awesome :thumbsup :thumbsup

TAXES in this direction ^^^^^^^^^^^^

That's the thing. Solar roads generate electricity, which can be sold. They essentially make money. A concrete road does not, unless you count taxes paid to use it or tolls for example.

They already received the OK to build real roads as a proof of concept test.

Lots of detail here: http://www.solarroadways.com/numbers.shtml

Better video here:

this isn't a dig at *anyone*, but it's interesting to see the mindset of the majority is always why it won't work, why it can't be done, why it will fail, and so on. It fascinates me how thought #1 is 'great idea', and 10 seconds later the follow-up thought(s) is/are the negative way of looking at it, instead of the how it CAN be done.

Separates the high-achievers from the rest (including me, not saying I'm any different as my default setting :) ).

this project will come to fruition right after they build the space elevator.

more pie in the sky technology.

http://www.vote29.com/newmyblog/wp-c...8in-1978-1.jpg

Panels look raised so would create tire noise or they would need to come up with new tire tread design.

After this last brutal winter Chicago roads still fucked, guessing gonna be a fucked up construction delayed summer/fall.

I'll succinctly summarize solar roadways: this is the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard for roads.

'most stupid' :winkwink:

most stupidest.

btw, either way is correct :)

Our city waits until 2am or 4am to send the sweeper down our street. Vibrates the foundation and wakes the entire frickin' neighbourhood. And since we live on a corner, we get the added bonus of listening to the backup beeper 4-5x for an hour or more.

50 trillion dollar project.

it is? I got called on that some time ago, looked it up, and sure enough it wasn't a word... they let that one in now? (too lazy to look lol)

The ones with the technologies to make these things, usually don't get their feet off the ground to make them efficient and affordable, because their products get shot down before they can make headway.

Look at Elon Musk as one of the rare few that has both the ingenuity and the money backing him to overcome what big oil and power industry can do. Even still Telsa has a very hard road where several states have actually made it illegal for him to sell his cars there. Texas is one of them, I think NC was another.

Now look at all his money and it's still a struggle to push forward against big oil, big auto with a proven concept that works. Now think of some small time company trying to do the same. It doesn't happen..

go back and look at the history of the "tucker" car.. otr the guy that invented the windshield wiper, big business keeping the under dogs down by using the govt is nothing new..

Always nice to see people not allowing some painfully obvious mathematical realities get in the way of a feel good pipe dream.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, gives the forms as “stupid” … “stupider” … “stupidest.”

And this isn’t a peculiar Americanism. H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage also gives the correct forms as “stupid” … “stupider” … “stupidest.”

Fowler hints, though, at what might account for ... avoiding “est” in favor of “most” to form the superlative:

“Neglect or violation of established usage with comparatives & superlatives sometimes betrays ignorance, but more often reveals the repellent assumption that the writer is superior to conventions binding on the common herd.”

1828: Thomas Carlyle, in a letter, refers to “the simplest and stupidest man of his day.”

1842: Samuel Lover, in Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life (1842), writes, “She felt the pique which every pretty woman experiences who fancies her favours disregarded, and thought Andy the stupidest lout she ever came across.”

1871: Charles Gibbon, in the novel For Lack of Gold, writes, “This cursed frenzy makes me say and think the stupidest things.”

Just for the heck of it, I searched online in “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913,” and found the word used in testimony in a theft case tried in May 1785. A prosecutor is quoted as saying, “I should be the stupidest man living, having property, to leave my house so unsafe.”

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/20...stupidest.html

fuck, where were you a year ago with this info? :D

Just to clarify-

the franchise laws already in place in those states is the issue, those laws were already in place before elon musk was born.

And it's Tesla's choice, they choose to not sell their cars the way the laws are established, via dealer showrooms, otherwise they would not have the issue.

The interesting thing is it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary or M-W

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us...id?q=stupidest

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid

You very well may be right.






edit-

Sorry, I needed to expand a drop down of adjectives, stupidest is in the Oxford

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us...id?q=stupidest

Looks very cool, but unfortunately, this won't help to those animals that jump from the off-road. E.g. Kengooroo. The first step the made on the road is just in front of your car.

The U.S. Federal Debt is about $17,690,680,484,000.

Who's gonna hold another pink slip for $3 trillion? How much of this hi-tech roadway is $3 trillion gonna build? A few highways? The streets around the Capital building in Washington?

Seems like an awesome concept. Sounds extremely unfeasible given the cost and the existing debtload to the nation (and that goes for us here in Canada, too).

What makes it even more unfeasible is that solar is entirely inefficient as an energy producer. It converts at best 16% of the Sun's energy and that's on a good day and I say good DAY intentionally. ~12 hours of the day under ideal conditions it converts 16%, the remaining 50% of the day it sits idle. Not working. Now expand that year long, ~6 months of the year is cloudy, winter conditions 1/2 the year, so 1/2 the year and 1/2 the day you'll get a 16% effecient energy plant.

and my $50 trillion dollar comment above wasn't sarcastic, that's the LOW estimate to convert the nation's highways and biways to solar.

I'm not directing this at you, SK, just quoting your comment for a sounding board :winkwink:.

Good idea in general but it won't happen...

(nodding)

Hell, even $50 trillion would be a major lowball estimate, as you say.

Cost aside, we all know how Mother Nature likes to defeat the best of man's innovations. They can test it in extreme climates all they like - but I wouldn't wager the stuff would actually perform anywhere near the durability they claim for it in our winters.

Our city switched from mercury vapor to digital LED streetlighting about two years ago - and they STILL haven't got it functioning as promised. We still get a large number of lights flashing like a disco strobe all over town. Great for inducing epileptic seizures. And the technology for streetlights would be comparatively simple to roadways made of solar panels.

Something about the best laid plans...of mice and men. :winkwink:

Well you should start up solar company if you know how to manufacture them cheaper than every other company. And become a billionaire :thumbsup

At first let's make regular solar energy "profitable"...

If you are liberal, you don't have to worry about financial realities when all you have to do is take the money from others, then blame those very people along the way, for the failed ideas.

i guess no one appreciated the humor in my *pie in the sky* post............:(:(:(

get it- pie in the sky, solar energy, it's a homonym ,.......the tasty slice of pie represents the su......n/m.

Best we have ere in utaw is dem radar guns on solar and sum flashing road signs. Woot, welcome to the future!

Pie.... cakes evil cousin.

It's a trap!

http://www.theppk.com/wp-content/upl...0/PieCover.jpg

I watched it through..

You left out a couple of things, Dyna.

Solar cell effeciency used to be about 2%, and were very expensive. Today, commercially available & affordable ones are at 16%, with high end ones passed 40%. The point is, Solar technology, is getting better and cheaper.

Next, your calculations are wrong and you started with wrong data. The solar cells they use are 18% efficient, not 16% efficient (2 points make a big difference on a large scale). There are 4 hours of peak daylight hours per day (4 x 365 = 1460 hours per year) as their site says. Their site goes on to say this:


Now I'm fairly sure that getting that much coverage is impossible, however, it would make sense to me to cover at least some roads and highways with this product. Right now, roads are wasted as far as energy creation or conversion goes. If this can be done in a way that is cheap, reliable and safe, why not? Don't forget that if this works, it MAKES money. People like you and me who are not engineers discounting the idea is the wrong thing to do. If everything sounds good, why not test it out?

We desperately need to find alternative, clean, renewable sources of energy. We need it for the sake of our lives and future generations, and all of life itself. Coal and Oil are the worst possible places to get energy from, and we're smarter as a species to continue to suck the tit of big oil.

Solar is hard work to get going! been living off solar for 3 years...

15 big 1m panels... barely powers a small fridge and laptop... huge losses everywhere in the equation!

but yeh... inevitable to go this way... Solar is GREAT I suburbs where everyone has a rooftop... in CITIES will use the free space on the road for sure! with a lot of vehilcle restrictions... e.g. 80km/hour electric cars..


http://mud.com/shark.png

Isn't that a moot point? It can't be done cheaply and efficiently which is why it is not done to begin with. That shouldn't need explaining.

I mean seriously.. its a cartoon video.

Solar has been the next big thing for decades and still is not here yet. Obama, your lord and savior, funded a few solar companies with the stimulus plan which promptly went out of business. The largest I believe was Abound Energy which received over $400,000,000.00 USD and then promptly went out of business and auctioned its assets.

Further, if it could be done cheaply and safely, it would be infinitely easier to implement it on home and commercial buildings anyway. Things that are accessible, do not cause traffic issues to repair or maintain, which are not surfaces affected by freezing and heat and constantly buckling and heaving and breaking apart, surfaces which don't require massive snow plows being scraped over them and which also cover a massive amount of surface area and so on and so on and so on and so on. It would seem quite obvious to anyone that spent even a few seconds thinking about it, that coating road surfaces with something like this is an insane idea... car accidents ripping it up, constant car fires melting and destroying them (yes, if you pay attention on any major highway, there are places all over the place where cars burned), crazy weather, snow, ice, remoteness etc etc etc etc etc. Maintenance itself would be impossible. Further, if there was any surface better than asphalt or concrete it would be in use already. Thinking a solar panel is somehow going to be just fine as a highways surface is a bit silly.... given the fact that the world has been struggling with the "better, safer road surface" question for a century.... and still are stuck with asphalt and concrete.

Furthermore, there is another point which should be fairly obvious. The nations entire infrastructure is crumbling. We have 10's of 1000's of miles of bridges which are not just in dire need of repair, but much of which are beyond repair. So it's not very clear where anyone thinks the many hundreds and billions of dollars just to start something like this is going to come from, when roads and bridges are already falling apart.

Example: U.S. has 63,000 bridges that need significant repairs

even the crazy schizophrenic above gets it.

You are doing it wrong.. I power a small fridge, laptop, lights and random other things plus occasional usage of a inverter with only 200 watts of solar + 2x type 31 AGM deep cycles.

You are crazy if you try to power a regular 110 volt style fridge on solar. You have to get a efficient 12v model and no not those crappy 3 way propane things they sell for RV's.. I mean a quality fridge built to run on 12v as the main option.

Truckfridge for example makes some affordable smaller versions. A regular house style fridge that runs on 110 is extremely inefficient and shouldn't be run on a solar set up. Same with those 3 way fridges they put in RV's. Those aren't meant to actually run full time on 12v so they are very inefficient.

Not here yet? It's all over..

Cali for example is building 14 new solar farms at this very moment..

This is a article from just a few days ago talking about how NC of all places has become the number 2 producer of electric with solar right behind Cali..

http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte...new-solar.html

Just because you choose to stick your head in the sand doesn't mean it's not out there. Renewable energy is the fastest growing sources of energy in this country. More solar & wind farms are being built now than any other type of power generation method..

**********, what TheSquealer wrote sums it up. Don't get me wrong, I think most all of us here get a kick out of tech but this is like a couple of stoners sat around and played the what if we combined this with that game. Also, this isn't new, the idea and all got it first funding from the gov back in 2009 and then again in 2011, the road block then was the detoriation and covering of road grime of the panels so the solution was to invent self-cleaning panels. See where I am going with this? It's an insane Pandora's box, both in application and costs, and worse, it is not a panacea. I'm all for hi-tech and alternative energies but this is just plain silly.



I've been thinking of adding a solar setup to the motorhome, so I guess this applies to the rooftop AC, everything? Is there a good place online to start? I started by googling solar panels for RVs, didn't realize about the appliances.

Yea read this guys site a few times. It comes off a bit crazy and it's kind unorganized but he knows his stuff.

http://handybobsolar.wordpress.com/

The moral of the story, is don't install solar unless you do it yourself, because 99% of the RV dealers have no clue what they are doing and they will sometimes purposely install low gauge wire to hinder performance in order to sell you more panels.

Also the RV dealers do insane mark ups on the products, so you are better off buying the stuff online.

Roof top AC is pretty much a no go, but if you get a good 12v fridge you can power everything else. I have heard of people powering small window units AC's but they usually require about 500w just for that.