I-96 Solar Roadway?

[darwinism]

An interesting and pie-in-the-sky concept to turn the Motor City on its head.

The Indiegogo videos even mentioned Detroit and Hart Plaza specifically !

http://www.cnet.com/news/solar-roadw...iegogo-record/

The section of I-96 being completedly ripped up could be rebuilt using this on a small scale as a trial. Imagine if the Motor City can be the first major entity to implement such a revolutionary technology.

[Scottathew]

It looks like a cool technology, but it needs to prove out a little further before you see it used on such an important artery.

The main things that I would like to see how solar roadway would hold up to traffic and crashes, and the cost compared to a normal roadway.

[gazhekwe]

It looks so great and needs a major trial. I bet it would cost a lot more to install than the junk they put down that breaks apart in a decade. It might be great to do it on something that is already scheduled to be completely replaced but it would likely take a ton of pre-planning and development. Surface prep, availability of supplies, worker training for example.

Maybe pick a smaller segment somewhere and really test it out where there are pedestrians as well as truck and car traffic, like Southfield and Ten Mile, the whole intersection, or Greenfield between Ten Mile and Seven Mile. Nominate your favorite section for replacement and testing. Let's start planning a project in the near future.

[Jimaz]

That article links to Solar road could change how we power the world, which has a video and a lot more information.

It seems expensive but if it's far more durable and has so many other benefits, it just might fly. They also talk about using heating elements to deal with snow removal.

That would surely require a lot more manufacturing work than asphalt!

[ndavies]

I don't see them putting it on freeways in the near future. They are going to want to choose places that have much lower traffic speeds and volumes. That will allow the cells to live longer.

They'll probably start with parking lot aisles and access roads. No point in putting it under parking spaces if you expect a car to be parked there. The parking lot is always close to and proportional in size to the facility that needs the electricity. Being close to the end user will limit long distance electric line losses. That will make the system more efficient.

[wolverine]

It would be a waste to invest in this application beyond experimental prototypes at the moment. The efficiency and components going into photovoltaics is improving so dramatically at the moment, the solar road would be obsolete and terribly inefficient before it ever became operational. Better to wait until the technological improvements plateau a bit and then the technology can be applied toward something useful beyond a laboratory setting.

[Huggybear]

With all these overweight trucks driving over it, it will last, let's see [looks at watch].

HB

[RO_Resident]

That article links to Solar road could change how we power the world, which has a video and a lot more information.

It seems expensive but if it's far more durable and has so many other benefits, it just might fly. They also talk about using heating elements to deal with snow removal.

That would surely require a lot more manufacturing work than asphalt!

The video is a little bit of truth, a little bit of propaganda, and a fair bit of bullshit. That's not to say that such a road [[or road surface treatment) may have uses in the future.

First, a little bit of truth--sure, roads provide a lot of open area that can be used to harness the sun's energy. Look at our urban heat islands--might as well use some of that energy to power our grid.

A little bit of propaganda--the photocells aren't really they road. They are just a surface treatment. It looks like part of the selling point is their 'smart grid/water conduit/internet hidey-hole' base. I speculate that they are trying to create a precision-manufactured box culvert as a base for their photocells. There has to be pretty strict manufacturing tolerances to place the location posts in the right location. [[Remember, they are selling the modularity of the photocells).

Now on to the bullshit.
a) The cells are not made out of wonder material. They will be subjected to forces, weather extremes, ice, water, heaving, water, incompressible fines that lodge in joints, water, oil, rubber, water, scratching, polishing, etc., etc. The cells are mechanically fastened to the road base, not bonded. 2 inches of anything is not going to carry a lot of load. You figure the typical cross section of a residential driveway is 4" of concrete. A 40 ton boulder lands on your roadway, and you only need to replace a handful of solar panels? Give me a break.

b) Did I mention water? Water is the enemy of roads and electronics. You will see a lot of exposed joints in the hexagonal design. Water will get in between the joints. The water will carry fine sand and other sediments. Over time, the cells will start faulting--the ride will be bumpy as hell. [[Hell, in their video, it looks like there are 1/4" gaps and 1/4" differences in the height of the cells before significant traffic.)

c) They severely underestimate the cost of melting ice on roads. On a small scale, fine. But as snow is compacted into ice, it gets a lot more expensive to get rid of the frozen stuff. They already state that melting ice will be done by the existing power grid. It is incredibly expensive to heat anything with electricity.

No doubt the will find their niche, but I have a hard time seeing them replace a significant amount of the existing road network.

Oh, and if you want to see some recycling, head on over to the I-96 construction. There are 70' piles of concrete rubble waiting to be crushed into the new freeways base.

[paulj313]

It would be pretty cool to see Hart Plaza covered with them, I think that would be a good starting point and could draw more people and events to the park.

[Mikeg]

Horizontal solar panels aren't very efficient in locations like Detroit during the short days of December where the sun only reaches a zenith of 24 degrees above the horizon. And even if they solve the load-bearing issues for the "glass" surface of the cells, providing wet pavement abrasive friction for tires that would be comparable to that of asphalt and concrete will be a major challenge.

[Huggybear]

RO_Resident - Good points, but you left out the extremely corrosive compounds used to de-ice, particularly the ones used this past winter… moisture isn't the biggest killer of electronics; it's the mineral content in the water that does the permanent damage.

HB

[Detroitnerd]

Why not just turn I-96 into the stem of a metrowide PRT system?

[DetroitPlanner]

Like RO Resident, I too wonder about how these would hold up to Water and Oil. I for one would not want to be on a glass road covered with a thin film of oil. Water will infiltrate this system, make no bones about it. What will happen then? Yeah eventually you could theoretically use it to run electric cars, but is that practical? No. How would events like the Woodward Cruise be handled? Much of the road network has tree cover, particularly in residential areas. Would those be electric? What would you use in the transfer period? You know that the gasoline cars will still be out there getting oil all over the glass panels. If you are using the electricity from the road to run the cars, then how would they get around once they hit dirt roads that so many rural areas have? Fly across the United States, you will see that there is seriously a lot of land out there where this technology may not be possible economically. There is a whole lot of nothing, or ag uses.

As a concept though I love it. It needs a lot more work and sets up new issues. It kind of reminds me of a local guy who was pushing something 10-15 years ago known as the Interstate Traveller.