Why all the publicity?
"Local" media have been devoting considerable time and hype to a project that obviously isn't ready for public exposure. Supposedly it's "solar pavement" which will supposedly power half the country or something.

The project isn't even at 'proof of concept' stage yet. It's a few panels scattered across the floor of a room, not paving a road. No engineering student could get away with this for a senior project, let alone a graduate degree.

Nobody asks the simplest questions. Roads get dirty fast. Rubber and oil and spilled stuff. How will these panels clean themselves to continue generating power? Will they stand up to an oversize load? Studded tires? A moose or deer galloping across the road? A toxic spill? Heavy snowload? Salt? Deicer? Sand? Snowplows pushing the sand across the surface? A Palouse farmer driving his Caterpillar combine down the road to work his neighbor's field?

It took me one minute to list those questions.

The answer to all of those questions is clearly NO at this point. You don't need to analyze stresses and strains, just look at the materials and sizes of the panels. Unless they're made of diamond, they will almost instantly become opaque and useless.

Why all the publicity for such obvious nonsense? Who's paying?

Later: I remembered that this project has been underway for a LONG time. Polistra looked at it in July 2009:

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An Idaho inventor has a federal grant to develop ... are you ready? ELECTRIC ROADS. He proposes to turn all the roads in America into drivable solar panels, tied together into a grid. This is unspeakably silly. You can immediately list dozens of intractable problems with the idea.

Needless to say, we don't need any new energy inventions, silly or serious. We just need to build 100 more nuclear plants. That's all.

I suspect the Feds are supporting this idea mainly to see if it leads to a spin-off. DOE isn't dumb enough to believe the Electric Road could be practical. If this yields a more durable solar panel design, or an advance in manufacturing photovoltaic cells, then it would be worth the money.

= = = = =

Polistra decided to stroll down Electric Street to visit a neighbor.
"Ow! Ow! Ow! This is a criminal invention", she charged painfully.


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Interesting that I cited intractable problems, then 7 years later finally listed the problems including a tractor.

Labels: Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 12:22 PM