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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.
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'
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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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
um duh, transparent or translucent amalgamate instead of rocks. My driveway, patio, and sidewalk have been like this for decades. The Romans figured it out a couple thousand years before I was born.
Don't worry, the technology will get just good enough!
And somehow the regular solar panels won't take any advantage of the improvements despise being the same thing, except better.
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
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
solar power is unpossible
Not a single comment has ever said that.
What they have always quite consistently said:
1- Solar PV is inefficient.
2- Solar roadways is one of the least efficient ways of making solar PV.
3- Solar roadways doesn't make sense if you have roofs that are not yet covered or land to spare.
China doesn't need to read Slashdot to understand this, they just need to take highschool physics. But while you're being quite facetous about big public works projects which China are very good at, they mostly do it for busy work and utterly fail the cost benefit analysis of doing them.
Only some 1/3rd of the major logistic infrastructure projects make any sense, all the rest do is put the country in debt: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep...
Heck there's entire books describing how China builds almost entire cities that end up as virtual ghost towns: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-C...
Mind you when I lived there it was incredible to commute to work. An 8 lane highway with maybe 2 cars on it. Traffic you could only dream of.
Many, many years ago I had the opportunity to see an asphalt road after a tank had driven over it. Left a few scratches. I think you probably won't want steel treaded vehicles meandering down your solarized roads.
If they work well enough to care about after a few weeks of ordinary use.
Which seems unlikely.
OTOH, this can't possibly be as crazy an idea as it sounds.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The point is that some things that people call stupid are just stupid. The solar roadway is one of them. And just because someone in China is pursuing it, doesn't mean it can't be stupid.
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.
Solar panels in the highway road bed is a terrible idea. The transparent top material, quickly scratched and covered with a film of oil, will drastically reduce the efficiency. Consider yourself lucky if you get 5% after the first year of use. And the panels must be armoured against the weight, so they cost x3 the price to start with. A much better plan is to build a roof of standard roof top solar panels over the highway. The panels are tilted to the sun so they get more light(higher efficiency), no covering (higher efficiency), standard solar panels (cheaper), can be changed out easily (easy maintenance), and you drastically reduce snow removal costs (would probably pay for this over 10 years).
I'm not sure about that. You see this goes long before the Chinese were trying to be technological leaders. It kind of underpins the economics of the country, the busy work to keep employment at zero percent. The Chinese throw incredible funds at projects that seem to do nothing other than keep the wheel turning.
Funny story, on the way to work one day I saw a semi-trailer (lorry, truck, b-double, whatever they call them where you are) which had jackknifed, slid across the side of the highway and knock out 4 trees clear out of the ground before coming to a halt. Surprisingly apparently no one died. ... The day after the stumps were gone. ... And the day after that there were 4 fully grown trees planted in their place being held up by scaffolding poles while their roots develop.
Anyway that afternoon on the way home the area was cleaned up and the trees were already cut down to the stumps and logs were piled up on the side of the highway. Not bad. Got the truck towed AND the gardening done. In most of the west that would have taken the better part of the week. Except
I honestly have never seen anything quite like it. A 30min cycle out of the city people are living in poverty in run down crumbling buildings, but at least the trees were replaced within 3 days.