Worst Solar Power Concept…. EVER
September 7th, 2009
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Solar power has more than a few problems. It tends to be very expensive, it’s not very reliable, it takes up huge amounts of space, in the case of photovoltaic panels, they have a limited life-span and tend to degrade with time. They also occasionally develop internal faults and shorts, which can destroy the cell prematurely. They produce direct current of variable voltage, which must be regulated and inverted before it can be put out onto the grid.
To say that a solar power project takes the cake for being idiotic is really saying something. But this project may very well surpass even the quarter billion dollar boondoggles that pump out piddle power in the damp, cold areas of Northern Europe.
Solar Roads get small DoE contract, confidence to change the world
Solar roadways? Yeah, we’ve seen ‘em before, but we’ve yet to see America’s own Department of Energy give any one development company such a notable vouch of confidence. Just recently, the DoE handed over a $100,000 contract to Solar Roadways, which is just enough to build a prototype of the “first ever Solar Road panel.” The 12- x 12-foot panels could theoretically be embedded into roads, and when shined upon, could pipe good, clean electricity straight into the grid. Heck, they could even boast LEDs in order to alert drivers to upcoming accidents or changes in road conditions. Reportedly, each panel would cost around $7,000 (at least initially), and if these were used on the entire US Interstate system, we could pretty much forget about using non-renewable energy sources to power our homes and businesses. Of course, our government is simultaneously wasting money on repaving perfectly good roadways with antiquated asphalt, so there’s a tremendously great chance that this won’t amount to anything.
Yeah, “wasting money” by using asphalt when you could be using something more economical… like semiconductors. According to the company’s site, the solar roadways will be able to produce enough power to shut down all the coal and nuclear plants in the US. They’ll also never need to be plowed or salted because they’ll heat themselves, and also be able to direct traffic with embedded LED’s. They’ll power the country and the cars that drive on them.
But back to reality: The idea that they could generate enough energy to heat themselves alone is a fairly dubious claim. It can take quite a bit of power to heat a surface to a temperature well above freezing in the dead of winter, and winter is also the time that provides the least amount of sunlight. Unless these roads can store all the energy they produce in the summer, there’s no way they could keep with a few inches of snow. For example, if the average daylight hours in December are around ten per day, and the days were less than 100% sunny, then a nominally effecient solar panel would produce less than one kilowatt hour per day per square meter. Even if 100% of the energy produced was used to heat the road and none was put out to the grid, that would not be enough to keep up with a medium snowfall on a cold day.
The reason this is important to consider is that it means the roads would still have to be plowed. They’d have to be plowed, salted and all the other things that go along with it. This is, of course, only one of the things that the road would have to deal with. Others include:
- Ice, which can melt and then refreeze, potentially separating layers or forcing its way into small cracks
- Frequent traffic, including cars and 18-wheelers carrying tons of material
- Plowing (as mentioned above)
- Road salt and sand (as mentioned above)
- Dirt, sand and dust, both blowing onto the road and being tracked by tires
- Pebbles and small stones, being run over, ground in and agitated by cars
- The occasional car that is dragging part of the muffler or the chains on a trailer hitch
- Cars occasionally skidding to a stop
- A variety of tire types, potentially including metal studded tires
Obviously, solar panels need light in order to operate. However, solar cells are fragile and therefore when they’re used outdoors, they need to be covered with some kind of protective film or panel. One problem which frequently arises is that the transparent film on the panels may become scuffed or scratched over time. Many large industrial solar systems have an additional acrylic sheet that covers the panels and can be replaced. This is important because over the years, hail storms, dust in the wind or other factors can damage the material, defusing light and severely impacting the effeciency of the solar cells. In cases where the cells have only the film applied directly to the panels and not a replaceable outer cover, a single hail storm can make the system a write-off.
Any solar panels which are going to have cars and trucks rolling over them are going to need a very tough (and thick) material to cover them. This material must be strong enough to avoid transferring much of the pressure directly to the solar cells, as this could cause damage, especially if the pressure is not symmetric across the entire cell.
An example of a similar material would be the “glass floor” of the CN Tower. Since 1994, a popular attraction at the CN Tower in Toronto has been the transparent area of floor that allows visitors to look straight down. The floor is not actually “glass” in the sense of being a single solid piece of glass. It is actually several layers of laminated glass and “plexiglass”, bonded together with a strong acrylic film and with an air gap under the first layer of laminated sheets.
The floor of the CN tower does not have to deal with much in the way of scuffing or abrasives. The only abrasive material that would be present is the tiny amount of sand or soil that would still be on the shoes of visitors after standing in line, riding the elevator up the tower and then walking to the glass floor. The stress is limited to visitors shoes, which are mostly made of rubber or plastic. About the worst thing the floor is likely to see is the occasional pair of high heels. The staff of the CN tower also try to keep the floor swept and clean, to avoid the etching effect of sand grains. The material on the top of the floor is reasonably scratch resistant as well.
Despite these efforts, it is simply impossible to keep the transparent material from being scuffed and scratched by the daily foot traffic. For this reason, the top layer of the glass floor is an easily replaced 3/8 inch “scuff plate” layer. This layer is replaced at least annually. If it wasn’t, within a few years, the floor would be so severely scratched and scuffed, it would be difficult to see anything through it. When the glass is first replaced, it looks great, but as the end of its year-long lifespan draws near, the need for replacement becomes very obvious.
(It should be noted that the company states in their FAQ’s that they intend to use “self cleaning glass.” This material uses a microscopic thin film layer of a hydrophobic material such as titanium dioxide on the surface. It is not capable of truly “cleaning” dirt or sand from their surface, but can resist grease stains, finger prints or other dirt, or to make it easy to remove with a spray of water. These materials are generally intended for use on things like PDA screens, that tend to get finger prints or on the sides of buildings, where rain will provide some level of cleaning. Since they can’t decompose dirt-only repel it, this effect is not as useful when the material is horizontal. The dirt will still sit on the surface, even if it does not adhere to it.)
Aside from the obvious possibility of optical degradation to the top layer of material, there is also the issue of foreign substances penetrating and damaging the solar cells. The panel must remain absolutely sealed in order to keep out water, road salt, oil, sand dirt or other foreign material. Even a tiny hairline crack or damage to one of the seals on a panel can allow in enough moisture to destroy the solar cells, or at the very least, condense on the inside of the transparent panel, blocking much of the light from entering. The seals on the joints of the panels as well as the transparent layer will be subjected to constant vibration. Over time, such forces can force water into even the smallest gaps and can agitate dirt and debris, even below the surface, causing it to rub and act as an abrasive, should any get in.
Based on the diagrams avaliable on the company website, it appears that the glass or transparent plastic top layer does not ride directly on the solar cells. Instead, there are depressions and circular bumps that the material rests on. This would be necessary to protect the solar cells from direct mechanical stress or vibrations. As long as the top layer remains entirely intact and does not deform enough to push on the solar cells, this should provide some level of isolation from these forces. However, it also provides a nearly perfect area for moisture to become trapped, corroding and destroying the solar cells and potentially forcing the layers apart. When water enters a gap like this, the expansion do to heating and freezing can exert tremendous pressure on structures.
The site touts a lot of benefits. It claims to have contacted leaders on this issue. Some were even dumb enough to earmark federal money for this insult to better thinking. It claims that these roads will “pay for themselves” – something even solar cells placed on dry, vibration free ground have yet to do. However, unless they plan on making the top layer out of a single sheet of synthetic diamond, (no known facilities exist that can produce synthetic diamond in such sizes – not to mention the cost) then this whole idea is a lot of hogwash before the first super-expensive slab of road is even laid down.
Based on the website and the way it is written and cited, it appears that this company is basically one person, possibly with some amateur part-timer help. It also appears that the “Solar Roadways™ lab” is the garage and back yard of this guy’s house. That’s not to say that a garage is a bad place to start a buisiness empire, as Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer demonstrated. They, however, did it based on selling a useful product and not because they got a one hundred grand cash hand out from the government.
This almost makes me want to come up with a stupid idea to get some free money for. How about solar panels on the bottom of shoes? Yeah, that’s just as good. Now I’ll just call my representative and steal some of that tax payer money for myself! (kidding… I couldn’t bring myself to do that)
This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Misc, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 7th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
This takes the cake alright, and I believe these nonsense schemes that we hear are being treated semi-seriously by governments is just smoke designed to maintain the illusion that this civilization can somehow avoid embracing nuclear energy.
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September 7th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Obviously this is a dreadful idea for roads, but could this be applied in any other area?
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September 7th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
The Curtains said:
I suppose. I mean, if you have a circumstance where you need power and solar is a good value (which is certainly the case in some circumstances, such as remote systems like seismographs, weather stations, communications relays, galvanic protection for pipelines) then solar panels on the ground… could work. It seems like the whole concept makes things unnecessarily complex and failure prone.
Generally if you have solar panels, you want to get the most out of them, as they are quite expensive, and that means you don’t want them right on the ground pointing straight up. You’d want them up high enough to avoid stuff casting shadows on them and ideally with a slight angle to the south in the Northern hemisphere or to the north in the southern hemisphere, since that is where the sun will usually be.
Also, having them on a tilt means water runs off of them and debris and dirt are less likely to stay on them.
For example, this is a solar powered relay station on a remote ridge. It’s relatively low power and far from the grid, hence the use of solar power:
http://depletedcranium.com/telecom.32201441_std.jpg
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September 7th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
WELL.Personally,i dont like the solar roadway idea.It will cost too much money to do it for sure.
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September 8th, 2009 at 12:07 am
The Curtains said:
You mean solar panels embedded in some kind of walkway or patio or parking lot? Or you mean the combination solar and LED thing?
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September 8th, 2009 at 12:38 am
Russ said:
The solar panel walk walk way idea. Though the combined panel and LED is a pretty neat idea too. I’m sure someone could come up with a good use for this thing. Though I am probably being overly optimistic here.
drbuzz0 said:
I agree with you completely here. If there are two things we have in abundance over here, it is sunlight and remote places.
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September 8th, 2009 at 6:00 am
A mirror as a road, surely the glare won’t be a safety problem as well.
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September 8th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Embedding some heat exchangers in a Californian parkinglot seems like it could provide reasonably cheap hot water much of the year. As for embedding photovoltaics, that’s just silly.
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September 8th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Embedded photovoltaics sounds really silly. Slightly less silly is a suggestion I’ve seen to have movable segments which would convert the physical action of cars going over them into electricity. In some settings, it might be practical, but certainly not as a replacement for all roadbed.
Of course, it’s irrelevant whether or not it would be effective for generating power, if he can’t convince transportation officials that the stuff is even safe to drive on and will tolerate the abuse that roads normally get. Never mind the cost. This just screams impractical and unsafe, never mind the “would it work” question.
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September 8th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Calli Arcale said:
The problem with this sort of ‘energy harvesting’ is that the energy has to come from the gas being burnt in the car’s engine and that is going to have an impact on the vehicle’s mileage. The laws of thermodynamics can’t be broken. It’s the same with the piezoelectric floors that are supposed to generate power from people walking on them, it is going to require more work to cross that floor.
To keep the effects of this below the point where it can be detected, also implies extracting such small amounts of energy as to make the system too costly for the returns.
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September 8th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
DV82XL said:
I have seen proposals to use those kind of things in areas where cars have to slow down anyway, like when entering a toll booth lane or an exit ramp, because the added resistance would just mean that the driver applies less breaks and the car slows down more due to the road surface deforming.
Unless the car is an electric car with regenerative breaking, nothing is lost that you wouldn’t lose anyway and some of it is recaptured.
That seems like it would be less harmful, but honestly, how much power do you expect to get out of an exit ramp? Would it ever be able to justify the cost? I highly doubt it. Especially considering that it would be horribly intermittent power. Car rolls over it and you get power but if no car goes by for a few minutes, no power at all. Therefore, the peizoelectric bumps or whatever are no good on their own. They need to be hooked up to buffering and storage systems or they just dirty the power on the grid by spiking it periodically.
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September 8th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Well that was my general point: to make them unnoticeable means they have to be uneconomic.
Also, since it does look more and more like BEVs and hybrids are going to make up a large part of the automotive fleet in the foreseeable future, schemes like these are just outright theft.
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September 8th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
What about the glaring error in this entire story? If a car is on the panel there will be no light hitting anything. Realistically these panels would only be used in major urban centers where there is always traffic except at night. During the day the panels would get only sporadic sun from the cars passing overhead. In a traffic jam there would be hardly any light getting through. What happens in a car accident with these panels in the road, how could this ever get approved?
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September 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I’m inclined to agree. That’s why I said “slightly less silly”.
Just about the only setting where I’d consider it reasonable would be in something like a parking ramp, where you might have some kind of device (e.g. something that’s counting cars for the purpose of calculating usage statistics or something) that maybe can use that teensy bit of power to do something useful before shutting down again until the next car happens along. But that’s about all I can think of. Anything else is just going to need more power than the road can usefully provide, which renders the whole exercise pointless.
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September 8th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
How could a solar powered road “heat itself”? That seems like a complete necessity in colder climates, since a single pass by a plow would destroy this thing forever. But think about it: the energy that is collected by the solar panels is always less than or equal to the energy that falls on the area from the sun. If you did not have solar cells there, just black asphalt, that energy would be absorbed by the road and converted to heat. Black road surface does this pretty well and that is why it is often hotter than the surroundings. (try walking on it in summer). This is usually not enough to keep it from freezing though, at least not if it gets cold enough, although sometimes the road stays wet while snow stays frozen on grass.
Your energy equation changes from:
Light -> heat
to
Light ->electricity->heat
Still the same amount of energy. the road would be a net consumer of energy or need to store it in the summer.
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September 8th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
This strikes me as extremely amateur in the description. The website doesn’t really demonstrate much understanding of “self cleaning” materials. They’re not self cleaning in the sense that they would be able to somehow remove particles of dirt or sand that are sitting on top of them. They are amazing materials, however. They are super-repellent to water and the water glides on top of them and any dust or dirt that would adhere to surfaces, like grease or exhaust grime will just glide off with the water. The water can get under it and it all just floats off. (although it isn’t universally like this. Some substances don’t come off any better).
What happens is that the material actually ionizes the water and creates a thin layer of OH ions that the water floats over. At the molecular level, it produces like charges and the water rides on this layer. The process lifts anything off of the surface and it washes away. Even very damp air can produce this effect in some cases. If it were horizontal it would not work the same way, especially if it had any kind of pit or imperfection in it.
The layer is fragile, though. It is only molecules thick. if you rubbed it with anything abrasive it would destroy it.
If you touch this material though, it feels very strange. It has almost no friction. It feels many times slicker than a Teflon frying pan. It repels the moisture on your hand and you slide across.
In the FAQ section they talk about traction from textured the glass. That won’t work. Cutting groves or ridges in it will actually make traction worse in most cases (less surface contact with the tire). You’d need to texture it on a much smaller level, like frosted or sandblasted glass. That would compromise the dirt repelling as well as optical characteristics and still would only give slightly better traction.
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September 8th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
DV82XL said:
Deformable speed humps could put less stress on the suspension of a car so there might still be an argument there (although I’d rather fixed speed cameras if you need to slow people down).
DV82XL said:
There are some people who would consider that a good idea even if they didn’t get a small pittance of power from it.
Mace said:
It would depend on the size of the cars and how much distance they are from each other when stopped, probably about a quarter would be uncovered if they are keeping a decent distance between each other when stopped, bumper to bumper and wide cars would make that worse.
Mace said:
It won’t end up approved for actual use (but it will convince a few people that the need for carbon neutral electricity can be supplied without splitting atoms).
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September 8th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I still do not understand how anyone with any logic can think that a solar producing road would ever work. Even at optional spacing and only “moderate” traffic there will still be hours of sunlight not hitting the panels due to the cars. If we are following this line of thought why don’t people place solar panels in trees? They could be up there and protect the tree from the weather while producing all the electricity we would ever need. Not to mention that the entire production would be carbon neutral if not carbon negative. Or what ever the carbon stuff is.
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September 8th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Mace said:
They address the issue of cars covering the areas here in the faqs: http://www.solarroadways.com/FAQ.htm
I think cars probably would not cover most of the road most of the time, so the total loss from just the shadow of cars might only be like 10%, which is still a considerable amount, but in reality, it is the least of the problems I see here. Wear and scuffing, bad traction, expense, moisture, snow and road salt in cold areas, plows, ice, vibrations, accidents, sand, dirt, oil. I’d put shadows on like fifth or on the list of reasons this is idiotic.
It doesn’t really matter though, since it’ll be broken within a day tops.
Also, putting solar panels in trees to “protect” them from the weather isn’t a good thing for the trees. Trees need light. Without it they can’t pull that carbon stuff out of the air to live. If you block the sun from a tree one of two things will happen: either the tree will start to grow leaves more toward the sunny areas and try to grow around and past the thing blocking the sun (in the process blocking your panel) or the tree will die trying to.
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September 9th, 2009 at 2:23 am
Jesus, finally a page on this with some sanity. I saw this on Engadget and the first thing I thought was how dumb it was. I searched and saw hundreds of blogs and comments everywhere saying how great this was and how we need to spend more money on this and how it will fix the economy and replace concrete etc etc. I had not even thought of half the crap listed here for why it won’t work, but this site is 100% dead on in each and every reason. Good logical argument that this tech is useless and any moron could see that.
Why the **** is it that anything that is called renewable gets a free ride? Even gadget geeks who should have sense about this crap line up in droves to praise it. My faith in humanity has been restored. I’m not from an oil company or the Bush family either. I just think this is a stupid idea and I’m glad someone else does too. Too bad several thousand don’t see that.
Please, spread this word and try to get some of these nuts to sit down and read this end to end and think about what it is saying. This is all stuff to think through before handing the check over to this fantasy.
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September 9th, 2009 at 2:38 am
I found this site by typing in “Solar Road DOE stupid” All the other results were articles and posts praising it with a few comments saying it was a stupid idea (90% or more saying it was a good idea and the ones saying it is stupid being jumped all over by everyone else). This site is like number 8.
Even Popular Science said that it could be “the future of energy” http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/solar-panels-built-roads-could-be-future-energy
I know PopSci is not the most hard academic science mag and it tends to be very futurist and speculative, but please guys, use your brain just a little bit!
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September 9th, 2009 at 9:50 am
C’mon, guys! There are a lot of places this would work great. Mercury, for example.
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September 9th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
When you consider how long the nights on Mercury are it might not actually work so well there.
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September 9th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
The tree idea was a joke, I mean really? But people would fall for it and think it was a good plan. The logic used is the same as the road idea. There are many many issues that would have to be solved for this BS idea to ever work. I mean solar panels in roads come on really!.
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September 9th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
You know if the morons had said they were going to run pipes under the pavement to collect energy via solar thermal, it would have at least made me do the calculations to show it was not viable, but like Mace said: solar panels, not even close.
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September 9th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
DV82XL said:
I’d be interested in that actually.
Seems to me you could get away with cheap, mass-produced modules of steel pipe and then just lay them down and braze toghether in the field. Wouldn’t the tar be pretty good at inhibiting corrosion? You’d probably want several disjoint loops for fault tolerance such that if one series of connected modules springs a leak you just take it out of use without affecting the others.
It also seems you’d want to think of some mechanism to ensure that the tarmac stays pitch-black instead of turning grey-ish with time. Preferably a passive mechanism.
In California or some other near-desert it seems like you might actually get away with it for water heating.
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September 9th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Soylent said:
Road pavement is a dynamic system that need to compensate for many forces that it is exposed to. Thermal stress both from heating and cooling, vibration, loading/unloading forces in all directions all have to be compensated for. Did you know that when a very heavy load is traveling at speed on a highway there is actually a bow wave of a few tenths of an inch set up in front of the leading wheels? All of this makes the notion of a network of pipes in these structures problematic.
It probably could be done, but it would be a greater expense than just the cost of the line and the joinery as the whole road would have to be rebuilt from the bed up to accommodate it, and one would still have the issue of getting this new energy to market.
Oh and by the way: most steam/hot water lines corrode from the inside out. Tar wouldn’t do anything for that.
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September 9th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
One big problem, as far as I can see it, is that roads don’t get nearly hot enough. You need to get the fluid hot enough to at least run a steam turbine and ideally you want it as hot as possible, in order to be able to get some descent effeciency out of it and possibly use it in a combined cycle system.
The energy of solar radiative flux per a given surface area is not enough to achieve high enough temperatures against radiative cooling. To get the fluid hot enough you need to concentrate the solar energy – to get solar radiance from a large area to heat a small area. This is done with trough mirrors or mirror arrays. You could potentially do it with lenses too. Just laying out pipes in pavement is not going to get the fluid up to a high enough temperature.
It could potentially run some kind of thermal engine that only requires a low difference in temperature. There are some sterling engines that can effectively operate with just a few degrees of heat. You might be able to run a turbine at a low pressure or with an ammonia-water mixture. But you’d get very very little useful work out of such engines.
I could see it as being useful for something like domestic hot water or heating a swimming pool or possibly even heating a small structure, if combined with a heat pump or something. But power generation? I don’t think so.
However one thing you really have to consider is that this works equally as well, if not better, by putting panels on a roof or some place like that. You’d also avoid the vibrations, stresses from cars and the deformation by ground settling. Another thing is that pipes that are embedded in pavement are very difficult to service and repair. it can mean jack-hammering up all the pavement and then repaving the area.
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September 9th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Soylent said:
There is one pice of info that would go a long way to seeing if this were even a little bit viable:
the cost of re-bar vs. the cost of steel tubing that would have about the same tensile strength.
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September 10th, 2009 at 2:17 am
DV82XL said:
I’m not talking about a high-way, I’m talking about something like all the road surfaces on a parkinglot that people do not park on. You can even disallow trucks if that would help.
DV82XL said:
“the market” is just an apartment building or swimming pool complex or something that has a large need for water that is hot enough to comfortably bathe in an owns the adjoining parkinglots. Even partial help in heating up the water is helpful and since it’s usually oil or gas heating intermittency isn’t such a problem.
DV82XL said:
Use glycol or something as a heat transfer medium and isolate the heat collector from the end users with a heat exchanger.
drbuzz0 said:
What steam turbine? It’s hot water, you shower and do your dishes in it.
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September 10th, 2009 at 2:21 am
Soylent said:
Okay, so we’re off the topic of power generation then? I’m all for using solar heating to heat water and thereby reduce fuel used to produce hot water. I’m not entirely sure I see any real advantage in putting it under a parking lot or driveway. I suppose if you happen to have a large parking lot and you don’t have a roof or vacant area to place traditional solar hot water panels, then maybe. I don’t know that it would be worth the added complexity and potential problems from embedding it in the pavement would be worth the return.
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September 10th, 2009 at 5:06 am
A quick Google search shows that the idea of solar-thermal parking lots is not new, with several research projects and a patent or two. All of them seem to revolve around producing domestic hot water. While the numbers seem to work for that application, it still holds that getting at the heat exchanger for repair once it is encased in concrete or asphalt is a consern that has not yet been satisfactorily addressed.
BTW, glycol alone is not enough to deal with corrosion issues, you have to continuously control for the O2 dissolved in the working fluid. This is not a major issue in and of itself as industrial HVAC systems have been dealing with it for years.
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September 10th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Uh, aren’t you three talking about a modified Geothermal system? A series of steel pipes under ground filled with a liquid that facilitates the transfer of heat. This is not exactly a revolutionary idea. In fact having the pipes so close to the surface means the system stops working in the winter time in Northern lattitudes. If a company wants to use their parking lot more efficiently, they just have to call up a geothermal company and install a system that will heat the building in the winter and cool it in the summer, no need to reinvent the wheel.
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September 10th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
DV82XL said:
You could also use some kind of corrosion-resistant piping that will not have major issues with corrosion even under such circumstances. Perhaps a designer stainless steel alloy – one of the specialty super corrosion resistant ones with high nickle content in addition to chromium, molybdenum and other additives. Some of them are pretty amazing.
Of course, there’s also gold. Gold is extremely corrosion resistant.
I guess both of those options would be rather expensive (especially gold) but hey, we’re talking about solar power here, so expense never matters anyway!
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September 10th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I love stainless steel. There are some types that you could make pipes out of and not worry about any kind of corrosion for hundreds of years or more.
Type 316(L) (XG) – Marine/Surgical grade – low carbon – extra high grade (meaning that it is guaranteed to have less than .01% impurities or out of spec. Hardened heat-treated would be good too. I’d imagine this would last at least several lifetimes, especially if it is high gauge. If you add a thermoplastic coating to the outside, even the more so. By the time it really starts to wear it’d be someone else’s problem.
It’s not cheap though. The super high grade stuff is used for things like implants or certain chemical containers and stuff.
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September 10th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Gold by itself is no good as it crushes being too malleable in its native state – we’d have to alloy it with platinum to get its hardness up. Antimony would do as well but I think you agree we wouldn’t want to appear to be cheapskates.
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September 11th, 2009 at 1:47 am
It sometimes seems to me that any time something has the word solar or green energy in it, it is license to make outlandish claims and get no skepticism or healthy level of critical doubt. Looking at this it seems obvious that there are a huge number of problems and they will be expensive or impossible to solve. The fact that there is so much enthusiasm for this gives me great pause. When a new idea is put out there should be a natural instinct to first ask yourself if it actually is realistic at all and look for reasons it might not be.
Not all ideas are bad ones but not all ideas are good ones either. Some appear to be good until you actually stop and think about them. If you don’t stop to think about them becasue they seem like a good idea at first glance, that is how you get yourself in trouble.
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September 11th, 2009 at 4:55 am
Unless you live in the middle of no-where or there is a special application suited to solar power, then most people can forget it. There are reasons you dont see everyone using solar; it costs alot to setup, takes 10 years to pay off on average. There are many others but I believe these are the main ones. How many years has solar had to prove itself? Has it done so yet? Unless there is some amazing increase in efficiency and reduction of production costs, it will never even begin to become the solution it currently claims to be.
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September 11th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Two points that I have not seen made yet:
- I’ve heard that solar cells actually take more energy to make than they usually generate in their lifetime
- Is there any advantage to embedding solar cells in a roadway compared to rooftops or other locations? I see lots of discussion of the problems associated with putting them in the roadway, but are there any BENEFITS at all to even consider overcoming the problems?
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September 11th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Daniel said:
It depends how you do the calculations, but it seems that they are better than break-even at this point, but not by much.
Daniel said:
No there are none. The environment is not favorable. To make it so, the road’s primary task – that of providing a running surface for vehicular traffic – would be compromised. The expense of such a system optimized for both tasks would far outweigh the value of the power generated.
Some work has been done on savaging solar heat from large paved areas, but that too, while somewhat less complex and expensive, does not show much promise for general deployment.
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September 17th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
This is quite possibly the stupidest proposal for solar cell deployment I’ve ever seen.
Have any of you heard about the recent Japanese proposal to build a space-based photovoltaic energy satellite, on the 1 GW scale? What a huge waste of money.
I recently had someone try and tell me that transparent photovoltaic windows were a great idea… except, well, you can’t have your light and eat it too, so to speak. The light either goes into lighting up the building or it gets absorbed in the cell; it can’t do both.
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September 17th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Luke Weston said:
Eh. It won’t be a waste of money because it’ll never happen. They’d need thousands of rockets, even if each were the size of the largest realistic rockets conceived.
The only money that will be lost will be on stupid concept study work and such things, since it will never actually happen.
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September 17th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
If you get the resources from space then Space Solar might actually be worth doing (of course it depends on how cheap space mining is and requires us to have space infrastructure we don’t have).
As for transparent solar cells, what I’ve heard is that they’ll only be partially transparent and so might capture 50% or so of the light and let the other 50% through (i.e. tinted windows that also generate some electricity). Whether they’ll be worth it is another matter but I wouldn’t call the idea impossible.
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September 18th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Space resources is a really limitless thing we can look forward to in the distant future, but I don’t know its something we can reasonably forsee any time soon. The cost of launching stuff is still so high that its cheaper to mine anything here.
I hear the whole idea of mining and fabricating stuff in space. That’s all fine, but it will be a while before we can really consider having production factories to make goods on the moon or asteroids. It just needs to much to build stuff. Think about a modern rocket and imagine how many factories and workers worked on that, if you think of every transistor and circuit board and pump and nut and bolt.
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September 18th, 2009 at 7:05 am
It’ll probably be cheaper to mine what we need on Earth here on Earth even with very low launch costs, but it could very well be cheaper to get bulk materials that are needed in space from space (which would include most structural material along with silicon for solar cells).
Space mining though hasn’t been proven as of yet so we only have guesses about the economics of it.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Solar Power is so cool. it is clean and renewable energy. when the cost of solar panels goes down, i think every home should be owning a mini solar power station.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Detox John said:
Dream on! For decades, there have been delirious proclamations that the world would soon run on solar energy. Those statements have always sounded too good to be true and, sure enough, they have always been false. The laws of physics impose certain inescapable shortcomings on every solar-related energy source.
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October 4th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Detox John said:
From what I’ve seen of solar power in practice and considering that no country has gotten even remotely close to 1% total electricity from solar, I don’t think it has any future even if solar cells were dirt cheap. the inherent limitations make me believe that even if the solar cells were virtually free, it would still hardly be worth the cost of the voltage regulators, inverters, copper wiring, mounting clips and other incidentals that it would involve. PV has consistently proven to be absolutely incapable of providing any kind of reliable power on the megawatt level with even remote economy (at least on earth).
I’m not saying it doesn’t do well in some applications like calculators or seismometers or weather stations or whatever, but when you’re talking megawatts – NO WAY. Much less gigawatts. Anything that can’t be scaled to produce many gigawatts is not a contender for any major function in the energy grid.
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