Solar roadways

[jmra]

Wouldn't mind having this on my driveway.
[youtube][/youtube]

[RoyGBiv]

Very interesting idea, but there are lots of engineering and fiscal obstacles to overcome.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1831 ... crazy-idea" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jmra]

Very interesting idea, but there are lots of engineering and fiscal obstacles to overcome.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1831 ... crazy-idea" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I understand, but it would be neat to have in the driveway and around the pool.

[baldeagle]

Very interesting idea, but there are lots of engineering and fiscal obstacles to overcome.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1831 ... crazy-idea" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That article looks entirely at the cost side and not at the benefit side. The real question with solar power is what is the ROI. If you combine solar power with smart roadways, as they suggest, you gain efficiencies you can't get in other ways. So the idea isn't quite as far fetched as the article suggests.

The article includes this:

Rooftop solar arrays are reaching the point where they’re actually quite cost effective in certain parts of the world — and they’re much, much cheaper than building a Solar Roadway — but adoption is still very low.

Adoption is low because the ROI isn't there. It might be there with roadways. They have to be built anyway. And they have to be maintained. And you have to factor in the reduction in cost due to a reduction in accidents. (Whether or not that will actually happen is an open question, but that's what testing is about.) If you reduce electricity downtime to zero, that is a net plus. So is removing powerlines and other obstructions from the roadways.

Overall it's intriguing and it will be fascinating to see if it gets adopted. The Wright brothers offered their airplane technology to every major government in the world: the US War Department, England, France, Germany, and Russia. They all turned them down saying they were crackpots and their idea would never work.

Bureaucrats and critics are seldom right.

[RoyGBiv]

^^^ While I understand your points about "other gains" and "you're going to build it anyway", closing the gap between $15/ for asphalt and $70/ for this road would require a huge column of "other" benefits. and that $70/ doesn't include other costs to address known engineering issues (impact performance, keeping the glass clean, replacing damaged/dead/broken panels/components, etc.

I've been a big fan of alternative energy since before I wrote my senior thesis on it in the early 80's. Unfortunately, we've wasted money on Solyndra instead of putting it towards basic research to improve efficiencies/materials and improving the ROI.

[rotor]

The holy grail is fusion. Solar of course is a byproduct of fusion ( the sun ) but the only hope for the future as far as energy goes is figuring out how to contain fusion. In North Texas the wish is for water right now not energy.

[RoyGBiv]

The holy grail is fusion. Solar of course is a byproduct of fusion ( the sun ) but the only hope for the future as far as energy goes is figuring out how to contain fusion. In North Texas the wish is for water right now not energy.

The best solution will be local, and storage is a big issue.

Wind blows constantly near the coasts, and other places.
The earth's crust is thinner in some places than others (geothermal).
The sun shines all day, every day and its energy lands somewhere on the planet.

Fusion is likely cleaner than fission, but they both have the potential for catastrophic combustion, a flaw that gives other energy sources an important advantage. Fusion also suffers (IMO) from the need for transmission over long distances. That model works well if you are an electric utility, but local (on site) generation would be able to unwind all that infrastructure cost.

[rotor]

The holy grail is fusion. Solar of course is a byproduct of fusion ( the sun ) but the only hope for the future as far as energy goes is figuring out how to contain fusion. In North Texas the wish is for water right now not energy.

The best solution will be local, and storage is a big issue.

Wind blows constantly near the coasts, and other places.
The earth's crust is thinner in some places than others (geothermal).
The sun shines all day, every day and its energy lands somewhere on the planet.

Fusion is likely cleaner than fission, but they both have the potential for catastrophic combustion, a flaw that gives other energy sources an important advantage. Fusion also suffers (IMO) from the need for transmission over long distances. That model works well if you are an electric utility, but local (on site) generation would be able to unwind all that infrastructure cost.

Everything you say is true but the holy grail is still fusion and once we can figure out how to do it we will have almost unlimited inexpensive energy. Probably not in my lifetime. I read not long ago that one of the big labs had produced fusion for a microsecond or so creating more energy than they put in. A start of course. Cold fusion didn't pan out. Everything else that we do is good until we get to the endpoint which will most likely be contained fusion.

[cb1000rider]

The best solution will be local, and storage is a big issue.
Wind blows constantly near the coasts, and other places.
The earth's crust is thinner in some places than others (geothermal).

The best solution is local because it avoids transmission losses. Power companies (like mine) that don't at least do minimums to encourage consumer production of energy are absolutely doing it wrong. Why not at least offer the same deal to your members/consumers that you're paying for wholesale upstream? ... End of my local power company rant...

Wind is interesting. I got certified to install it (specific product). When I flushed out all the details, I declined to install it in residential instances - it's limitation is that you need to regulate the rate at which energy is produced. In residential installs, they do this by storing to batteries and then using this power. That means I'm maintaining moving parts, a set of a batteries, and the upstream power conversion. I do solar installs all day long (grid feed), but stay away from wind for residential.

In Texas, solar produces the most power when you need it (when you need your AC). It's not got paybacks in the <10 year range, especially if you have local incentives..

Solar roads? maybe...

[baldeagle]

When I looked at solar, it didn't pay for itself in 20 years, even with incentives.

[RoyGBiv]

I know you all realize this, but, perhaps worth stating... In the grand scheme of things Alternative Energy "incentives" = progressive wealth transfer.

Incentives have some usefulness in getting demand kick-started so that production process can run at an efficient scale, but incentives that carry on for more than a few years are just wealth transfers in support of some politicos agenda.

In the case of alternative energy, it's best to view the economics by removing incentives from the ROI equation to get a real ROI, not an individual project ROI.

[baldeagle]

All true, RoyGBiv, but when the ROI isn't there even with the incentives, you have to wonder what the motivation is for continuing to offer them.

[baldeagle]

BTW, WRT storage, their FAQ states:

We designed Our prototype to use "virtual storage", meaning that any excess energy is placed back to the grid during daylight hours and then can be drawn back out of the grid at night. This is important as solar energy is only available during the day, but our heating elements need to have power at night in the wintertime in northern climates for snowy weather. However, we can add any current or future energy storage devices to our system. For instance, batteries and flywheels can be placed in the Cable Corridor for easy access, if customers wish to incorporate them. We chose to not use batteries in our prototype system. We fear that, if we make that the norm, our environmental project could leave mountains of lead acid battery in its wake.

I'm not sure what that means. Big huge capacitors? Millions of little capacitors? The energy has to go somewhere if it's not being consumed. What are the alternatives?

[cb1000rider]

When I looked at solar, it didn't pay for itself in 20 years, even with incentives.

When was the last time you looked and what are your incentives? If you know how many watts you're looking at, I can give you the "real cost" to your installer (or pretty close). It's a high margin business.

A retail priced install in my area, where we've got no incentives beyond federal, and a power company that doesn't purchase my excess, my payback is probably in the 20-year range.

Areas like Austin that had huge local incentives on top of federal have pretty quick payback, even considering that their requirement that installers do things like have $1M of insurance payable to Austin (drives up the cost of installs). When you can get retail installs that pay back in less than 10 years, you should bite...

The price of solar has dropped radically in the last 5 years... I'd say that it's dropped radically in the last 3. Full disclosure: I don't have solar power (yet) - even though I can install it myself and my payback would be in the <10 year range. It's largely because I need to put up a structure to hold the panels and do some additional tree clearing... It's on the list of stuff to spend money on. I do have solar water, but my house isn't oriented right and I have way too many trees.

In regard to incentives being simple wealth transfer for the political elite: There may be some truth to that, but it also smells like party line politics. I'm not into running up the Federal debt by providing tax incentives, but a few things to consider:
1) These are federal tax advantages to the middle class and better. They're not typically going to your on-welfare single mother.
2) Without these incentives, no one starts to install this technology. So it stays small scale and really expensive. The incentives provided a "break through" point where people could start doing these installs and the technology started becoming more and more affordable due to mass production and international competition.
3) This is good technology. It makes us more energy independent as a country. If you like nothing else about it, like that. It's like creating small completely "green" power plants in people's backyard.
4) The more residential solar we have, the less infrastructure we need to carry and distribute that power. It helps decrease everyone's utility bills. A large part of your cost of power is transmission cost and transmission loss. That's minimized if your neighbor generates power.


In regard to "storing" energy.. All of that technology has finite lifetimes. Largely, that's why I don't do off-grid solar or wind energy. I don't want to deal with battery maintenance and expense.

[Jaguar]

From what I've read, wind and solar are mucking up the grid in places that have high alternative energy production.

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9559 ... UK.html?fb" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).