Slashdot Mirror
Sandpoint Town Square Home To First Public Solar Roadways Panel Installation (newatlas.com)
Two years after the Idaho-based company Solar Roadways exceeded its crowdfunding goal of $1 million for constructing roads that gather solar power, the company has completed its first public installation in the City of Sandpoint, Idaho, where there are 30 tiles currently installed. New Atlas reports: The 150 sq ft (14 sq m) installation in Sandpoint's Jeff Jones Town Square is made up of 30 SR3 panels. Where Solar Roadways' second generation prototype was a 36-watt panel, the SR3 is the same size but is rated at 48 W, made possible by replacing the panel mounting holes with edge connectors. The new units each include four heating elements to help keep the installation free of snow and ice and over 300 brighter, daylight readable LEDs with over 16 million available colors. Though now laid down and switched on, not everything went exactly to plan with the installation. Manufacturing difficulties meant that some of the SR3 panels were not fully operational at the time of the public reveal. The working units were placed in the center of the grid and surrounded by dead panels. Solar Roadways aims to swap out the non-working units as soon as possible. Sandpoint officials plan to allow the public to interact with and modify the light show soon, and future plans for the town square include free public Wi-Fi and the roll out of electric vehicle charging stations. You can view the live stream of the Solar Roadways installation here.
It doesn't work out: https://youtu.be/6-ZSXB3KDF0 (EEVBlog video debunking the concept7)
just how much snow and ice melting does it take to turn these into a net negative rather than positive generator of energy?
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
This is a public place for pedestrians, bikes and market stalls.It's not even a road!
Call me again when they put it in an actual road where a few hundred semi trucks driver over it per day, all of them with gravel in their tires.
This is just a stupid publicity stunt.
150 Square Feet of roadway for a cool $1 Million and nearly half of them don't work yet? Sounds like a pretty expensive road to me.
So, what exactly is the point of this little experiment anyway?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
2 years - and the most feasible thing they have is 150 sq ft? These look shiny. I'm guessing that means bad traction. They look thin. They are not letting cars or anything heavy on them. Won't the "heaters" take an impractical amount of power? If not, why not put heaters on *all* roads regardless of Solar Roadways. They don't think the complex wiring infrastructure (trenches) required in their initial description will be a problem for major, large-scale installation, but didn't do that here? I could go on a lot more...
Just gotta order a couple million more of these to build 1 road eh?
The specs for a good roadway are diametrically opposed to those of those for a good solar installation, I expect that the final product will be both a crappy power generator and dangerous road.
But seriously - too many reasons to go into on why this is a stupid idea, geared towards wide-eyed fans too stupid to know any better...
Are you trying to get people to automatically dismiss you and anyone else who would try to inform people why this is a bad idea?
Because this is how you get people to automatically dismiss you and anyone else who would try to inform people why this is a bad idea.
If this really is a bad idea, and your goal is to convince others of that, then list some of the reasons. For better or worse, saying "I'm not gonna list the reasons" tends to be viewed by some people as code-speak for "this is a very good idea, I just have a personal vendetta against it and want it to die".
What the fuck does that headline even mean? God Damnit I miss Cowboy Neal.
Slahsdot should seriously consider getting rid of comments. There is nothing but assholes and Debbie Downers commenting on this site anymore.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Just what we need, another great way to create light pollution.
I'm not sure the debate preparation is working.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The people who donated over $2 million to fund this wanted the experiment to happen and it's happening.
Solar Roadways didn't take the money and run. They've actually produced something that at least partially functions (and what beta test product has ever been 100% successful?). It's been installed and they have another installation planned.
Advancement comes from failures as well as successes. While this experiment may be doomed to failure (as many people are predicting), it's still likely that there will be some knowledge gained from that failure.
$1M kick starter gets you that far! wow
for $1M you can buy 699,088W of PV panels at retail price..
given the years they've spent on the project. how much energy could have been generated if they'd just crowd funded a solar farm.
This is really cool technology. I could see some places where simply the idea of reconfigurable LED lane markings could be a big win. Turning all the roadway asphalt into solar farms would be wonderful.
I'm still quite skeptical that the panels will generate more power than they use for melting snow. These will probably never be practical in snowy climates.
As to solar roadways, I still question how this will ever be more economical than building a steel framework above the roadway that is covered with solar panels. This is becoming more common in parking lots, and has the side benefit of holding the snow until it melts instead of requiring the lots to be plowed (at the expense of reduced winter electric production).
It hasn't happened, and it won't. All they've created was a solar powered light exhibit that anyone could have done - and an extraordinary price tag. Everyone already knew you can create solar powered lights. The problem was turning the project into an economical roadway capable of generating power for the grid in a "cost competitive" and sustainable/maintainable fashion. They have done nothing to prove the feasibility of this.
Damn me. Access to all the knowledge to reveal that this is a scam is available on the internets for free and people still hold fingers for this fairy-tale.
The world is fucked.
Being a somewhat sceptical individual, this really doesn't help my view on environmentalists in general. It seems that what governments and organizations tend to latch onto these bad ideas, applying magical thinking to fill in the gaps. I would much rather see well reasoned approaches to making our lives better. Any of those around (the more non-political the better)?
That's somewhere around the the average household power usage for a single residential utility customer amortized over about the space of several weeks. Note... *AVERAGE*. There are many times throughout the course of even a single day that the demand would exceed that by a no small margin, and without the storage technology to supplement it, it would not meet the needs of most residential households, let alone a location that is for public usage.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It wasn't enough for logic and a bunch of engineers and whatnot to put this idiocy to the ground, I guess they needed to make a public test that will obviously fail hard and never go beyond the prototype phase.
I hope this finally leaves dumb politicians and a bunch of people with too money to spare before doing proper research with enough proof not to waste more money and time with this.
People could literally contribute more by putting that money into LED lights for their homes or tested and tried real solutions like solar panels on their roofs.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try new things, but nothing about the Solar Roadways idea is new, and nothing about it is worth testing. There is no new concept there. There is no component of it or idea that has not been considered before and discarded due to infeasibility. This is the glass sword idea. It might look cool to some, but there are just so many reasons why you'd never do it that it's plain stupid to even try.
There's just too many people defending the idea because "we have to try to see if it works" or something. Try to eat your own poop to see if it's tasty. Oh, you don't want to? Why? Have you ever even tried it? Perhaps it's great and you don't know!
At least per the pictures..
Flashing LEDs that the public can program!?!? OOOOH! SCIENCY!!! /smashes face on desk/
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
After Malda left, I think the smart "industry / geek" commenters left for Reddit where there's more forum specialization, and the "contrary for contrariness' sake" crowd of commenters drifted in as /. got more mainstream (more traffic, ads, etc.) It's not all dumbasses, just less posting from the old-thymers as they still *read* /., but *post* on specialized forums these days. I mean, shit, we both have 6-digit UIDs in the 2xxxxx range, so we've been reading Slashdot for... ~18 years by now.
I suspect these "Debbie Downers" cribbed the "I'm contrary, I hate everything" schtick off some late-aughties comedian, because I started seeing the same "style" pop up all over the 'nets around the same time.
Look at their posts: they just sit around and bitch. They are most definitely not building the future - they're off on the sidelines moaning about How Difficult Everything Is (waah). I've actually known a few in real life: they are generally excuse-making, low ambition, lazy, have little to offer the world, and will be forgotten within their own generation. They are followers, and distant ones at that... tellingly, "sheep" is one of their top pejorative words.
So after the ranting, I gotta put my mouth smack dab where the money is - you know, generate good commentary for the /. community. Because I'll be damned if whipslash bought this sumbitch from Dice only to have it populated by a handful of do-nothing trogs. So back to the topic at hand:
I've seen flexible solar panels, and foldable ones, but not fancy tempered ones with integrated LEDs. These inventors may have something if they "pivot" (whoops- another coin in the swear jar!) away from the "solar roadways" moniker and focus on the rugged, integrated aspect. That's gotta be useful for something a bit higher-profit than replacement road surfaces. Like so:
* Pedestrian crossings.
* Fancy solar-LED-mosaic tiles for outdoor spaces.
* Markers for marathons, etc. Shit, you could put long range RF tag scanners in them and deploy as needed around the course. (Non-runners: In races, runners pin these single-use RFID type labels to their shirts so their times are easily - and cheaply - logged by sensors around the course.)
* Make some pentagonal ones too and cover a dome house in a high-risk hurricane area with them, like a soccer ball. Regular panels would fly away.
* Master what I can only assume is a "laminate the solar panel to the tempered glass" technique and start doing it with curved surfaces; have vandal-resistant solar facings.
* Pop a couple high-powered LEDs (omnidirectional) in there and have solar flares (not that kind) for construction sites, highway maintenance crews, truckx0rs, etc.
* Make high-end ruggedized panels for seagoing boats (that have a higher chance of capsizing, etc.)
I like where they're going by over-engineering the things so you can drive over them - just look for more uses for that kind of ruggedization instead of solaring the roadways. The roadways don't need solaring quite yet - as the others have mentioned, putting it *over* the road is a better place to start.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
An excellent plan, sir, with only two minor drawbacks.
During the day there are cars on it blocking the sunlight.
And during the day there are cars on it blocking the sunlight.
You seem to be lost, Voat is over here
Where's the verb on the title?
Regular cleaning of dirt, mud, leaves, and debris from solar roads by a paid employee(s) operating gas-powered street-sweeper/-washer trucks seems like a more regular and energy-intensive maintenance requirement for these roads than melting the occasional ice and snow. [Said from the perspective of my armchair, of course].
Who wouldn't like lunch on the moon? Think about the prestige you'll get. My new business Lunar Roadways is paving a path to a moony restaurant that will, ahem, eclipse all earthy establishments. Yes, there are some technical details to work out. But if Marconi and Tesl... er Edison had listened to the Debbie Downers, we'd have no radio and we'd not have it in the dark.
On this here napkin I've sketched out the key astronomical constants, solid fuel prices, launch pad costs per square foot, and my five-year revenue projection. True, the first few lunch dates will be expensive, but this is all proven technology. NASA went to the moon no fewer than several times, and when you factor in economies of scale, my Lunar Lunch Shuttle will be competitive -- on a per-mile basis -- with Uber.
The population of the earth is 7.2 billion people. If only half of these want to dine lunarly, that's 3.6 billion customers, nearly as many as McDonalds. Figure $100 a seat not counting meal service, and we're talking 3.5 TRILLION dollars of income. It's widely known that with trillions of dollars you can do anything. And we haven't even factored in repeat business!
Is it green, you ask? It's green! All those people off the earth will cut CO2 emissions by up to a lot! I have done testing with people in walk-in refrigerators, which proves it.
I've raised a couple million dollars already on my IndieNoNo campaign, from people who like to gamble and don't understand basic mathematics. I'm on the verge of securing government funding, thanks to the Really Great Idea of the Year award from Popular Mechanics.
Get in on this rocket ship (literally) while there's still room!
I see what you did there
This does not inspire confidence.
https://imgur.com/a/hf6BM