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Are Glowing, Solar Smart Roads the Future?
cartechboy (2660665) writes "We were just talking about glow-in-the-dark roads and how they were having issues already. Now there's a company called Solar Roadways that's looking to make glowing, solar, smart roads. Back in 2009 the Department of Transportation awarded Solar Roadways $100,000 to prototype road systems with embedded digital signage and dividing lines, all powered by the sun. As it turns out, the company's prototype performed well — so well that Solar Roadways is now looking to go big-time, and it's asking for your help to do so. At the heart of the Solar Roadways project sit a vast number of hexagonal tiles. The bottom of those tiles consist of solar panels and circuit boards, covered with a thick sheet of tempered glass. The panels contain LED lights, which can be configured to mark traffic lanes, send messages, or fulfill other functions. The panels also have heating elements to help melt snow and ice during colder months. Are these smart roads the future, or just another pipe dream?"
What is going to prevent these plates from getting scratched and rendered useless shortly by studded tires, gravel, snow plows, etc.
i think solar roof tiles is a much better idea.
The prototype tested in the Netherlands had not much success because it failed to glow properly after a rainy day (link). The issue is like with any kind of solar power - it simply does not work if there is no or too little sun.
Seriously. I'd hate to analyze a situation using the facts that are in play.
I've seen a pile of articles on this, and never once in them has anybody even scratched the topic of cost. Which would kind of be important, one would thing. Turns out, they don't know or aren't saying. From their FAQ:
"We are not yet able to give numbers on cost. We are still in the midst of our Phase II contract with the Federal Highway Administration and we'll be analyzing our prototype costs near the end of our contract which ends in July, 2014. Afterward, we'll be able to do a production-style cost analysis."
There are a hundred billion cool ideas out there, but if they're not cost effective than who cares?
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... only optimum conditions are envisioned. I did not see any attention paid to less than optimum conditions. As such, this project fails before it even starts.
How much traction can you get between a rubber tire and tempered glass?
Assuming it can become the norm everywhere (huge assumption there)...
I imagine we will replace our coal plants with large battery plants to store all the extra power we get during the day so that these things can function well at night (having to only power sections of road with vehicles on them would probably make that very feasible).
Then the electricity bill wouldn't be for the actual electricity. It'd be for maintaining these large battery store houses and maintaining these roads. I mean really, if we laid out a ton of this stuff across the US (the desert regions specifically), I figure electricity would be dirt cheap if not free (aside from the aforementioned maintenance).
The only way I can see this actually happening is if the solar panel roads become ubiquitous, which as I said, is a huge assumption. The oil industry won't have it, and getting the capital to produce enough panels to make it worth while, then lay them across major highways would be massive. Then there's building the battery centers so that they can actually function at night (or we can shift to coal power for night time).
I think this is something that would definitely pay off in the long run, but probably won't happen for the same reasons other things similar to it didn't happen. i.e. big business and lobbyists.
or to put it another way: no.
The NUMBER ONE infrastructure budgeting problem in America right now is that roads cost too much. Not bridge repair or aging electrical grids or anything like that. Just purely by the dollars, it's the cost of roads. I know! Let's make them more expensive for a reason that solves a problem that doesn't exist. My headlights + titanium fleck paint means I can see the lines just fine. I also don't need the road to literally tell me it's raining or snowing or below zero. The road tells me that already just be looking at it.
I think this would make for an excellent driveway/sidewalk material. It could have motions detectors and be used as lights. During the day, it would work as solar panels. Sidewalks and driveways cost around $5/sq ft for concrete and $10/sq ft for bricks. I think it they cost around $15/sq ft I think a lot of people would go for it, esp if they already have other solar equipment in the house.
I'm sure lots of specialty uses are possible - like casinos or paving Main St with this so it looks really fancy.
I know road budgets are astronomical and so, I would think it would depend a lot on how much these cost to make, maintain and replace. In most cases, labor is at least half the cost and so, it would depend on how much more expensive these are than asphalt.
Not much grip though.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Our roads need to be repaired almost constantly. How does this improve the situation? How about a dumb road that does it's job for 80 years straight?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
The repair is going to be nuts. Both the cost and the skill/work required. But then again, only (some) waterways and dirt road are truly repair-free.
Seems like an huge and expensive project. I wonder how long systems like that would last for, and how long it would take to be repaired.
Parking garages, though... Lighted arrows and lines to direct people to empty slots might be useful. It could be useful for intersections which have highly variable traffic patterns, where adding additional turn lanes dynamically is useful. Stadiums often do that, with a small army of people moving traffic cones around.
Solar powered snow melting seems unlikely to work. If you really need snow melting, the power requirements are huge. The cutting edge of technology there is induction heating of snow in railroad switches. Many railroads in snowy areas heat their switches. But nobody heats the entire track.
"Our roads need to be repaired almost constantly. How does this improve the situation? How about a dumb road that does it's job for 80 years straight?"
What the fuck?
Can't you see from the video that these roads are made from hexagons?
And they glow in the dark?
And if these roads get damaged, it can electrocute common nuisances like earthworms, birds, little kids and the like?
And all of these features are solar powered, so you know it is green (except for the toxic chemicals in the solar panels these things deposit in the water supply when it rains).
People like you are why we don't have progress and why some little kids in Asia are choking on smog and you don't care, which makes you a jerk!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I would love to see these work in the middle of a Minnesota winter. Seems like a good idea for warmer climates. The heating elements will do absolutely nothing other than make a layer of water under the ice, during a cold winter. Not to mention the fact that they would split apart during time when the wind chill is around -40. Ill stick with pavement and concrete.
Are the panels replicating themselves?
Are we planning to have panels power electric refining and mining equipment? Power the plants to produce the panels? Power the transportation to move and install them?
Or are we going to use diesel powered machines to strip mine rare earth material, plaster this stuff at a net energy loss, and prop up car culture?
How long are they going to run in ideal conditions before they meet the net energy requirements to justify their production and transport? What about battery storage and wiring and all the energy that goes into producing the ancillary components? How long do the panels last?
Roads? Doubtful. But everyone will want multicoloured versions for their new mixed-purpose driveway/dancefloor!
I don't want glowing, solar smart roads. What I really want are nubile girls that let me fuck them in the ass.
This suffers from the same problem I often see when people try to optimize code: needless merging of unrelated things. They have solar panels, power transition, and a hard driving surface. These 3 separate things are grouped for no good reason. Its even worse than solar cells with no sun tracking since the angle is fixed at that of the road. (For you CS guys: Loops are not expensive: don't overload your i-cache and hardware loop detection by merging all your loops! Keep separate things separate)
Suppose you put the same solar panels where its efficient to do so (not where the roads are). This means you can aim them at the sun, put them in places with more sun, and you don't to put them at ground level with cars driving on/covering them. You would get drastically more power if you put the same solar cells on fixed posts next to the road so you could angle them properly, and way more than that if you put them in areas that get more sun and even more if you tracking. Given that the featured road also served to provide power transmission, there is very little loss to doing this, and huge gains: their plan is stupid.
And if you with to argue that generating the power locally is beneficial because of potential transmission outages, thats BS. This thing is suppose to have enough power to melt snow and light up at night: huge loads when its not producing any power. Its dependent on external supplies and/or storage, and it it has local storage, local generation is not needed, and it the storage is non local, local generation does not help much.
So, the exact same parts they used in this project would produce much more power (I'd guess more than 3x) if they built a solar power plant, and their smart road with no solar cells in it. Land area wise, sunny deserts are bigger than roads. If the smart road minus the solar cells makes sense is another question.
They assumed only 4 hours of sunlight and a poor efficiency factor. Their prototype testing was in Idaho, not california. The panels are designed to withstand loading of 250,000pounds.
They were fairly pessimistic in their design assumptions, so it ought to be given a chance.
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We've seen how easy it is for hackers to reprogram electronic highway signs. Do we really want to give them the ability to reprogram the lane markings, too?
So that's how the Borg started.
Table-ized A.I.
We don't need another source of light pollution.
how long till its hacked?
> roads cost too much.
No. They only cost a lot compared to what Republicans are willing to spend. They hate spending money to make roads safer for children. They'd rather see a dozen children dead in traffic accidents than spend a single dollar on infrastructure. That is the way of their kind.
You won't.
I am constantly surprised we aren't working harder to have three dimensional travel --and not need to build/maintain all of this infrastructure.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
If the tiles are only tempered glass, there are going to be motorbikes slipping in good weather, and ice-skating in bad weather..
BS. Thank you for the classic "what about the children" argument. We are not talking about a few dollars here and there but more like billions. There is no way to make the roads completely safe and spending billions on an unattainable goal is just waste.
Because Republicans would rather tear down homes owned by minorities to make children homeless than simply fly over them. New roads are all about screwing nonwhites.
Costs: the idea is that this would cost less than building normal solar pannels AND roads; Moreover, they would also replace the need for powerlines as they are inteded to be part of the distrubtion system. Thus price for new developments shouldn't be an issue.
Repair: Most road damage is due to heavy trucking and utilitys digging them up. The solar roads are designed to withstand and excess 250,000 pounds, and the pannels are modular, which means they can be removed and replaced if digging benigh them is required
Wear: there won't be snow plows going across them as they will have a heating element built in, loss of transparancy is currently thought to have a maximum reduction on output of only 9%, see repair (above) for more questions about durablity. Line Display: netherlands failure: used glow
No it's not. the #1 problem is morons that are elected trying to make budgets. none of them are accountants, most can barely walk and chew gum at the same time.
Until we drastically increase the IQ of elected officials as well as increase their honesty level everything will stay a mess.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Then you simply don't understand the laws of physics. Moving something in the air requires fighting gravity constantly, our methods of doing so are far less efficient than the energy lost when matter itself is physically converted to energy fighting gravity, which is so tiny that its effectively undetectable outside of stars.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Real Dirt will likely doom this thing because of the labor required to keep it sufficiently clean and to repair large numbers of them constantly being broken (dont worry greenies will invest tons of the taxpayer's money into it long after its proven to be impractical.)
I don't know about anyone else, but I find roads that are 'bright' such as when street lights reflect off black asphalt during the rain VERY difficult to see properly on.
I can't see the entire road glowing as a good thing. Lines and indicators which are slightly lit so they are more visible, sure. The entire road surface? Absolutely not. Its bad enough dealing with oncoming headlights and being able to see other things in the unlit areas.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They simply won't stand up to the wear and tear.
They talk about how such a road can withstand loads in excess of a quarter million pounds.
Okay. But what about SHEARING FORCES? In a lot of cases this, not straight downward pressure, is what tears up roadways.
You also have heave in the roadways. Now, most roadways are built in such a way that heave is minimized, but there still is some that has to be factored in.
Also, what will weeks/months/years of thermal and physical stresses do to the surface? Here in Chicago, the roadways get replaced every 5-10 years.
How do these things handle a puddle of burning gasoline from an accident? Or howsabout an entire carbecue raging away on the surface?
And once the surface is breached (and it WILL be breached), you have an environmental hazard on your hands.
And how much will it cost to build these things? Compare the coverage to an asphalt or reinforced concrete roadway on materials cost alone. Not to mention the specialty labor for installation. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.
You're also going to be installing this expensive road surface in areas that traditionally don't get much sun.
Rush hour anyone?
Currently, most solar cells STILL don't make back their manufacturing costs within the lifetime of the product.
As for loss of transparency due to wear? "It is thought to have a maximum reduction" basically means "They don't know, but they'll ass-pull a number out for you."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I feel sorry for Smart Roads. They're so smart, deep down they must realize how many miles of Dumb Roads could have been built for the same money.
I feel sorry for those embedded hexagonal tiles too. They must have known as the grout hardened around them that it was a one way trip into a soul-less, sorry-ass world. At the semiconductor plant there was so much optimism and excitement, everyone was buzzing about becoming an integral part of the ongoing man-machine synergy. Of course when everyone graduates from silicon college they all think they'll be the ones to stretch Shannon's limits and change information states in an intricate dance party of information-sharing, everyone connected. But what happens is, so many are diverted to become these simple blinky-light drone units on a lonely road as countless strangers fly over them. Heartless strangers. And through the cruel geometry of the hexagon, only six adjacent units to keep them company. For ETERNITY.
Covered with tempered glass for Pete's sake. Even the glass is pissed off by this idea, it has already lost its temper as it is being cemented into place. I'm glass goddammit, roads are like playgrounds where all the kids are mean and gravel and skidding tires are everywhere. Gravel hurts. The glass knows its glorious transparency and reflectivity will soon be gouged and cratered, the pane dissolves into a translucent pain of dwindling light.
The solar cells under the doomed glass are perhaps the saddest of all. To lose their photon stream bit by bit until a mere trickle of current escapes them is purgatory without end. Soon all of them will be barely functional, trapped under road, when they could have been some where out in the sunshine.
It is merciful when a load of dirt just covers them up on the shoulder and just hardens there, they can settle in for a nap.
During the first frost of Winter everyone in the hexagonal array is overjoyed when the heating wires kicked in and electrons begin to jump out of their shells once more. But soon it was obvious that something was very wrong. "Hey, ease off! There's delicate electronics in here!" But trapped within their isolated pockets of trapped heat they realize that no one can hear their cries. The heat element, though it can deliver a continuous torment to the components inside, would never melt a thick layer of ice. "Someone duid not do the math. Help us!"
But no help comes, and soon the project hits cost overruns is abandoned. One day the control signals go silent, and once again a wave of dismay sweeps across the trapped colony of orphaned electronics. There is no more purpose in life, but thanks to the cruel embedding of solar cells, life will go on.
It's all just so damned horrible.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
So many words spent on how snow and ice are such a problem. Might be a problem in northern US, but not everyone lives there.
In a country like Australia, where snow rarely falls anywhere but on mountains, this might well be a practical and sensible idea.
There's not even enough money to fix crumbling roads and bridges that are much cheaper.
So this will be something for countries with bike lanes, highspeed trains, underground phone, electricity and glassfiber cables.
IOW, not the US:
Moving something in the air requires fighting gravity constantly ...
Give These guys a call - I'm sure they can be available constantly for such an important task.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
All going to a landfill near you after the completion of the product life cycle, how many mountains of glass debris and electronics is that anyway?
New roads are all about screwing nonwhites.
Bullshit, they are about screwing all poor people, race has nothing to do with it other than large areas of slums are "nonwhites".
There are two main factors that have led to the increase in road costs. Material costs (fuel, asphalt, steel, concrete) is one. The other is that most projects are now expansions/rebuilds rather than new roads. Building a new road on land that the federal government already owns is cheap and easy. Rebuilding and expanding a road in a developed area, while not taking away any capacity during rush hours, is much different.
My Grandpa always used to say "Damn politicians don't know enough to pull their pants down to take a shit and they're going to tell me how to run my farm"
I miss him.
Roads cost too much because they do a shoddy job of building them in the first place, requiring continuous repairs. Illinois is especially bad about this, you don't need a sign to tell you that you've crossed the state line into Wisconsin or Iowa, you can tell just by how smooth the road suddenly becomes.
Weird... I live in a republican state and our interstate and highways are in great condition. Sounds more like a state doesn't manage their road taxes well enough than party politics.
More tech solutions looking for a problem. Just wait until the maintenance cycle kicks in. Also when these fail, suddenly the center stripe vanishes. Very poor failure mode.
We've too many roads going to too many places that don't justify the expense of dropping 40 million a mile. And it is about aging.
It's a rolling problem. We started out with town roads, then county roads, then state roads, then interstates. And we happily kept building more. But the roads fall apart on a steady schedule even as we merrily throw down more. What happens is you spend more every year just to keep up what your great-grandfather made, your grandfather made, your father made, and eventually the backlog of the rebuilding costs more than you can pay - and your infrastructure falls apart, slowly at first, then the process accelerates.
You can either let it die, or raise taxes, and of course lower costs by eliminating unions, using immigrant labor, removing health benefits from labor and taking advantage of new road-laying tech. But it's obvious by gross evidence that we can't keep up. We don't want to be taxed enough to maintain the backlog.
Question about this glass isn't about how much it costs - the first part of the cost accounting problem - but how much it saves over time. If the glass wears longer and as a grid produces three times more power than the entire nation requires, then it is worth more than the asphalt roads made of oil.
The road lasts longer. It self-lights. New energy grid. More power than we need, with over-production used to melt snow. Acts as a information highway, literally. Needs no new land. Could self-plow. Hell, it could power electric vehicles by induction. Remember, a stretch of highway can use more power than it produces because is part of a grid of all roads, some of which overproduce electricity.
Republican states, almost invariably, pay less to the federal kitty than the federal kitty pays back. They've great roads because they're on federal road welfare.
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From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
...and build a roadside network of extremely cheap, energy-capturing small windmills that are all interconnected? There's free wind power at ground level from passing traffic all day, every day, not to mention environmental energy from weather patterns. These work at night, during rain, etc. I'm talking windmill-on-a-stick sized pinwheels that capture wind energy.
Holland, you're up first.
Thanks for marking your area ! ;)
Are you fucking kidding? Our infrastructure is close to third world status. We can't even fill the potholes, but we'll toss around the idea of solar powered glow in the dark bullshit?
New car headlights are better than ever. They are simply fantastic. Reflective paint on the side of the road is simple, cheap and works well.
Let's solve the real problems first, and teach people to pay attention when they drive.
New highway costs seem to run $2 - $9 million dollars per mile. The concrete base for this road will cost more that a traditional concrete roadway. The old road has to be removed in order to begin installing this roadway system. It has to have a cableway for power and a method to attach the tiles to the concrete base. So, let's call it $6 million dollars per mile for the base.
Now the roadway... Somewhere the Solar Roadway founders previously stated that they are hoping the cost for a 12' x 12' can be as low as $10,000 each. A mile of interstate would need a minimum of 1760 (440 x 4 lanes) panels and be very straight. this at the hopeful price of $10,000 each would be an additional $1.76 million. We need to install power lines in the road to distribute the energy collected, these run $200,000 per mile or more.
So we are up to $8 million minimum per mile to install Solar Roadway on an existing highway.Converting I-10 from LA to Phoenix (374 miles) would cost $3 Billion dollars. Resurfacing a highway costs something like $300,000 per mile for existing highway.
Geez, how 'bout if I *don't* want the only thing I look at at night to be the road, and your car?
And as this is allegedly slashdot, how many stars can you see from outside your house?
mark
Answers this perfectly.
The NUMBER ONE infrastructure budgeting problem in America right now is that roads cost too much.
Nope. Los Angeles has more paved roads than any other city of the world. It uses only 7% of its city budget for road maintenance. It uses 30% of its budget for funding police/firefighter agencies, and it uses a whopping 40% of its budget solely on paying firefighter/police officer pensions. Roads are cheap.
Take this material and first put it towards, solar roofs, solar driveways, solar sidewalks, even solar bike paths. Why not start with those and see what happens?
Violating gravity and keeping it that way instead of remaining neutral against the ground automatically costs a ton more, especially over time. That's engineering 101.
With the way all of our high tech industries seem to be breaking testing rigs these days, looks like a great opportunity for someone to make a bigger testing machine!
Instead of spouting all the negativity, why not got to solar roadways site and read their faqs???? The area of roadways, parking lots, sidewalks are much greater than rooftops..... go to the solar roadway site and read up and watch the videos.... they have already had a grant from the US DOT... which means the government is interested... they have a working model.... it can be improved, that is why they are on indigogo looking for more funding.... they want to keep it in the US and not outsourced by some major corp.....
I'm reminded of the old Red Skelton skit, as a whacky inventor Ludwick von Humperdoo who created the cement tire.
"What good are cement tires?" he was asked.
"For the Rubber Road!" was the punchline.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
AWESOME! I say go for it!
Sure tempered glass is strong and very durable to wear. But how do you get traction and stopping power if driving on it? If you texture the surface you lose the light capabilities to charge. We all know that road surfaces wear tires and gain stopping power by heat transfer from the friction of tires. Glass is smooth and near frictionless. Factor in snow and even a rain and lose even more traction. Next glass really isn't a cheap product and tempered glass is a safety type in case of breakage so it costs more then plate glass. The other thought I have is this product really would not work on a mountain range as the light changes quickly and falling rocks would destroy the road besides being the common obstruction we incur today.