Keith_McClary wrote:http://phys.org/news/2015-05-solaroad-path-electricity-yield.html
This seems, at this point, to be a WAY overhyped experiment. 3.5 MILLION Euros to generate a bit over 6000 KWH per year.
So this 70 meter long path of special tiles would power about 1.1 typical US houses a year, and they're all wound up about how much electricity is being generated.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3A public-private partnership in the Netherlands has such a pilot project going on, in the form of sunlight on the road surfaces converted into electricity, in the form of a bike path. The project participants for SolaRoad want the world to know that this project so far is looking good. SolaRoad is in a pilot phase for a three-year period; The Associated Press said that this was a 3.5-million Euro project.
The first six months of the pilot phase were successful, according to a SolaRoad press release issued earlier this month. The energy yield was beyond their expectations. Spokesperson Sten de Wit said they were surprised to see the level of success so quickly. Case in point: "The bike road opened half a year ago and already generated over 3,000 kWh," he said. "If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70 kWh per square meter per year, which we predicted as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year."
The engineers behind the bike path design had to develop a solar road that could not only have requisite strength but also resist skids. SolaRoad has been described as a "living lab" of about 70 meters.
I guess that wouldn't bother me, but then they claim they're thinking of charging the solar powered cars of the future continuously with "all" the power the road generates:
Looking to the future, TNO project manager Wim ven der Poel said, "Using this energy to charge electric cars while they are driving over the road is a beautiful dream, which might become reality. SolaRoad acts as a step towards a closed ecosystem. From mobility through energy back to mobility – which makes the circle complete."
Read more at:
http://phys.org/news/2015-05-solaroad-p ... d.html#jCp
So let's see. A Tesla Model S has about 70 KWH capacity in one of it's batteries (averaging the 60 and 85 KWH battery sizes). So they're going to charge a bazillion electric cars rolling over the road continuously, when a meter square chunk of road generates enough electricity to charge the car battery ONCE in an entire year (IF the electricity is used for NOTHING else).
Sure.
But wait! There's more. The article begins asserting lots of things that are going to be powered with "all" this capacity:
What a concept for a pilot project. Can't we change our roads into gigantic solar panels? Harvest energy from them? Get solar electricity from them, fed into the electricity grid and used for street lighting, traffic systems, households and electric cars?
I know these people want to justify their funding and all, but overselling by orders of magnitude seems a bit silly, even for those of a marketer's ilk.
OK. Now I get it. This would be "success" for a MILITARY project, right? Spend many billions of dollars for several miles of road with this. Charge a handful of cars and power a handful of houses and some traffic signals and street lights. Claim it is a "success". Replicate this to scale up to trillions of dollars.
Gee, it should be no problem, given all the spare $trillions every country has lying around in surplus.
No, wait...
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.