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Historic Route 66 To Feature Solar Road Technology (cnet.com) 202

An anonymous reader writes: The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has announced plans to upgrade a small stretch of the historic Route 66 roadway with solar-powered panels. The panels, which are created by Solar Roadways, can support the weight of cars, feature built-in LEDs to create light-up road markings, and can be used to generate electricity to donate back to the grid. The company has won a number of contracts with the U.S. Department of Transportation, though it's unlikely we'll see solar-powered roadways throughout the country anytime soon. MoDOT said it hopes to lay the first panels starting with the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center by the end of the year, The Kansas City Star reports. SolarCity released a new report recently that says their solar power systems have a usable lifetime of at least 35 years, which is 40% longer than what the market expects.
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Historic Route 66 To Feature Solar Road Technology

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  • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @08:09AM (#52447383) Homepage Journal

    Look, if you were doing rolling charging, there might be some point to this. But if you aren't, there isn't. The best place for the panels is at the point of use. The best point of use is at a vehicle charging station where people park during the day, preferably over the top of a parking garage where the panels will have all the positioning advantages and also add shade to the top level of the garage, or on a convenient flat corporate rooftop where it can be serviced without substantial hazard to workers. The best place for a panel will never, ever be a road surface, and it will usually be a roof — just probably not the roof of your home.

    • What if the power can be used to melt ice??? Then it is not useless.
      • Exactly how is it going to generate energy when it is covered by ice?

      • We already had this discussion. [slashdot.org]

        If you want a long (but informative) rant about why that is utter nonsense - here's mine. [slashdot.org]
        In short - the best they are pulling off today is 36 W, they hope to someday, with the help of magic elves and such, make 52 W.
        Only tests they made of using their panels for testing required 72 W.
        I'm guessing that's why they ended up testing it on a road in Missouri and not in... say... Wisconsin.

        Also, as any melting would be done in the winter, with shorter days and continuous snowfall -

        • If anyone wants some more detailed rants, check out these videos by an actual electrical engineer explaining, with a lot of calculations, why this is all a waste of time:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

          • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

            Rule of thumb: never try to learn science from youtubes.

            If somebody had something useful to say, they wouldn't have tried to say it on a youtube.

        • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

          We already had this discussion. [slashdot.org] If you want a long (but informative) rant about why that is utter nonsense - here's mine. [slashdot.org] In short - the best they are pulling off today is 36 W, they hope to someday, with the help of magic elves and such, make 52 W. Only tests they made of using their panels for testing required 72 W.

          Since you can't even bother to figure out what the right units are-- Watts per what?-- this rant is a fail.

          • Address your lack of units to the "creators" of said "solar roadways".
            All the numbers are quoted directly from their site. So they refer "per hexagon".

            But who cares - cause their "invention" simply doesn't provide the power needed to melt the snow.
            Not even their updated "48 W" version, which still doesn't come close to the power they had to pump into the heaters to melt the snow.
            Which is a thing their FAQ no longer mentions. It just talks about how awesome it is to melt snow - by the power drawn from the gr [solarroadways.com]

      • No, but it's much less useful than mechanically displacing the ice/snow away. Water has a latent heat of fusion of 334 kJ/kg, meaning that to melt a tonne of snow, you'd need to burn ten liters of gasoline. It simply doesn't make sense to waste energy like this.
      • Do you realize that to melt a volume of ice take the same energy as it would to raise 0 degree C water to 70 degrees C? That is a lot of electricity. Also the power to melt the ice would have to come from somewhere else as the ice would interfere with the electricity generation.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Can't speak for these guys by the Colas Wattway system, which is somewhat similar, is as much about providing a cheap and durable road surface that can be easily laid and replaced as it is about generating electricity. The energy generated is just used to offset the cost of the road surface.

      That's the point - even if it isn't the most efficient place to put solar PV, you have to surface the road anyway so if the lifetime cost is similar why not?

      • That's the point - even if it isn't the most efficient place to put solar PV, you have to surface the road anyway so if the lifetime cost is similar why not?

        The question is whether it can possibly have a similar lifetime cost, and I think the answer is no. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but I don't think so. Nothing has turned out to have a lifetime cost as low as tarmac. Other things have been tried, like concrete roads, which only have a low cost if you neglect them badly and they are horrible to drive on — witness the 101 in CA. It's embarrassing. I don't think it's going to turn out to be as durable or as easy to service as they claim.

      • Neither the installation nor the maintenance and operation costs for this particular "invention" are cheaper or simpler than the traditional road solutions.
        They are nowhere close actually.

        They require concrete foundations, with crawlspace for all the cabling.
        They have built-in lights to light up the animals crossing the road.
        They have built-in heaters to melt the snow and ice.

        It's a product of hippy thinking, not engineering a solution to a problem - which would be roadside solar panels.
        Fear for the deer? P

    • by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      The best place for solar is the same place it is for coal and gas, at a central station pushing out power over the grid. Rooftop installations don't even approach the economics of central solar. The only challenge there is storing the energy so that peak solar periods don't go to waste.

      Yes, for some uses having rooftop solar can be valuable, but those cases are premium use cases. I wouldn't argue against you having some panels, if you want, but its not the right solution for providing economical solar po

  • by jcochran ( 309950 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @08:10AM (#52447391)

    The concept of "solar roadways" has already been so thoroughly debunked, it's totally unbelievable that anyone would fund them.

    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      Solar in general is not where the funding should be going. Without storage solar will always be a highly opportunistic supplement. In the south of the US in summer it could help with AC loads but will still need to backed by lots of peaking plants powered by natural gas. Wind is better but the real investment should be in the next generation nuclear plants and honestly I would like to see more funding for some of the innovative fusion designs like the Lockheed high beta and the Polywell. Yes they are long s

      • Solar thermal is where it's at. Dish sterling CSPs are running at 33% efficiency, versus 14% collection for standard-grade PVs and 19% for extremely-high-end multi-band crystal PVs. Salt towers are viable; for under-road, you can actually collect a lot of blunt, low-temperature heat, enough to warm buildings. You can concentrate this heat by running the air through a compressor with the compression chamber attached to a cooling loop, but I don't know if that will give you much gains with the power avail

        • by Raenex ( 947668 )

          I've theorized that a high-efficiency heat pump--a quantum tunneling junction, in particular--could circulate atmosphere and concentrate heat well enough to use a compressor and compressed-air engine to leverage atmosphere heat, essentially using the entire earth's atmosphere as a solar battery being charged continuously by the sun

          I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

      • Grid storage has historically been cost prohibitive. However several big energy players are working with the auto industry to re-purpose [thinkprogress.org] used batteries from EV's and hybrids which is driving the cost of grid storage down making it more economically feasible.
        You are correct that nuclear is the way to go based on existing technology but the NIMBY attitude is so strong getting them built anywhere is a monumental task and even if they get built face continuous resistance and scrutiny on a much larger scale tha
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Jones' videos have been thoroughly debunked. The test cycle way in Europe exceeded expectations and proved that the technology is viable.

      Jones' mistake is that he doesn't understand the economics. Most of the cost of paving a road is not the surface material, it's the labour and the equipment. Solar road surfaces might not be optimal for producing energy, but they don't have to be. They just have to pay for themselves and then some over their lifetime. I don't know about these guys, but in Europe Colas has

      • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:23AM (#52448843)

        Jones' mistake is that he doesn't understand the economics. Most of the cost of paving a road is not the surface material, it's the labour and the equipment.

        If the marginal cost of making a road a solar road is $x / Watt of installed capacity, and the number of Watt-hours generated over the expected lifetime adds up to a value of $y, and x > y, then the labor and equipment cost doesn't matter. It's never worth it.

        You're demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding about opportunity costs [wikipedia.org] and percentages which is all too common (and is a large part of how marketers exploit people's purchasing habits to upsell you). That if a cost of an option exceeds its benefit, that you can somehow make it worthwile by reducing its percentage share of the overall cost. i.e. When a product is 100% of the cost, it's not worth it. But if you add it onto another much more expensive purchase, it's now "only" 1% of the cost and that somehow makes it now worth it. Yes the percentage got smaller, but it's irrelevant. You're comparing against an absolute benefit, so you need to use the absolute cost to make a proper comparison. No those floor mats aren't worth $150. But add them onto a $25,000 car, and suddenly people will pay it because it only adds 0.6% to the price of the car.

        You can argue that the cost of a solar road surface is reduced compared to plain panels because the people making the road would be doing the labor anyway, and that it's no additional work to lay down the PV material since (for installation purposes) it behaves similar to other material they're already using to make the road (I dunno, I haven't read up on solar roads). Or you could argue the PV material replaces some other material they're using to build the road, and so represents less additional cost than just the PV material alone. But you cannot argue that it somehow magically becomes worth it because you're tacking on a bunch of other costs (labor and equipment) which you would be paying for anyway.

        Another crucial aspect here is that electricity cost is about 20-35 cents/kWh in Europe, while it's only 11.5 cents/kWh in the U.S. So a solar project that's marginally "worth it" in Europe can be a total money loser in the U.S. (unless you're in Hawaii).

      • by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:25AM (#52448863)
        The idea is pure lunacy. Here's more details on your test cycle path from thunderf00t [youtube.com]. They got about half of the power you'd get from putting the solar panels on a roof.
      • Most of the cost of paving a road is not the surface material, it's the labour and the equipment.

        Agreed, which is why I think solar roadways are doomed to failure. Patching a crack in a traditional roadway involves throwing a patch of asphalt in the pothole by a couple of unskilled construction workers. Patching a damaged solar roadway would necessitate replacing an entire segment of roadway.

        In engineering, when combining two functions in one item you're usually looking for complimentary requirements that can be used to provide synergy between the two. The requirements of roadways and solar panels are

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Patching a crack in a traditional roadway involves throwing a patch of asphalt in the pothole by a couple of unskilled construction workers.

          Maybe on a quiet rural road that they can close off. On a motorway though, you are looking at lane closures, cones, emergency recovery if the hard shoulder is out of action, signage etc. The finish has to be good too, on a high speed road. Pulling up a slab and replacing it, even if you don't bother to hook up the electronics for power generation, probably has a similar cost all said and done.

      • Care to reference any of these claims?

      • "Jones' videos have been thoroughly debunked. The test cycle way in Europe exceeded expectations and proved that the technology is viable."
        It produced HALF of the energy produced by the same surface taken as a rooftop or side panel.
        "They just have to pay for themselves and then some over their lifetime."
        There is no way such marking pay themselves over a such time, when really self reflecting paint do the same job, and repainting is far far easier than a trench or electronic. What happens if it cracks o
      • They put the thing on a bike path in Europe, it did nothing to validate the model. These things will easily be a factor or two more expensive than conventional road construction and the failures will require massive spending to fix. (you can find the pictures of the broken glass and panels on the google image search).

        Do you know how you tell something is a fraud? When people are doing shit outside their area of expertise. Pond's a Fleschman were chemists claiming to do physics and none of these solar roadwa

      • Jones' videos have been thoroughly debunked. The test cycle way in Europe exceeded expectations and proved that the technology is viable.

        I'd be interested in reading/watching those debunkings, could you share some of what you're looking at?

    • by dave420 ( 699308 )

      No, one or more implementations of solar roadways have been "debunked" (read: shown to be impractical). That does not automatically mean all implementations are equally flawed. By your logic the very first attempt at anything must be wildly successful otherwise it will be cast aside. Yay.

  • I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )
    If a portion of the power might be usable to de-ice the roads?

    Perhaps before adoption as roadways, these panels might be put to use as sidewalks. In just our place alone, we have over 800 square feet of sidewalk. Its also the area on our property that receives the most insolation.

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      "If a portion of the power might be usable to de-ice the roads?"
      Sure because ice always forms on roads on bright sunny days right around solar noon.

      • Use solar power to pressurize tanks or some other form of power storage, use off peak power to keep roads clean.

        • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          Wow....
          Okay you want to use expensive solar power and then store it to melt ice off the roads... Since this is in winter you do understand that solar power will be in short supply right? And you want to build how many pressure tanks and turbines and pay for upkeep on the system?

          Here let me make this really simple for you. Why not just make the roads black! The sun will heat them and keep them warm enough for the snow and ice to melt...
          Wait they are black and that is not what happens could it be that in wint

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

        "If a portion of the power might be usable to de-ice the roads?" Sure because ice always forms on roads on bright sunny days right around solar noon.

        I have solar panels that produce electricity on non-bright sunny days from morning to afternoon.

        I think you are getting your solar power production concepts from 1940's tomes. And I wonder if somehow the power might be stored some way. Naahhhh, that's crazy talk.

        • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          "I have solar panels that produce electricity on non-bright sunny days from morning to afternoon."
          Are they perfectly flat or are they at an optimal angle facing south? Also what percentage of power on a cloudy winter morning do you get vs say 7 am on cloudy winter day.
          And since the coldest temps at NIGHT and that ice often starts as SNOW how much would your panel make under snow and or at night... NONE.

          "And I wonder if somehow the power might be stored some way. Naahhhh, that's crazy talk."
          Yea it pretty muc

          • I can tell you from experience that my solar panels produce about 1/10th on a sunny winter day that they do in summer.

            Raining or overcast? Practically zero, 1/20th or less.

            • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

              So from your data the idea of using a solar road to deice it's self is in technical terms dumb as a box of rocks.
               

    • by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      The website says the road remains free of snow/ice so I'm assuming there is a heating element built in.

      Without diving too far into the website, it seems as if the design also allows utilities to run "through" the panels.. likely in molded conduits on the bottom.

      Depending on the wear rate, even if it only provided enough energy to ensure no snow/ice formation as well as run the lights built in to the panels, it might be a good option. Seems like it'd be better for sidewalk applications, though, or dri
    • Whatever the use for the electricity... lighting, heated road, heck.. vending machines at convenient but otherwise deserted points...

      Putting regular cheap thin-film solar panels OVER the road is infinitely cheaper, more efficient (angle control) and safer than trying to replace cheap and malleable asphalt with fucking tempered-glass tiles containing expensive electronics, and having to maintain/replace those as they get mangled by heavy traffic. Have you ever seen a paved road?? Paved pedestrian walkways

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Everything about this article is pretty much garbage. Let's pick this apart.

    The solar panels are being installed in a sidewalk as a test to see if they might be viable in other places like roads. Nobody is installing solar panels in roads yet.

    Potholes shouldn't be an issue because the solar panels include a heating element, which should prevent many issues with thermal expansion and being covered with snow and ice. Despite what Slashdot commenters think, people have actually thought of these problems.

    The go

    • > Potholes shouldn't be an issue because the solar panels include a heating element

      OMG, do you have any idea how much power you need to melt an inch of snow?!? There's a reason we use snowplows!

      > and reduce maintenance costs

      Yeah, because we all know how great glass is in high-wear areas when it comes to reducing maintenance.

      Ugh!

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        OMG, do you have any idea how much power you need to melt an inch of snow?!? There's a reason we use snowplows!

        I've seen lots of heated driveways in Utah, and in the mountains an inch of snow is nothing. I've only seen them while skiing, so I don't know whether the standard practice is to plow/shovel them and then just let the heat melt the residue and keep ice from forming or whether they're capable of melting a full load of snow.

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      Agreed that the article is garbage. However, the comments aren't far off.

      Tests on sidewalks? Why not just talk about sidewalks, then, rather than vehicular roads? If the test is viable on a sidewalk, then putting it into the road makes the test useless and you start all over again.

      Potholes - heating is THE MOST energy intensive thing you can do. And having elements in one part of the panel and snow on another, that's going cause problems with differing expansions which is why we have potholes in the fir

  • I am very pro solar power, I believe in the appropriate climates we should have most of our power generated from panels, but this is completely idiotic! Plain ol' durable asphalt has the grip required by tyres and can sort of handle the wear and tear from traffic and weather (lasts a few years), why replace it with something fancy? It is a "solution" searching for a problem. What's wrong with putting panels next to/over the road? Oh, that would be too easy and not costly enough huh? Who in their right mind

  • ... to just let them try it and find out for themselves, because scientifically literate people telling someone who supports this all of the entirely valid reasons about why it won't work don't mean squat when a person really *wants* to believe something, and that is blinding them to the arguments against it. The only thing left for them to listen to is their own, hard-knocks experience.
    • One of the main points of engineering is to take something that currently doesn't work and improve upon it to make it work. The problem is that we don't currently know why it won't work which is why it's necessary to start small and then scale up.
      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        Oh, that's not true in this case... educated people already *do* know why it won't work. The problem is that that there are people still think it would be a good idea despite having heard all of those reasons... they *want* to believe it will work, and this is blinding them to the realities of exactly why it won't work. They believe that the reasons that have been given for why it won't work simply will not apply to solar roadways, despite being unable to give any rational basis for why the reasons it wo
  • Dumbest idea ever (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @09:15AM (#52447787) Homepage

    This really is the most moronic idea I have ever seen. Glass is not exactly on the list of best materials to use for:

    1) high traffic areas
    2) load bearing capacity
    3) coefficient of friction, especially when wet

    That last part is especially laughable when you consider their solution, a pattern of pimple-like bumps on the top. Ok, so those will last exactly as long as the first snowfall, at which point the plough will make it rather smooth again. And, of course, as anyone knows, rough roads will produce lower gas milage, so the effect of this surface might be to use *more* energy.

    And everyone really needs to go and look at their youtube videos where they show how it's wired up, which requires a trench to be dug under the roadway and kept waterproof because it's stuffed with expensive non-waterproof electronics.

    What a joke.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Have a look at Wattway: http://www.wattwaybycolas.com/... [wattwaybycolas.com]

      Their surface isn't smooth, and they claim it provides adequate grip. 10 year lifetime in heavy traffic areas, laid on top of tarmac for ease of installation.

    • by fgouget ( 925644 )

      That last part is especially laughable when you consider their solution, a pattern of pimple-like bumps on the top. Ok, so those will last exactly as long as the first snowfall, at which point the plough will make it rather smooth again.

      And yet asphalt is not smooth either, even after snowplows have been run through many times...

  • There's been a lot of speculation here about reducing thermal expansion. One of the reasons roads in Wisconsin need to be paved so frequently is that they have to be designed to handle a temperature range of -20F to 100F. This means that asphalt roads here have a lot more asphalt. When you look at a southern state, they handle a much narrower temperature range of say 50F to 130F. They can get away with lower asphalt content, which means the roads are more durable. Northern roads also have to content with fr
  • Unbelievable: they found a sucker. Of course, in this case, the sucker is a bureaucrat paying with other people's money. So that makes it ok.

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