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There is not one single place where there is a solar roadway. Provide evidence of a ROADway please that is in use and has been working well and efficiently. Roadway, not walkway. Not a bike path. A road. As in something cars and trucks drive on frequently.
Ah, goal post moving at its finest.
Yes, if you exclude test facilities (e.g. the Solar Roadways parking lot in Idaho or Colas Wattway test roads in France) then there are none which "cars and trucks drive on frequently" and we have efficiency data for. The public facilities with verifiable efficiency data are currently limited to pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
It isn't clear whether the Rt 66 project or the public Wattway installations in France will be rolled out first, but one or both should meet your 'requirements' within a year... at which point you'll no doubt say they still 'do not count' if they cost more than rooftop solar or some other new dodge to continue pretending that they don't exist.
Some people will always be determined NOT to 'get it'.
This talk reminds me of a friend that still thinks the solar roadway thing is possible. I have to laugh and point out what has been happening, the science behind it, etc.. and show it is a total crock. He refuses to listen though when I point out that they spent thousands just to learn that solar panels get more energy when they are tilted.
Picture of a tractor on test road section
article critical of solar roadways
Would solar roadways work - written before first project was finished
Company
Wiki
solar roadways Wikipedia article
The first public installation was in Jeff Jones Town Square in Sandpoint, Idaho. It opened to the public on September 30, 2016. As a pilot install it is for walkways only.[13] This installation consists of 30 Solar Roadways SR3 panels covering an area of roughly 150 square feet. The cost of this installation was roughly $60,000 with the majority of the money coming from a grant from the Idaho Department of Commerce ($47,134), and a $10,000 grant from the Sandpoint Urban Renewal Agency. [14]
This thing (Sandpoint...hey...isn't that in Golarion...) has been up for less than 30 days, a bit premature to say it's failed...don't you think?
It's not even at the "full roadway has been built" stage yet and you are making statements regarding whether it's successful or a failure?
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Source blindness is really really bad. As a scientist, the validity of your source is fundamental to any research and claim you can make. If you start dropping poor sources in to arguments, then people just ignore what you have to say.
Mind you, the guy in the clip said some interesting stuff.
Now, if you look at the design of the solar panels they are talling about, you'll notice it is a series of mini panels inside a larger and more robust case. High enough that you can in fact mount the individual solar cells on a pivot system that can indeed tilt each cell to face the sun. Not the entire case, just the little cells within the bigger hexagon. Given how light the cells themselves are compared to what an entire panel is, it would take minimal energy to make it rotate. Even better, plastics are being worked on now that alter their structure with sun exposure. In short order, we can build panels protected from damage and able to tilt automatically for maximum exposure using modern plastics. They'll function like sun flowers inside a non breakable glass house.
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But wouldn't it be better to have them on things like rooftops? Maybe up on posts next to roads so they can get more light, more often?
Wouldn't it be better to put solar panels near the equator where they will get light even MORE often?
Sure, you put solar panels in the most ideal locations first. That makes sense.
The question is... why would you STOP there? Yep, roofs are better... but there is only so much properly angled roof space in the world. Not enough to cover our CURRENT power needs, let alone projections of future needs.
The whole point of covering 'roads' (and other 'flat surfaces for transportation') with solar generation is that we already have enormous amounts of such spaces... enough to easily cover our projected power needs for a long time. Thus, we don't have to devote a lot of ADDITIONAL space to solar power generation... we could do it by allowing existing infrastructure to serve double duty.
Better yet, roads inherently go to places where there are people. Thus, if the roads were electrified they would serve as an electrical grid covering the vast majority of our power delivery needs... meaning we could actually free up space because the existing separate power grid would no longer be needed.
CBDunkerson, for you saying I am moving the goalposts. Roadways mean it is a road.
So... are you saying ONLY the 'road' versions of the technology are impossible / bad? The bike paths, sidewalks, driveways, and parking lots are all fine and you are JUST complaining about the automotive roads (i.e. currently limited to Colas test facilities in France)? 'cuz that doesn't seem to be the case. Last I checked, sidewalks were flat (your only ACTUAL objection thus far) too.
Plus, like I said, admitting to spending thousands and reporting that with recent testing, they discovered that they collect more power when at an angle. That's kind of obvious and has been known for a long time.
Again, a biased presentation of the facts. They knew angled panels generated more power. The point of the tests was to determine HOW MUCH more power... as it turns out, not so much. Again, yep properly angled panels are better. Mobile sun tracking panels better yet. But 'A is better than B, therefore B does not work' is NOT logic. Flat solar panels can still generate plenty of electricity... so the fact that they generate LESS than angled is NOT a reason not to use them... any more than the fact that angled panels generate less than sun tracking panels is a reason not to mount panels on angled roofs.
I don't have much to post but I will post this. Some people will just get angry about the source though, but I try to have source blindness.
You must be failing in that, otherwise you'd presumably have encountered a source pointing out the logical fallacy inherent in the 'angled is better, therefore no flat' argument and/or the reason they performed the flat vs angled testing. Or do you mean that you intentionally blind yourself to the bias of your sources? That'd explain it.
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Deaths from U235 need to account for those cancer victims who mine it, the people who died from Chernobyl, the people who died and are still dying from radiation leak from Fukishima, the people exposed during early nuclear testing around the world.
Pretty sure those numbers are going to eclipse your wind turbine ones.
As for the 3 degree margin you mentioned, you're correct. We're going to hit that even if we stopped all CO2 production right now. That's why it's not just alternate energy sources being looked, but greenhouse reducing schemes as well.
For example, scientists just managed to convert CO2 into ethanol using small electrodes, which can be run from solar panels. Ethanol burns much cleaner than normal fuel and produces much less co2. Effectively running a car in a way similar to plants, bacteria and fungi. Use sunlight to make a burn able fuel, which you can then recycle again.
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Actually Quark, the majority of the stuff I listed above is from nuclear reactors and mining for Uranium for use in nuclear reactors.
Fukishima was the most modern reactor there is. It was destroyed by earthquake. The ensuing Taunami then dragged untold amounts of radioactive material into the seas around Japan. We still have no idea how wide spread it is going to,be nor how many organisms, including humans, are going to die from it.
Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor accident. Every worker died because of it. Every person who studied what happened there in the first few years died because of it. Hundreds of Spetznatz soldiers and other enlisted men died there because they were sent in To clean up the debris.
People were evacuated from the area due to radiation damage and spread, but the death rate from cancer in those evacuated went through the roof.
I was alive when it happened. I studied it extensively at high school and at Uni afterwords for ecological studies and energy management. I witnessed first hand the increase in intensity of Sunsets in the Southern Hemisphere alone, as a consequence of the,sheer amount of radioactive material it spewed into our atmosphere. Apparently that effect was even more prevalent in the northern hemisphere.
I was told by a university professor that the amount of background radiation in our atmosphere is higher now than before Chernobyl, because of Chernobyl.
If you think Nuclear is ever going to be safer and better in the long run, you really do not understand nuclear threat at all.
However, given Russia and Americas current state of affairs, chances are everyone is going to experience the fear of living in a nuclear state again very soon.
Good times man, good times.
Yes, of course if you do not develop a technology for thirty or forty years, and see it as all it will ever be, then it will be useless. That Fukushima is the newest plant there is does not say all that much. It is from the seventies.
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Sissyl,
Nuclear power is devastating for very long periods of time when it goes wrong.
Here are some things that can make them go wrong, despite their awesome design.
1) natural disaster. Eg Earthquake. While Earthquakes are common along fault lines they can also occur any where on a tectonic plate. It only takes one for massive devastation.
2) concerted effort to attack one. During a war, or a terrorist situation, or whatever scenario. Protocols might control reactors now, but nothing stops melt downs once shielding and coolant is destroyed.
3) hacking. Probably the most likely and most scary. All those safety protocols are computer monitored. There's already proof it can be done. America did it to Iran to stop or slow its nuclear development plans. It's been documentaried.
So, 30 years of advancement has improved the odds for human error not to do bad things. It has done nothing to stop the consequence of bad things.
Bad things can still happen, and do still happen (Fukishima).
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Fukishima survived the earthquake and had its failsafes activating properly. It did not survive the Tsunami, which took out backup power. Most of the world doesn't have to deal with those.
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Fukishima survived the earthquake and had its failsafes activating properly. It did not survive the Tsunami, which took out backup power. Most of the world doesn't have to deal with those.
I only suggested earthquakes because one of those recently triggered a nuclear level event.
This article (from 2004) shows how close we've come to even more. It was luck that avoided more, nothing else.
https://www.nirs.org/factsheets/naturaldisaster&nuclearpower.pdf
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Fukishima survived the earthquake and had its failsafes activating properly. It did not survive the Tsunami, which took out backup power. Most of the world doesn't have to deal with those.
Most of the world maybe not, but nuclear power plants aren't put in most of the world, they're overwhelmingly put by the water.
And while the post-Fukushima investigations revealed that Japan's overall nuclear safety regulation was compromised by industry interests, I'm willing to take bets that India's will be found to be much worse/actively corrupt once they have a major disaster.
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Additional to that note Coriat, here in Australia we had a disaster at a place called Grantham. It's inland from the ocean by a good two hour drive.
They had a Tsunami like event there a few years ago that killed most of the town ship. A very high river bank broke up mountain from them, dumping water like a dam had busted open. It ripped buildings apart completely.
So, being not close to an ocean does not protect you from the dangers of catastrophic water events.
And as stated by Coriat, the majority of nuclear plants are located near large bodies of water.
article on renewables surpassing coal worldwide
Interesting to note is almost half of China's new energy production is renewables, and the US and Europe are adding renewables faster than increasing energy demand.
Fukishima survived the earthquake and had its failsafes activating properly. It did not survive the Tsunami, which took out backup power. Most of the world doesn't have to deal with those.
There's the one built right on top of a fault line in the Southwest.
University of Wisconsin Madison. Totally nothing. Nothing! How can that be?
Yeah, solar is just busting out everywhere. Heck I don't even see any in these places. Aren't they the bomb too?
In this case, I found the first green roof at UWM (is that its abbreviation?) with just a minute or two of poking around on Google Maps.
I'm willing to grant that an observer randomly scrolling around might mistake it for a ground-level courtyard. Props for doing some research, but in this case, it does suggest that you might see what you're looking for but not recognize it. If you're scrolled further out it becomes all but indistinguishable from a courtyard.
On the other hand my own review agreed with yours on solar panels. Didn't see any on my scroll-around through the campus. I'm not claiming I'd necessarily recognize them either, but it seems they'd be more recognizable than green roofs (which I saw a number of, but which, as above, can be subtle).
Fair enough. In that case, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be that solar panels are not necessarily any more easily spottable than green roofs, or alternatively that I am just not very good at spotting them.
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I sorta cheated. I used regular Google search to find buildings talking about their solar panels and then pulled up those buildings on Google Earth.
Anyway, I'm not sure why Wisconsin would be considered a high sunlight area. You want to see solar panels, try Arizona.
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Peoples resistance to putting solar in place is a very poor metric for how effective it is.
Dare I say that's particularly true in America.
In my estate alone, suburban Brisbane, middle income neighbourhood, nearly every roof has solar.
The school I work at has solar on all their roofs,
You can't drive through a suburb without being blinded by solar panels on roofs.
In my estate alone, suburban Brisbane, middle income neighbourhood, nearly every roof has solar.
I suspect the laws of physics work differently in Brisbane than they do in certain posters' heads.
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Righto, I went for statistics rather than google earth
https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/policy-advocacy/reports/clean-energy- australia-report.html
That link takes you to the 2015 report for renewable energy.
According to that, the lowest latitude population in Australia (Tasmania) is 97% renewable energy.
16% of that total comes from household solar panels.
Queensland actually has the lowest percentage of use in all of Australia!
So, if I am driving through my area and I'm seeing a ton of solar panels, and we are the lowest percentage of imbedded renewables in Australia......
The numbers really speak for themselves Quark.
There's also an interesting map out there that showed how much land needed to be covered by Solar panels to provide the entirety of Australia energy. It was less than 1%.
Australia has a lot of land to put solar farms to make up that 1%.
Sadly it's politics and mining companies that are preventing this happening. Not technology nor latitude.
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Don't know. My panels have a 30 year warranty on them. They'll have paid for themselves by 2020 at this rate. That gives me 20 years of energy profit before warranty runs out.
I really think you need to look at things more deeply Quark.
Battery systems are already here. They are expensive now. 5 years from now that won't be true. Look at every piece of technology for households,that's ever gone to market. TVs, computers gaming console etc.
They all,start super expensive and then get very cheap very fast as the technology advances and people begin to consume.
My prediction, 5 years till self sufficiency for many homes.
Assuming we don't have a fricken nuclear war in that time.
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I'm just not buying the solar is awesome arguments for one practical reason. Other than heavily subsidized and/or politicized construction, solar is still incredibly rare.
Without heavily subsidized and/or politicized construction, Nuclear would be NON-EXISTENT.
Solar is currently in a boom in New Jersey... North Jersey at that. Solar powers a community wifi deployed across the state that's shared by every major provider save Verizon.
Without government expenditures on nuclear we'd all be speaking Russian.I'm just not buying the solar is awesome arguments for one practical reason. Other than heavily subsidized and/or politicized construction, solar is still incredibly rare.
Without heavily subsidized and/or politicized construction, Nuclear would be NON-EXISTENT.
Solar is currently in a boom in New Jersey... North Jersey at that. Solar powers a community wifi deployed across the state that's shared by every major provider save Verizon.
The weapons program pretty much has zilch to do with civillian power. And do you have any idea how long it's been since we stopped making nuclear weapons?
And do you have any idea how long it's been since we stopped making nuclear weapons?
We haven't. We can't. The weapons decay, you see, and that reduces their purity.
For example, one of the key components of the trigger for a fusion device (H-bomb) is tritium, which has a half-life of about 12.5 years. This means that every thermonuclear device on the planet needs to be re-made every year or so as the tritium decays.
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We don't have Thorium reactors because of the Military Industrial Complex pushing U reactors.
Actually, we don't have thorium reactors because they don't exist. Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. This means it doesn't produce energy directly; you need to cook it in a traditional uranium reactor, where it absorbs neutrons and becomes U-232 and U-233, which are even less stable than U-235. (And then you burn those, which are actually fissile, to get power.)
The engineering issues involved in making a safe "thorium" (really, U-233) reactor are orders of magnitude more difficult than those involved in a modern PWR reactor.
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as I understand it the Thorium reactors can't meltdown
Wrong. Or, rather, I don't think you understand "meltdown." Thorium reactors are just as prone to catastrophic failures as uranium ones are, and have no obvious safety advantages.
and don't have significant waste to dispose of.
Wrong. The entire fuel chain for a thorium reactor is nuclear waste, because you need to cook thorium until you make U-233 and then get enough of it (among all the other waste products) to get the uranium concentration up.
They also don't help you make nuclear bombs,
And wrong. U-233 makes a fine fuel for nuclear weapons, but it's much harder to get than U-235. All you really need to do for U-235 is mine and purify, and it's largely non-radioactive. But if you're already making industrial quantities of U-233 for your thorium reactors, and you already have to go pawing through the muck to process it, you can easily get U-233 in weapon-sized quantities.
hence governments shelving the tech/research.
And wrong again. Far from shelving the technology, it's an active research area. The problem is, it's an active research area because it doesn't work for toffee and has never been shown to produce useful amounts of power, unlike "conventional" PWR reactors.
And if you're going to shell out for blue sky products that don't work, fusion is the way to go.
And do you have any idea how long it's been since we stopped making nuclear weapons?We haven't. We can't. The weapons decay, you see, and that reduces their purity.
For example, one of the key components of the trigger for a fusion device (H-bomb) is tritium, which has a half-life of about 12.5 years. This means that every thermonuclear device on the planet needs to be re-made every year or so as the tritium decays.
It just means the tritium needs to be replaced. As per treaty, the US does not make new nuclear weapons. It does maintain the ones reatained.
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I once went to a museum for a school field trip and we saw the ax that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. It stayed in the family for 5 generations before being donated to the museum. During that time the handle wore out three times and the head only once but it was the very same ax.
Makes sense.
A representational axe for a fictitious event.
As to, 'solar is small therefor it does not work'... there's this thing called time which you are overlooking. Solar is 'small' now, but it has been growing exponentially. Solar hit 1% of global (and US for that matter) electricity production last year. We know from projects already in development that it will grow to 2% in the next year or two... and then double again within a few more years. From there projections differ between continued exponential and merely linear growth... resulting in either near 100% solar or it 'just' being the biggest source of power production by 2050.
In the last years of the horse and buggy you're the guy pointing out how rare automobiles are as 'proof' that they're inferior to horses. An overview of the facts shows that you're obviously wrong, but so long as you can find any sort of 'evidence' to support your delusion you will continue to focus solely on that while ignoring the big picture.