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.

Comments

Do the math...

[mbeckman]

It doesn't work out: https://youtu.be/6-ZSXB3KDF0 (EEVBlog video debunking the concept7)

Re: Do the math...

[mbeckman]

Fine. In the meantime, don't make the public pay for it.

Re:Do the math...

[Rakarra]

Here's the problem -- this makes the roads much much much more expensive. Heavy vehicles operating on the roadways degrade them fairly quickly. Heavy vehicles on the road's surface will very quickly degrade their solar efficiency. How are workers supposed to dig into the roads to install cables, lay need sewer lines/etc?

Think about how many roads around your city or town are in poor condition because "there's no money to fix the roads." And that's for extremely cheap asphalt. "Underfunding municipal projects" is a problem I don't think we're ever going to solve.

Re: Do the math...

[mbeckman]

Are you kidding me? The City of Sandpoint donated many hours of maintenance and city planning staff hours for preparation work at the site, not to mention real estate, to give Solar Roadways a prime downtown public demonstration venue. According to the City Council meeting minutes, the project was funded by city-donated employee labor ($10,000), the State of Idaho Department of Commerce ($47,134), and the Sandpoint Urban Renewal Agency ($10,000). The City also provided infrastructure to back feed energy to the power grid, and is staffing the ongoing system programming with its own employees. The city absorbed unexpected contingencies, such as when city workers discovered the sand bed couldn't support level tiles, so they had have to pull them out and start over.

Naysayers were brushed aside in the excitement to be the first demonstration site for this mathematically unsupportable technology. At least one city council member had problems seeing this as a public benefit The project passed a funding vote marginally, 3:2.

This is what's known in municipal circles as "as sweetheart deal."

Re:Do the math...

[Maritz]

lol. It's more than a little amusing to me that the great naysayer of human space activity is keen on this completely ludicrous, pointless and impractical idea. This will never take off. In fact, it's fucking stupid. Can you imagine what 10 ton trucks driving over this will do? lol.

Re:Do the math...

[AmiMoJo]

I've seen them replace modular road surfaces in Japan, due to damage (road accident) and when they needed to access utility pipes underneath. They basically lift out whole panels and replace them with new ones, finishing the joins to be smooth.

It seems to work well. Roads recover quickly after accidents and utilities digging them up don't leave huge craters and bumps all over the place.

My understanding is that the overall cost of maintenance over the lifetime of the road surface is lower, it just costs more up front. So not ideal for places where the roads get five year budgets.

"free of snow and ice"

[networkBoy]

just how much snow and ice melting does it take to turn these into a net negative rather than positive generator of energy?

Re:"free of snow and ice"

[imidan]

Even if they become energy consumers during snowfall, having a road that clears itself saves on fuel for plows and de-icing trucks, labor costs, chemical costs, potentially capital costs if fewer plows are needed, and probably other things I'm not thinking of. I mean, as long as the heating component actually works in practice and isn't wildly inefficient. Anyhow, even without snow cover, winter in the Pacific Northwest is not a great place to be trying to do solar, especially low to the ground where there is more likely to be more shade. In this environment, I'd consider any power generated by the road to be a nice bonus, and not the primary goal.

Re:"free of snow and ice"

[wolrahnaes]

just how much snow and ice melting does it take to turn these into a net negative rather than positive generator of energy?

My thoughts exactly. This installation has 30 tiles over 150 square feet, so five square feet per tile, with each tile generating 48 watts total under ideal conditions. Let's be nice and round it to 10 watts per square foot.

Looking at a variety of heated driveway and heated roof systems it seems that most use somewhere between 30 and 60 watts per square foot to effectively combat snow and ice. That's 3-6 times the best-case power generation of these panels.

This is no roadway

[klingens]

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.

Re:This is no roadway

[kaiser423]

Yea, sidewalks and other pedestrian areas seem to make a ton more sense. I mean, I can't tell you how many pedestrian areas around commercial buildings I've seen dug up to put in heater wires and then filled back in. One employee slipping and cracking their head on company property that hasn't been adequately cleared of ice can be pretty costly. If these can get cost comparable to those heater systems by just being able to lay over existing walkways, or even just require less tearing up of the current walkway than the embedded wires do, or generating power in non-winter months to help pay off install costs, then I could see a future in that niche area. These look kinda slick themselves though, so it could be self defeating :) On a real road with multi-ton trucks at 65mph with gravel, and other stuff in their tires? Not a chance.

It's a bit expensive...And for what?

[bobbied]

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?

Re:It's a bit expensive...And for what?

[Enigma2175]

To prove a couple idiot's from Idaho with no engineering experience can't design roadways. At least that's my takeaway.

If you're going to call people idiots, you should at least learn how an apostrophe is used.

When logic isn't enough...

[XSportSeeker]

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!

Dumbass effect + solar roadway alt. uses

[hackshack]

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.