Who has heard of solar roadways? They seem pretty cool and have a good potential. What do you guys think??

 

Watched a write up about it on TV, Sounds like a good idea

 

Old news. Would love to see it happen, but doubt it will

 

This. The materials required alone would be insane. Also how long does it take to lay a section of road? They repaved a 5 lane wide street 5miles in 3 weeks, that's including grinding then repave. Asphalt is the most recylced material product in use with over 90% being used is recylced (some survey's claim 99%).

 

i love the idea but it just isnt gonna work. lets look at this logically:

the cost of all the circuit boards and leds will be extreme. if you think asphault laying is expensive i got news for ya.

led's are really visible the best in the dark or under shade. during the day, good luck seeing whatever is on the road, under a sheet of glass that will either be new and too shiney and reflective or too scuffed up to see.

led's don't take too much power to run but i can't see the solar rays being enough to power these things constantly, especially during the winter when they are supposed to be generating heat. and they will be under our ever-cloudy skies to boot.

Ball park numbers:
to 25 000 sq miles = 90 bn square meters.

At about 4 tiles per m2, thats 240 billion tiles.

At 50 LEDs each, thats 12 trillion LEDS.

These need to be light up ALL the time you want road markings!

300 LEDs takes about 60 Watts.

Cheap electricity is about 0.06 dollars per kW Hr

So to run 300 LEDs for 1 hr coast about half a cent.

To run 12 trillion LEDs for 1hr costs about 150 million dollars!
4 billion dollars per day,
1.4 trillion dollars per year.

They will take more power just to run the LEDs than will be generated by the road!!!
And thats not including the cost of building the infrastructure, or the fact that the LED probably will need to be replaced about every 5 years.

 

I agree that they are not really logical but are kind of a cool idea. And riceburner nice breakdown, that's pretty damn expensive just to light the roads haha.

 

seems cool!

 

Well considering they were rewarded a contract from the Federal Highway Administration, I'd say sooner rather than later.

 

Being rewarded a contract means nothing. DOE/DOD signs contracts every year with bio-tech firms for renewable fuels yet we're still using good ole gasoline and diesel from dino oil.

 

They would have to put some down somewhere and see what happens. I say test run a small section and see how it goes. This is all in the very early stages.

 

Agreed, I think they mentioned in the video that they could try it out in parking lots first

 

Maybe practical in select few regions with tons of sunshine. On a small scale nothing massive. But I'm sure the technology still can be refined quite a bit.

 

Riceburner break downs are very educational