Solar Roadways?
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They are trying to show what road markings would look like with their "solar freakin' roadways", but they just look broken.
Also, it is estimated to make them 10 cents a day.
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
They are trying to show what road markings would look like with their "solar freakin' roadways", but they just look broken.
To their credit, that screenshot shows that they're at least visible from above on a rainy day. How about from ground level, and/or when it's sunny?
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@hungrier said in Solar Roadways?:
How about from ground level, and/or when it's sunny?
Or from a highly acute angle, on a sunny day in southern California at 70mph when the roadway is covered in dust and scratches?
Yeah, you might as well not even light them up.
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How about kinetic roadways? The application in the article is football pitches and I'm only speculating about whether it could be translated to roads or pavements, or whether it would be cost effective. But still, thoughts?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XQOMBmuKw
Realistically, you can't get energy for free. If you were to try something like that on a roadway, it would have to result in an increase in fuel consumption in order to generate electricity.
Rooftop solar will always be cheaper than any of these gimmicks and rooftop solar is just now becoming economically feasible. The rest all seems like snake oil and usually is.
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@Polygeekery Well sounds like it works for football pitches, which is pretty cool for the kids in Rio.
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@CarrieVS yeah, it worked in that scenario apparently. But, you also have to take it for what it actually is. It is a PR stunt to garner goodwill. Chances are it was not economically feasible. I would love to see a cost comparison between PaveGen and a standing solar installation charging some batteries to run the floodlights. Rooftop or free-standing solar would not have required digging up the field, and that is what most of the kids seem to be talking about, the improvement in grading as a part of the project.
"The project is really nice because, now, the field is wonderful. There aren't holes anymore, so I can play without hurting myself. I'm very glad because I have a nice place to play with my friends."
His friend, Lucas Catro de Almeida, said: "The new pitch is nice and beautiful. I love soccer, so I can say that the project changed my life."
And Matheus de Souza Claudino, 15, said: "The pitch really changed my life. Soccer is my favourite sport, and before the works of repair, there were many holes in the field and we used to hurt all the time. Now, it's really a nice place to play."I also speculate that perhaps the lighting is also grid-tied. 200 tiles spread across a soccer field is not going to generate much electricity. Certainly not enough to power floodlights for any period of time.
I would be willing to wager that rooftop or free-standing solar would have been much cheaper and a better solution to this issue, but did not have investor backing for a PR project.
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@CarrieVS said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery Well sounds like it works for football pitches, which is pretty cool for the kids in Rio.
But, no matter what, in this case some kids got a good field to play soccer on and it was done with investor PR money. I can get behind that, even if there were better alternatives. :)
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@Polygeekery Well the next section down in the article, about the gravity light. That's pretty cool, right?
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@CarrieVS I didn't even see that one. Due to the odd way the page breaks I thought that the article was done and it was all adverts from there on.
I guess it is OK, if it is cheap enough. Something is off in their story and/or math though.
Each time the weight descends to the ground, it powers a generator to create 20 minutes of light.
It takes three seconds to lift, for 30 minutes of light.So is it 20 minutes of light per lift, or 30?
Regardless, if they have access to solar and cannot afford a monthly electric bill, it is hard to beat the economy of solar for non-gridtied situations.
The gravity light better be cheap because that is 100w output for $186USD and it seems to include everything but a battery. If they get 10 hours per day of sun, that is a kilowatt/hour of electricity. You could power twenty 5 watt LED bulbs for 10 hours after dark with a setup like that. Spread that cost across 4-5 houses that have 4-5 bulbs per and you are getting down to the level that even the third-world could afford it.
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@Polygeekery alright alright. Now how about this, I reckon we put those kinetic pavement tiles on the roof. Then the pigeons can earn their keep.
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@CarrieVS said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery alright alright. Now how about this, I reckon we put those kinetic pavement tiles on the roof. Then the pigeons can earn their keep.
Collect all the pigeon shit, put it in anaerobic digesters and make methane. Do I have to think of everything? :P
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@CarrieVS said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery alright alright. Now how about this, I reckon we put those kinetic pavement tiles on the roof. Then the pigeons can earn their keep.
Collect all the pigeon shit,
put it in anaerobic digesters and make methaneuse it to fertilize your pot crops. Do I have to think of everything? :pFTF Colorado residents.
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
I also speculate that perhaps the lighting is also grid-tied. 200 tiles spread across a soccer field is not going to generate much electricity. Certainly not enough to power floodlights for any period of time.
Each 5cm-thick tile, which cost £600 a square metre to buy, produces up to 7W of power per footstep - if they aren't being stepped on, the output is supplemented by solar panels.
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@boomzilla so if someone steps on the tile it generates an instantaneous output of 7w? That is enough to power a 7w LED floodlight for the length of time that a running soccer player footstep lasts...
Those tiles are producing fuck-all for power. The solar install is doing 99.99% of the work on this, and PaveGen is taking the credit?
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
The solar install is doing 99.99% of the work on this, and PaveGen is taking the credit?
I'm sure you're not surprised.
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@Polygeekery Haven't watched it yet, but:
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@boomzilla
10 points for you, posting the same video @Polygeekery already posted, while replying to @Polygeekery !
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@boomzilla said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
The solar install is doing 99.99% of the work on this, and PaveGen is taking the credit?
I'm sure you're not surprised.
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@izzion said in Solar Roadways?:
@boomzilla
10 points for you, posting the same video @Polygeekery already posted, while replying to @Polygeekery !Huh...I think the white background fooled me. I remembered seeing that picture but not noticing it was a video.
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@CarrieVS I didn't even see that one. Due to the odd way the page breaks I thought that the article was done and it was all adverts from there on.
I guess it is OK, if it is cheap enough. Something is off in their story and/or math though.
Each time the weight descends to the ground, it powers a generator to create 20 minutes of light.
It takes three seconds to lift, for 30 minutes of light.So is it 20 minutes of light per lift, or 30?
Regardless, if they have access to solar and cannot afford a monthly electric bill, it is hard to beat the economy of solar for non-gridtied situations.
The gravity light better be cheap because that is 100w output for $186USD and it seems to include everything but a battery. If they get 10 hours per day of sun, that is a kilowatt/hour of electricity. You could power twenty 5 watt LED bulbs for 10 hours after dark with a setup like that. Spread that cost across 4-5 houses that have 4-5 bulbs per and you are getting down to the level that even the third-world could afford it.
I was thinking it could work like a mechanically powered flashlight, and they apparently have a page on Wikipedia.
They don't seem to sell them yet but it looks like it cost $25 (weight not included, use whatever you want) when they ran their donation / groupbuy crowdfunding.
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@boomzilla said in Solar Roadways?:
Each 5cm-thick tile, which cost £600 a square metre to buy, produces up to 7W of power per footstep
Do you have any idea how much rooftop solar you could buy for $600? About 200 watts worth. Is that a landed and installed cost? Or is that what it costs at the factory door? How do these people even sell shit like this? Who is buying it?
Oh, wait, nevermind...
"The first site will be outside the White House in Washington," says Kemball-Cook. Power to the people.
If you're going to buy snakeoil, you might as well do it with other people's money.
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@Polygeekery another analysis:
https://energyphysics.wikispaces.com/Use+of+Piezoelectrics+(Human+Powered+Energy)
Currently, piezoelectric materials are not a realistic method for generating energy on a large scale. ... Another potential use of pavegen tiles would be education and awareness.
So...yeah...
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
"The first site will be outside the White House in Washington," says Kemball-Cook. Power to the people.
If you're going to buy snakeoil, you might as well do it with other people's money.
That's smart. With all the anti-Trump protesting going on they might actually get some notable power output, if the things don't break under the load.
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@JBert said in Solar Roadways?:
I was thinking it could work like a mechanically powered flashlight, and they apparently have a page on Wikipedia.
They don't seem to sell them yet but it looks like it cost $25 (weight not included, use whatever you want) when they ran their donation / groupbuy crowdfunding.Their Indiegogo campaign says they targeted a price of $5 per light, but that is not much light...
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gravitylight-lighting-for-developing-countries#/
It still looks like they would be better off to use the money to install solar.
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@JBert said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
"The first site will be outside the White House in Washington," says Kemball-Cook. Power to the people.
If you're going to buy snakeoil, you might as well do it with other people's money.
That's smart. With all the anti-Trump protesting going on they might actually get some notable power output, if the things don't break under the load.
It is possible...
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
There aren't holes anymore, so I can play without hurting myself.
I'd hate to see what the field looked like before the grading improvement.
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
I mean, think of the number of working solar installations we could have put up with the money that solar roadways has eaten up?
They have had ~$4million in funding so far. Rooftop solar has a landed cost of ~$8/watt according to the numbers I have seen. According to that, Solar Roadways funding could have funded 500kw of rooftop solar, and they still can't even get their shit installed without breaking.
So, nine houses for a year.
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@boomzilla so if someone steps on the tile it generates an instantaneous output of 7w? That is enough to power a 7w LED floodlight for the length of time that a running soccer player footstep lasts...
Those tiles are producing fuck-all for power. The solar install is doing 99.99% of the work on this, and PaveGen is taking the credit?
Someone needs to calculated 30 people stepping around, 210w, against floodlight power use.
Each floodlight are rated at 500-1000W.
So, as long as your entire crowd is stepping 4 times per second per floodlight for the entire game, then you're good.
(Oh, to be clear, typically a single field pole "floodlight" contains 4 or more floodlights, depending on field/stadium size).
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@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
I mean, think of the number of working solar installations we could have put up with the money that solar roadways has eaten up?
They have had ~$4million in funding so far. Rooftop solar has a landed cost of ~$8/watt according to the numbers I have seen. According to that, Solar Roadways funding could have funded 500kw of rooftop solar, and they still can't even get their shit installed without breaking.
So, nine houses for a year.
kind of electric bills are you paying? The average American home uses ~11K kwh of electricity per year. 500kw * 10 hours per day * 365 days in a year. That would be ~166K homes, assuming I did not botch a decimal place somewhere.
And yes, those numbers are pretty back of the envelope ass-pulls. But they should get you within an order of magnitude. :)
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
I mean, think of the number of working solar installations we could have put up with the money that solar roadways has eaten up?
They have had ~$4million in funding so far. Rooftop solar has a landed cost of ~$8/watt according to the numbers I have seen. According to that, Solar Roadways funding could have funded 500kw of rooftop solar, and they still can't even get their shit installed without breaking.
So, nine houses for a year.
kind of electric bills are you paying? The average American home uses ~11K kwh of electricity per year. 500kw * 10 hours per day * 365 days in a year. That would be ~166K homes, assuming I did not botch a decimal place somewhere.
And yes, those numbers are pretty back of the envelope ass-pulls. But they should get you within an order of magnitude. :)
Oh, I thought it was ~30kW. And I thought you mean 500kw in yearly output.
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That's what confuses me, when they use the yearly estimate of power usage, they state it as kwh. When you mentioned the power output of the solar panel, you use kwh.
One is total power consumption for the entire year, and the other is power production hourly.
I think the house estimate should be kwY, or kilowatt/years.
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@xaade kWh is a unit of energy. E.g. 1 kW of power over the duration of one hour. It's not power per time, that's a completely different thing!
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@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade kWh is a unit of energy. E.g. 1 kW of power over the duration of one hour. It's not power per time, that's a completely different thing!
Wow... so the labels are backwards.
kW is power over time, or power load.
kWh is the total power.
Fucking stupid units of measurement.
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@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade kWh is a unit of energy. E.g. 1 kW of power over the duration of one hour. It's not power per time, that's a completely different thing!
Wow... so the labels are backwards.
kW is power over time, or power load.
kWh is the total power.
Fucking stupid units of measurement.
Yeah, and batteries are rated in amp-hours or miiliamp-hours, even though the voltages can be different. Watt-hours would be a better measure but the one they use is better marketing wank.
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@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
@xaade kWh is a unit of energy. E.g. 1 kW of power over the duration of one hour. It's not power per time, that's a completely different thing!
Wow... so the labels are backwards.
kW is power over time, or power load.
kWh is the total power.
Fucking stupid units of measurement.
No, but I'm seeing this confusion all the time in my Physics classes.
There are several units where it's way easier if you imagine water and how it flows to get what they're meaning.
There's voltage: Voltage determines the amount of energy each single electron can give off. Its unit is thus not only "Volt" but also "Joule / Coulomb" (Coulomb being a unit which says: "Okay, this is a metric shitton of electrons, 6E18 electrons to be exact"). You increase the voltage by separating charges - i.e. you remove an electron from a positively charged atom core. The further you move the electron, the higher the voltage - kind of like an elastic band. Or how you move a bucket of water up from the ground to a height of 2 meters - the differential in height then makes it possible for the water to do work.
There's current: Current simply counts the amount of electrons through one line in a wire per unit of time. It has the unit "Ampere" or "Coulomb per second"
Then we get to Power. Power is a measure for how much energy a device can give off in a unit of time. It thus can also be called "energy flow" - you can see that by looking at the units. You calculate the power by multiplying the Voltage drop over a device (i.e. how much energy each electron gives off at this device) with the current through the device (hence how many electrons went through in, say, one second).
Thus we get Joule/Coulomb multiplied with Coulomb/Second and arrive at Joule/Second. (or Watt).And lastly we have the Work (or Energy, same thing): It's simply calculated by multiplying Power with the time said power flowed through the device - hence: Joule/Second multiplied with Second and we get simply "Joule".
Now, here's the thing: For historic reasons we use all kinds of units which don't follow the SI standard. Also, using "kWh" is a bit easier to grasp than a mere "Joule" - because the Power unit is on every device we use. And everyone knows what an hour is. And also, using both "kiloWatt" and "hour" makes the numbers smaller.
Because: A 500 Watt PC is running at full tilt for 2 hours - how much energy was "consumed" (or rather: converted)? Easy: 500 W * 2 h = 1 kWh.
With Joule that's a bit larger: 500 W * 7200 s = 3.6 MJ.
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@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
No
Sorry, the tooltip on "backwards" acknowledges that it's not really backwards. It's just intuitively different from other units of measurement. Usually the units are written unit/time, or unit/time^2 for acceleration. I'm not used to units where the unit itself has time baked in.
@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
Joule/Second
Exactly. Rates are usually denoted by Unit/Time.
@Rhywden said in Solar Roadways?:
A 500 Watt PC
is consuming 500 units per hour.
500 units/hr * 2 hours = 1000 units.
Still a simple calculation.
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@xaade said in Solar Roadways?:
I'm not used to units where the unit itself has time baked in.
It's a rather common sight in Physics, though.
And then you have the fun stuff where you have a unit which can denote two different (but related) things: For example, 1/s.
This can be a frequency (repetitions per second) or the angular velocity (angle per second, measured in Radians). :)
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@xaade Ooooh, I'll have to use a variant of that in my next exam!
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@Polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
If you were to try something like that on a roadway, it would have to result in an increase in fuel consumption in order to generate electricity.
Unless the energy came out of what's normally wasted as heat from friction. No idea if that works out though
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The man who fueled a lot of the debunking fire on Solar Freakin' Roadways visits the plaza install. It does not go well for Solar Freakin' Roadways.
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More news:
Uhmmmmmm, you might want to make your shit work before you start talking about linking them to driverless cars. You have not even gotten to step #0.5 and you are wanting to skip ahead to step #15732.
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@polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
It does not go well for Solar Freakin' Roadways.
Maybe Elon can make them work?
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@boomzilla said in Solar Roadways?:
@polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
It does not go well for Solar Freakin' Roadways.
Maybe Elon can make them work?
It's possible. As I was watching the video and seeing the failures of the panels I was thinking that they probably happened because they did not cure the adhesives in a vacuum.
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@polygeekery said in Solar Roadways?:
Uhmmmmmm, you might want to make your shit work before you start talking about linking them to driverless cars. You have not even gotten to step #0.5 and you are wanting to skip ahead to step #15732.
That's how cons work. Don't give the marks time to catch up and figure it all out.
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The solar roadways people were caught shoveling the snow off of their demo install before taking pictures and then claiming their solar freaking roadway cleared it all itself. I am amused.
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@lb_ I still can't believe so many rich people fell for that.