

Solar panels not for roofs, but for driveways, sidewalks, highways - mmphosis
http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/53033fd2f20e4928a5b2955111715b43/US--Solar-Roadways/

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cyorir
[http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-
idea...](http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-
idea-1582519375)

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/183130-solar-roadways-
pas...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/183130-solar-roadways-
passes-1-4-million-in-crowdfunding-just-short-of-the-56-trillion-required-but-
not-bad-for-a-crazy-idea)

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Mithaldu
Wow, this is really the money quote:

"The current state of the design appears to depend on the placement of a one-
foot-square grid of large bolts in the roadway. I've installed bolts into
concrete, and it takes me several minutes to mark the hole, drill it, clean it
out and pound the anchor into place. A mile of 30 foot wide roadway would have
150,000 bolts to install. Whee!"

Unless these plates are as damage-resistant as military-grade armor plates,
there's no way that they'll ever be anything but a novely.

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fighterjet
This idea is dumb on a lot of levels.

Asphalt is a really great road surface. It's hard, cheap, and durable. Paint
is great for road markings. You can see it during the day and it consumes no
electricity. Let's take a look at "Solar Roadways".

Glass as a road surface. Not just glass, but glass that must be optically
clear in order for the cells to work. The two most important things for a road
surface, traction and durability, just went straight out the window.

LEDs as road markings. Sorry, but this is one of the dumbest things I have
ever read. There's no way you could see LEDs under thick glass at the angles
you would be looking at them while driving in broad daylight. Not to mention,
the cost to power these LEDs on a major highway would be enormous.

Their site includes a video of them driving a light tractor on a short stretch
of tiles, in order to prove durability. I'm sure the tiles would hold up just
as well with a year's worth of fully loaded tractor-trailers unevenly
weighting and unweighting each tile as they travel across this multi-trillion-
dollar slippy slidey glass road.

How exactly do they propose to transport the feeble amount of electricity
generated which isn't used by the LEDs that no one can see?

There's many other things wrong with this. I'm pretty distressed to see this
on the top of Hacker News, and even more distressed to see that they've raised
over 1M in funding.

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ctdonath
_The two most important things for a road surface, traction and durability_

Solvable problems. Hard, yes, but solvable.

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Mithaldu
I want to see what happens when one of those things breaks. There is
absolutely no dispute that they will break in practice, but if they leave
glass shards all over the place, they'll be entirely unviable.

I'd also like to know if they will be able to with-stand super-high-load
traffic, like the transporters used to carry big things like the space shuttle
around.

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thedrbrian
[http://youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds](http://youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds)

EEV blog on the feasibility of solar roads

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thisjepisje
Why not place a bunch of solar panels in the desert or, indeed, on roofs,
instead of covering highways with glass? This makes no sense at all.

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ctdonath
Because there isn't a desert next to my house nor state.

The problem is finding a large flat surface that shadowing won't harm. My roof
may not be large enough for enough power via solar cells (and I'm really not
keen on climbing on that steep a surface that high up), I don't want to cover
the lawn with panels, and I'm not cutting down my forest ... but my driveway
(and street) gets a lot of light - given a solar panel tough enough to _drive_
on, that would reclaim sunlight-rich surfaces with zero further impact.

This "road surface solar cell" solves the problem of "solar strip mining"
whereby sunlight is denied en masse to an area that otherwise needs it (lawns,
deserts (yes, light-needing stuff lives there)). Paved areas have _already_
completely destroyed anything living there, and are not likely reclaimed for
any life or activity other than driving. Good to dual-use a road rather than
lay waste to even more square mileage of land.

(I'm skeptical of the durability of these things though. Roads, even mere
driveways, are an awfully harsh environment.)

