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China Is Building a Solar Power Highway (electrek.co)
China is building roadways with solar panels underneath that may soon have the ability to charge cars wirelessly and digitally assist automated vehicles. "This second solar roadway project -- part of the Jinan City Expressway -- is a 1.2 mile stretch," reports Electrek. "The building technique involves transparent concrete over a layer of solar panels." From the report: Construction is complete and grid connection is pending, but is expected to be complete before the end of the year. The Jinan City solar highway is formed with three layers. The top layer is a transparent concrete that has similar structural properties with standard asphalt. The central layer is the solar panels -- which are pointed out as being "weight bearing." The bottom layer is to separate the solar panels from the damp earth underneath. The road will be durable enough to handle vehicles as large as a medium sized truck. It was noted by engineers that wireless vehicle charging could soon be integrated and automated car functions could take advantage of the inherent data in this this already wired roadway. No details were given on which solar panels being used. Two separate sizes could be seen from the images. It looks like the solar panels are covered with a film to protect them from workers moving over them. Notice in one picture there is an individual sitting down with wires showing between the solar panels connecting them.
so they can mow down their citizens with brand new tanks.
Silly Chinese. If they'd only read Slashdot comments, they'd know that solar power is unpossible and they'd go back to scrubbing coal clean like the US and get their jobs back and be great again. I mean, it's not like the Chinese have ever been any good at big public works projects, anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What will happen when the road is all covered up with bumper to bumper traffic?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder if they tried transparent aluminum...
Seriously I don't understand the impulse to put solar panels in roadways... Durability, spilled oil, scratches from studded tires or flat tires, less than optimal angle, difficult to access for maintenance, etc. , etc.
I thought the whole thing was thoroughly debunked... not as being any kind of deliberate scam, per se, but debunked as being even remotely possible to achieve the kinds of ends that the creators were trying to sell.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm glad this is being done.
When it fails, the people that have looked at all the other solar-roadway failures will have yet another data point to use towards killing this stupid idea. Seriously, just put the panels next to the road. 90% of your problems solved right there!
Instead, the true believers will come back and tell us that, like communism, solar roads have just never been done right.
This kind of response is completely necessary, since the days when you could just go out into the countryside and find five or ten square miles of contiguous land which you could purchase is long gone. At this point roadways are some of the cheapest land available, and experience has shown that roadways are very easy and convenient to access for maintenance. Combining roadways with transmission lines should provide clear gains, as you always gain from synergy when combining unrelated operations into one svelte system. Wins all around!
Shout out to Thunderf00t and Dave EEBlog Jones who have gathered all the successes and failures of the concept. Especially Dave who walks through the watt/sq meter math and shows how it comes up short, no matter how you slice it.
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How come I've never heard of this (and I read slashdot regularly! :)
Seriously, if this isn't an April fool's joke (it isn't April 1 according to the Chinese calendar is it?) how come this TRANSPARENT concrete isn't a much more widely known building material? I mean, something with the load bearing strength of concrete with even just translucency and not good transparency would revolutionize architecture wouldn't it?
I once read (pre-internet days) that "Architecture is Man's conquest of light" or something like that in the sense that as materials got stronger, less and less of the load bearing had to be taken up by thick walls and, with the invention of cheap glass, "glass curtain wall" skyscrapers became possible. Wouldn't this be kinda on the same level of importance as that? How come we aren't seeing building with translucent structures that literally glow at night?
If this material is strong enough and durable enough (and cheap enough!) to be used as a roadway material (and maybe resistant to temperature swings that you'd expect in a temperate country like China) I would imagine there would be many many applications. So where are they?
If this IS true, and feasible and practical, well as another poster pointed out, there is a ton of available roadway that could be used to generate electricity. At least we'll go from something that is really just receiving solar energy and converting it to heat (asphalt) to something that will generate some electricity and what's far more important, cut down on the use of carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels. Win Win!
I wouldn't want to see that old friend. Not in China.
I absolutely do not understand why anyone would consider embedding solar panels underneath clear concrete[1] for a road.
I'm not an engineer but wouldn't the weight and/or vibrations from cars and trucks, over time, possibly mess up the electrical connections or the panels themselves? If so, how do you fix them... dig everything up, throw away everything, install brand-new panels?
If you figure it makes sense to combine solar power with roadways, why not invest in a really tall roof, and let the cars drive under the solar panels? The roof would keep rain and snow off the roads. If there's a wiring problem, workers could get to the wires and just fix them, or swap a faulty panel out. The roof angle could be chosen to help collect sunlight; under-the-road panels you don't have any choice of angle, the panels must be flat. And all the panels would get sunlight all the time, rather than being shaded as vehicles drive over the panel.
In my state there is a section of an Interstate highway that has a tall roof on it; I think it has something to do with winter snow. (The highway department does avalanche control there from time to time in winter.) So I know this sort of roof is at least possible.
Building a roof tall enough for all possible highway traffic sounds annoying and expensive to me, and yet it still sounds like a better idea than burying solar panels and driving on them.
[1] I didn't even know clear concrete is a thing. Google doesn't return much about it but I did find a 2004 BoingBoing article that has two dead links about it.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It was, the concept doesn't work. But China doesn't make decisions based on sound logic. Just like any other government they make it based on whoever's highest up in the power structure. And whoever that is just said "Solar, Fricken, Roadways!" and gave somebody a couple million. It's the same reason they put a ton of money into super computers that can only run lincpack quickly, instead of actual, useful HPC stuff. The same reason they're pouring hundreds of millions into molten salt reactors instead of fusion. The higher ups make the decision, not those best qualified for it.
For all the "China's doing X so it must be amazing!" stories they're just another corrupt, incompetent government organization doing exactly what every other corrupt, incompetent government does.
connectors all over the place. Many many humans wandering around 'waiting' for the 'boss' they have never met to come show them exactly what to plug in where.
This post really nails the new reality of our world. People in the US coming up with ways things shouldn't work, while other countries make those things work. It's too bad stupidity dosn't lead to innovation.... the US would be #1 indefinitely, but miles and miles..
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Others have already pointed out the impractical nature of this investment, but the idea could see niche applications. For example in remote warehouse type arrangements for autonomous vehicles moving around a shared space or travelling show go-karts that never need to stop.
USA! USA! USA!
Ditto for railway lines. Panels under a road is a silly idea, but there's more than enough wasted space at the edge of most major roads, which are often on embankments or in cuttings. Let the panels at least approximately face the sun, don't cover them with traffic, tyre dust, and other assorted grit, then it might make physical sense, or even commercial sense.
The article says the new highway will have transparent concrete over the solar panels. Google didn't find much for me on "transparent concrete", but "translucent concrete" finds stuff.
http://illumin.usc.edu/245/translucent-concrete-an-emerging-material/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete
P.S. I found the above by first searching for "transparent concrete" and Google found a BoingBoing article with only a little info. But after reading the introductory sentence I searched for "translucent concrete Aron Losonczi" and found lots of stuff.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As a red blooded American, I support the hidden hand of the marketplace to pick the best technology. We don't need some top down orders to tell us what to make and sell. The marketplace will solve those issues!
That is why vhs beat Sony Betamax....
uh. I'll get back to you.
Building them into the pavement surface is such an expensive and ineffective idea, that it would be better to build a structure over the road, and put standard panels on that. You can even make panels translucent - the cells are thin enough that some light gets through them, so you just need to use a transparent rear panel - so the roadway is adequately lit even under the panels.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You should spend some time contemplating why you thought your comment would be a worthwhile, meaningful reply.
Where's Thunderf00t when you need him...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
How will they remove the stains from tires? Regular cleaning?
I can come up with a lot of reasons it probably won't work very well.
But that isn't how this technology stuff works. Petrochemical internal combustion engines didn't rise form the sea, perfectly formed like Venus. An incredible difference between a huge hit and miss engine and say, my 4 cylinder Jeep Engine. Power, weight,maintenance all in favor of my not particularly notable engine otherwise. The old engine has torque and steampunk cool.
Any Slashdotters think we should have stopped improving IC engines at the Hit and Miss stage?
There are certain aspects of getting electrical power from those long ribbons of highway that make attempts to extract that potential pretty interesting.
Will this work? Probably not. But its certain that it won't work if it isn't built. It is their money.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This does give them the ability to experiment with ideas that we won't even try. I'm highly dubious about the solar roadway idea, but because China will build at least one of these wacky things, they have a better chance of making some technology work that we wouldn't even test.
Have you ever been to China?
The sun is a dull orange disc at best on most days, barely visible through the pollution.
I'm not exaggerating.
Residents of Jinan like paintings with blue skys in the same way that Australians like pictures of a snow-covered Christmas.
America does believe in solar power. We are happy with coal.
Actually, a bunch of neckbeards with one hand on the keyboard talking shit about something they don't understand isn't actually what "debunking" originally meant.
Etymology doesn't determine meaning, I know, I know.
Remember how NASA couldn't get a peer review for their paper explaining how a reactionless space drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster) worked due to US scientists claiming it was impossible, while at the same time, China announced production of a spacecraft that incorporating the new drive (https://www.popsci.com/emdrive-engine-space-travel-china-success).
Next up: US scientists dispute round-earth hypothesis as well as denying latest evidence that earth is not the center of the universe...
when the US did great thing like that. Now we can't even fix areas destroy by natural disaster, have more and more people going hungry and homeless.
But, hey, at least we keep cutting taxes!
You can trend US's greatness in innovation, infrastructure, creation right to taxes. Higher taxes, the better we have done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We hammer on roads. Heavy loads. Hot sun. Freezing snow and ice. Roads get used until they get holes in them and often we continue to use them like that for years.
Yet we are supposed to get a practical electrical grid with such a system? I can't see it happening.
For this to work you'd have to have a dead-simple and incredibly durable generating surface, dirt cheap and completely decentralized. It would need to be able to handle increasing levels of failures gracefully (for example, lose 20% of your surface due to anything and you simply lose 20% of your generating capacity).
That's a huge ask. Roads get too much wear and abuse to make a good electrical grid.