, which is not what I asked for.

And then the comment about the method I linked basically expresses similar thoughts to the one that SolarRoadways says outright on their page about wanting to be more efficient, which is one of the reasons they are raising money. So the sentence or two of your comment that was actually sort of an answer to the question I asked concerning whether this would work or not...is something that is already being worked on.

Devil's Advocate: currently being played by the passive-aggressive condescending narcissist near you!

(Though in all honesty, I'm STILL not sure how me saying "I like cake!" and you saying "You know what's better? UNICORNS!" -- which is basically what happened -- is playing Devil's Advocate. Both the Solar Roadways project and methods of nuclear power CAN exist and be funded/researched at once, you know. Some will just be available a whole lot sooner.)