This thread is inspired by another: view original post
Just gonna tl;dr this shit since this needs to get cleared up, fast.
-Each tile costs roughly $3,000 per square foot, not including cost of maintenance and installation (holy shit that's a lot!)
-Roads are not an ideal surface for solar panels because they are frequently covered by cars, dirt, oil, water, etc
-Glass is unsuitable to drive on
-The government would need to buy a separate power line system (cannot be simply "plugged into" existing power lines)
-Solar panels are optimally angled towards the sun, not straight up
-The issue with solar isn't the lack of space to put panels (they go very well on roofs, parking cover, etc.), it's the current cost of producing and maintaining panels vs. the value of the energy they generate
Watch the video for some more. Solar roadways were never going to happen. Maybe next time you guys will use a bit more scrutiny after watching a video with a caricatured person saying "whoooaaa" liked a stoned dumbass, or telling you that the world is going to look like Tron.
-
5 Replies in this Sub-ThreadEdited by Le Dustin xddddd: 6/3/2014 7:45:49 PM[quote]-Glass is unsuitable to drive on[/quote]Just as a another technicality, glass can be as strong as steel, if you're concerned that they may crack. The glass can also be textured so that they can provide perhaps even better traction than asphalt/bricks/rocks/dirt (the glass would have to be ridged in the right way so that it doesn't deflect the Sun's rays, but this is a surmountable problem).
-
Edited by HurtfulTurkey: 6/4/2014 3:10:13 AMI'm not concerned about cracking, although that's a legitimate issue. I'm concerned that the artificial friction created by small bumps in the glass will rapidly be smoothed away by hundreds of cars driving over them daily. There's a reason we use asphalt, and not glass. Asphalt naturally channels water away, and when it's worn down you don't lose friction because it just exposes more layer of rock.
-
I don't want to defend the idea too vehemently because the company did claim that they still needed further testing, specifically on scratches and scrapes, but they did offer an explanation for how that issue would be dealt with. [url=http://www.solarroadways.com/faq.shtml]According to their FAQ: (#27)[/url] [quote][b]How are you going to handle skid marks from tires? Won't that block your sunlight?[/b] We weren't able to officially test for that during our Phase II funding from the FHWA as it wasn't in the budget. However, we wondered about that too, so we conducted an experiment. It's not very scientific, but here is what we did: We took a rubber soled shoe and scuffed a section of concrete and a section of our glass. We used a bike tire to create a skid mark on both the concrete and the glass. The rubber on the glass came off with the simple wipe of a finger: it didn't stick well to the glass. That wasn't the case with the porous concrete: we may now have permanent skip marks there! We think that the simple act of the next tire rolling over a skid mark on the glass will be enough to loosen the material, which will then blow off or be removed the next time it rains. We are anxious to do some testing to be sure.[/quote]
-
-