Way over $900k now. Hitting $1m in a few hours. I really hope we as a community can be part of this. Great for marketing.
Please donate for the Peercoin fundraiser here: http://peer4commit.com/projects/88 See the other thread for all the details.
BTW I created another thread as it is good practise. Didn’t want to hi-jack FB’s thread.
I’m going to break rank and offer a few criticisms about this.
I can’t see this being used on major roads and highways where heavy trucks and so forth would put a great stress on the individual panels as they travel along the road. They don’t appear to be strong enough to withstand a few years of several million vehicle movements over them, particularly due to the glass materials used to enable the transmission of light to the panels themselves.
Another thing I would be concerned about is if the glass material they are made from will end up being more slippery than normal asphalt in wet weather conditions, due to a much lower coefficient of friction. Oil deposits from leaking engines would also an issue, and have an effect of reducing the effective output of each panel covered as well.
Grid management authorities would be pulling their hair out enmasse dealing with the fluctuations in supply to the grid that these panels would also cause on a significantly large scale of deployment. In some countries, such as Australia, PV panels on roofs can provide potential grid management issues when a large cluster of a significantly high enough net output are grouped in one area without battery storage options to mitigate the effect on the grid.
The same amount of money to cover a significant stretch of highway could be better used on something like a solar-thermal plant or energy efficiency measures instead. Just doesn’t seem effective in terms of $/W savings, IMO.
It’s a nice idea, but the issues above would need to be addressed satisfactorily for me to even consider chipping in to the crowdfunding they have going on at the moment.
@notanon, I accept that there is work to be done and not all the answers are there. That is why they asked the money.
Here are a lot of the answers you are looking for: http://solarroadways.com/clearingthefreakinair.shtml
Thanks for the link, has helped address a couple of concerns. I’m studying mechanical engineering at the moment and do have a background in renewables, so I tend to look at things like this from a different angle compared to most people. But yeah, the loading issues and the potential slipperiness in wet weather are my main concerns, due to potential safety issues.
That said, I do hope the engineers they intend to hire can deal with those two main issues to a reasonable extent.