Thanks Dave. There is a fundamental difference between a new technology being investigated, where optimizations and innovations are just beginning, and an established technology like solar panels and roads. We could, for example, imagine that instead of refrigerators we would all have a tube from the government which gives us a steady supply of liquid nitrogen; think of all the energy we would save by not having those fridges running! But of course, this is completely impractical. Pointing out that fact is not anti-innovation or anti-green energy, it is just scientific and economical facts.
Talking of refrigerators, one technology which is easily achievable and has the potential to save quite a lot of base load power, is a secondary heat exchanger on the domestic freezer / refigerator. Farms here use industrial scale ones and it saves money both on water heating, and on improved refrigeration efficiency.
I didn't expect to see so many numpties in the comment section. The bottom line is, as Dave said, no matter how much R&D they do to get costs down and improve on this idea, the cost per watt is always going to be much worse than simply putting the panels on poles or roofs. Even if they get the panels for free and the road costs are identical to a regular road, it would still be better to simply put the panels on poles or roofs. I've seen car parks that use solar panels as the roof/shelter for vehicles. This makes a lot more sense than having the road itself as solar panels.
The folks behind solar roadways are trying to invent trains before the invention of the engine. If you have solar panels good enough to work in roads, then why not first sell them as improved solar panels that can be used to replace what we are already using? Because, let's face it, the improved solar panels would be more important to focus on than the fact they can be used in roads - so why not focus on improved solar panels? Oh, yeah, because this couple haven't got a clue.
I'm starting to think that they went into this as a way to fleece stupid gullible liberal hipsters. But after all the praise, adoration, and attention they got that they started to believe their own lies and bullshit. A good example is the 19th century charlatan Joseph Smith.
fubecabr Dumb-dumb dumb-dumb dummmb. (South Park reference) It's amazing how people can deceive themselves, though I'm sure we all do it to at least some small degree.
NoNameC68 There's a lot of parallels between the Horny Joe story and the Stupid Freaking Roadways. Instead of rocks in a hat, it's solar road panels. Instead of a ridiculous plagiarism of the KJV Bible, the Brusaws have a flashy video, made by stupid people for stupid people. Anyone that criticizes is characterized as evil, in the case of Stupid Freaking Roadways, they're accused of working for Satan (BIG Oil). Mormonism claims to have gold plates that no one ever saw. Solar Roadways claims to have solar road panels that no one's actually seen working and that are supposed to be able to handle 250,000lb of weight. Same with the critical thinking, "Why would he make it up?"
NoNameC68 The space program people. When I worked for Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin on the Shuttle project they were definately building "trains before engines" so to speak. It's called "innovation", ya know that 10 pt word in Buzz Word Bingo?
This is the difference between science fanatics and actual scientists. Scientists will calculate stuff, consider everything and give you a truthful conclusion even if it goes against their deepest beliefs. Science fanatics will just say "Hey that's just like in the sci fy movie I saw! Why can't everything be like that? let's blindly support this idea and defend it with our lives"
I'd go one further. It's a difference between geeks and engineers. Geeks want it to be viable and engineers know it's not. It's not even in the ballpark of viability. The only time it might be viable is if we ran out of room because every other inch of available space in the world was covered by solar panels already. And we wanted to squeeze everything we could from the roads. And even then just creating these solar roads might require more energy which would not make them viable. Instead of wasting time and energy talking about solar roads. How about we concentrate in turning roofs solar. We already know it's viable and it works, yet most of them aren't solar.
As i'm working in the PV solutions, i believe a big part of the industry relys on cheating the client and convince him about some fantasia ideas. especially with battery backup systems.
Just few things I was thinking about. 1. road costs A traditional road needs high-costing maintenance works across 15 years. So I think that the value of 22 €/m2 should be multiplied by 3 as minimum. More than this, I think that they plan to use "solar-roads" to create paths for bicycles and/or secondary roads where traffic is light. So road costs cannot be compared to the ones of an highway (with bridges, tunnels, truck traffic and so on ) 2. Electricity costs Here in Bayern (Germany) we pay around 0.28-0.30 € per Kw/h, not 0.20€.
Yeah, lol, they dont have half a brain on them, even in amsterdam. Its fine to experment, but not when you can tell on the board that there is nothing good about a project, now or in the near future. There is no question here. Not a single thing about this makes sense.
6 months of actual data from this Netherlands project now! and yup it doesn't work. 192Wh/m^2/day is about half the generous maximum you calculated. SPOT ON MATE!
Thomas Baldwin '192Wh/m^2/day is about half the generous maximum you calculated.' 1) so it does work! 2) Average output in the Netherlands is 342 Wh/m2 /day for angled panels. Flat panels deliver about 87% = 298 Wh/m2/day. The loss due to being used as a road is about 35%. But the bottom line is not if it works or not (it obviously does), but if it is economically viable.
Yeah no Shart! At 13 million to power one single person house. That's a power bill of $520,000 for the next 25 years. It's extremely not economical and, therefore, it doesn't work. It's a huge waist of time and money. How many house could you power with the same 13 millions with solar panels angled on roofs?
Thomas Baldwin Not 13 million but 3 million Euro's. And the majority of that cost is related to the R&D, not the actual cost of the road. It produced 3000Kw during the winter months which was enough for 1 house. The actual annual energy production over 1 year will be enough to power 2 to 3 houses.
You have the right numbers, do the math 3 million euros ($3.7 million) for 3 "single person homes" 1 million euros per small house hold? If roadway lasts 50 years it would be 20,000 euros ($24,500) a year per small home Just put them on the roof. WTF. Its a Joke!! 70 KwH over 6 months for $3.7 million 70 kwh/ 6 months = ~ 12 kwh/month It would probably take $250,000 dollars in solar panels on roofs. (12x 15 kwH system, at $20,000 a piece) If, 250,000 over 25 year (realistic) 10,000 a year/ 3 single person house hold Solar Roofs = ~$3,500/yr/person (25 yrs) Solar Roads = $48,000/yr/person (25 yrs) you could bought 13 more people solar roofs instead. "i call that getting swindled and pimped"
Thomas Baldwin The major part of the 3.5 M euro is for R&D, not the actual cost of the road. They expect the road to pay for itself in 20 years or so. "Just put them on the roof. WTF. " If you were to cover every roof in Holland, you would only be able to produce 25% of the energy needs. The road is not meant to replace the rooftops but to be used in conjunction with them.
Let's not forget about winter months which means that the panels will get less light. It also means that the panels will continuously get covered in snow which only adds to the problem!
EEVblog Good. Of course, with snow comes cleaning and how to clean the glass of snow can be an issue. Using the wrong tools can lead to someone cracking/chipping the glass, or scratching it up, or any number of things. Oh, and heaven forbid there's ice covering the panels! I doubt I need to go into this! Let's also not forget the potential for vandalism as well!
TheTundraTerror As Dave told in the earlier solar road video,glass is a pretty soft material so just sand under your shoes will allready scratch it.Also here in the Netherlands we use salt in the winter to de-ice the streets I hope those solar panels like salt.
One of the great advantages is that they can use the solar power to melt the snow!:) That's a joke. It's also one of the stranger claims made by the Solar Freaking Roadways people.
We have years without snow in The Netherlands, and if we have is most times only for days. But in county that have long winters you are right, but almost all panels have that problem, more or less.
In moments like these, I acknowledge how amazing the educational part of TH-cam is, let alone, that educational videos exist on TH-cam. Great video, Dave.
QuantumFluxable It was all over the news months back: @news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak@news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak
EEVblog I believe that was a brief period over the summer not a yearly average (Europe had quite a good summer this year). I remember seeing a news story in the summer about wholesale electricity prices in Germany briefly going negative because so much solar power was being put into the system. The problem Germany has at the moment is an awful knee jerk reaction to nuclear power after Fukushima. Their other main power generation source burns brown coal and it doesn't get much worse than that - impressive mining machinery though.
EEVblog Ah, I see, it seems CNCtrl is right though. And yes, we still have to demonstrate against the coal lobby in Germany because democracy doesn't seem to work as soon as money is involved.
QuantumFluxable Democracy is not the problem. The reason for why coal is still a big thing in Germany is more technical. Nuclear power plants were shut down after Fukushima and reserve capacities from coal plants wer already there. Secondly, the renewable sources have greater fluctuations, sometimes there is not enough, sometimes there is too much, there are now between 10 and 20 days a year where electricity prices are negative (a fairly new phenomenon, getting money for using up electricity). Coal plants are favored sometimes because they can guarantee the energy output and it's less efficient when they run at lower energies, nobody wants to just waste-burn coal. Until there are more storage systems for electrical energy installed in order to even out the varied output of solar and wind, it will stay as it is. But since there will be more and more days with low or even negative energy prices, energy storage systems begin to become profitable, this is in progress already, it just takes time. When this is established, the safety is established and the coal plants can safely be shut down (the same energy giants will get the money from renewables instead of coal, the lobby will be ok with this)
EEVblog The unfortunate fact in Germany is that the power companies here are forced by law to accept any electricity generated by PV solar and wind. As they can't do rapid load-following with the mostly coal plants (some of the nuclear plants here probably can do it, I know France does it a lot), they end up with this glut of electricity they have to do something with. This leads them to the European Electricity Exchange. Here EU countries can buy and sell power on the EU-wide market, via the EU-wide grid. Having this massive glut of power unfortunately means that German power companies cannot sell it, because it's just too much. As a result they are forced to sell it at a loss, i.e. they have to pay other countries money to accept the power (which can then spin down some load-following plants, etc.). This is pretty expensive. Then, as the sun sets and the wind decreases during the night, power production in Germany sags to below demand and power companies here are forced to buy power via the EEX. This is then done at regular price, which means that so far it's been a complete loss for them. Naturally it's the consumers who then have to pay the price for this, as can be seen by the super-high electricity prices in Germany (among the highest in the EU). Recently subsidies for PV solar have been massively cut back as the German government is beginning to realize that the 'Energiewende' it began in 2000 is wrecking havoc on the German economy. Recent data shows that German industry is leaving for countries like France and Belgium where there is plenty of cheap, clean (nuclear) power, while German private consumers are often having trouble paying their electricity bills. At this point it's becoming painfully clear that without capable storage, PV solar and wind power are worse than anything else, as they both destroy the grid and the economy. Japan is also just beginning to learn this lesson after following the same course for a few years (massive subsidies, no limits on solar installations). Unfortunately there's no type of storage which could possibly store the power produced by all of the PV solar and wind turbines here in Germany without completely bankrupting the country a hundred times over. It's a downright shame that the government lacked a backbone in 2011 when they decided that despite zero major incidents at German nuclear plants they would phase out nuclear power. The coal lobby must have rejoiced at that news. It's clear at this point that the Energiewende has brought nothing but misery and gloom to a country which was doing so very well. I really hope that people here will see this reality soon so that we can turn things around. Sorry for the long post, BTW. Bit of a pet peeve of mine :)
Besides that all, we got here a company which bought the parking areas for the park&ride system run by our train company (Deutsche Bahn) and they began to install big roofes tiles over the whole parking area and angled it 60degrees towards the sun. I think this is a very good idea as the parking lots are for 60cars each lane and they got some 18 lanes. They got finally all their roof installed with solar panels. You just have two major benefits. As the former parking lane was expensive (2.50 EUR/day per car) and in summer your car got very hot, as the sun heated it up as there was no sade at all. Now your car stay cool and out of the sun, and they add a huge amount of energy to the city. If it´s raining you can get to your car without getting too wet,as most of the time you´re walking underneath the roof...
Ive seen Street lights and other pole systems run with angled solar panels and even windmills, I totally agree that these are a much better idea than using the ground.
FYI a piece of clear glass allows around 90% light to pass through, putting any sort of coating and texturing will reduce this amount by a considerable margin. Also, in the uk a piece of toughened 10mm glass will cost around £40 per square meter, much much more than your estimates.
I pay $0.10 per kilowatt where I live. Just the cost of the special maintenance to keep the solar roadways clean would consume far more than they generate.
+jburr36 , this guy and thunderf00t haven't even touched on that because its one of the smaller problems; even so like, you said it is still a mammoth task that we are not use to (since we don't have to clean our roads to the same extent) so it would mean designing specialist adaptions for vehicles, staff training, quality control, cleaning fluids etc to clean the roads to an acceptable standard! The whole thing is rotten, right to the core.
Gene I highly doubt your 8.5 kW system is on the ground with cars parked or driving on it. Solar panels work better when they are directly pointed at the sun. Not flat on the ground with traffic on them. This is idiocy.
That is not even close to being accurate. The most efficient photo voltaic cell out there is only 24.2% efficient and those are the best of the best cells. The average consumer panel is about 17% to 19% efficient average with standard installation. the remaining 81% to 83% is converted to thermal energy rather than electrical energy. But lets say we get the 34% efficient cells and put them in a roadway instead of a mount with a solar tracking system. their average efficiency would be 50% to 60 percent with a huge curve during the day and during a year. Plus obstructions like vehicles, road debris, dirt, road damage, etc. You can cut that in half or more. You'd be looking at the most 5% to 6% efficiency. Nothing compared to the cost. www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/appendices/solar-cell-efficiency-results2
Sorry, nothing is 100% efficient. There is always a loss when converting one form of energy to another. And I highly doubt you have these on your roof or a road
Dave (or someone else) I'm trying to understand the calculation to get to needing 175m of panels. I understand taking the required wh, and dividing by the power output per square meter gives 70 square meters. (70m of 1m wide pathway). How then does a path that's 1.75m wide need to be longer for the same result? I still think the idea of putting panels in the road is silly, but I'm trying to understand the math.
I just wondered the same; Dave incorrectly transferred the 26.4 kWh/Day over to the formula and made it 26.4 kWh/(m² Day). IMO that's the correct calculation: (26400 Wh/Day) / (380 Wh / (m² Day)) = 26000 m² / 380 = 70 m², so w/ 1.75m panel width you'd need just about 40m of such a solar way.
Andy Plater I just realized. Dave said it was 3M euros, but calculated the cost per square meter to be 300 euros. where the heck did the other 24,000 euros per square meter go?
***** yup, was just about to post the same! He says they need 70m² of panel, and somehow gets to a 1.75 metre wide path would have to be 175m long, obviously wrong.
You go DAVE! Keep teaching! Even though i am an electrical engineer you've stopped me from falling into many "traps for young players" So thanks! Here, have 1 USD worth of strictly negative feedback *****
As someone who worked at PPG in a quality assurance lab testing tempered glass and spent over 25 years in electronics manufacturing including in the renewable energy sector, I can tell you this is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams "not worth a load of fetid dingo's kidneys" Also, I don't know what time of day the picture of the panel being installed was taken but you can clearly see in the photo the bulk of the generating surface is in the shade of the adjacent trees so for at least a portion of the optimal daily insolation the cells are shaded further reducing the ROI.
I like that you gave best case scenario throughout the whole thing. One thing I noticed that you didn't mention is the additional loss incurred as soon as you put traffic on the road. If this were done somewhere closer to the equator it would be closer to feasible because of shorter shadow, and more direct sunlight. Keep up the good work.
I don't understand why they don't approach the problem from a more practical point of view: What exactly is the issue they are wanting to solve with this solar cycleway test? They want an economically feasible and ecologically sound way of providing electricity to homes. Well, there's a much better solution to that problem: Why not simply install solar panels on rooftops instead of roads? A lot cheaper, a lot more efficient, and achieves the same goal. I don't think you need 3M€ to figure that out.
So, what happens when snow falls on this solar roadway - can we clear it with a plow, or do we only install these below the 30th parallel? Do we need to make sure all trees are cleared new the solar road to make sure that they do not shade the roads and that their roots do not grow under the road to cause cracking? What happens when I have a tire blow out and my rim scrapes down the road, or when there is an unsecured load on a trailer that falls off onto the roadway? I hope there are a lot of fuse links to protect these panels from internal shorts. Even if it were financially viable, it would create a massive maintenance headache for municipalities and utilities. Not to mention you can't have pretty trees going down the median or lining the sides anymore - these solar roads will be ugly.
In germany, solar energy gets so much subvention (that we as private people have to pay, not the energy consuming industry), that it is breaking the market. Breaking the market you may ask: During "solar prime time" Negative prices for electricity on the big share market. That is flat out broken - you can not pay money to someone for literally wasting solar energy. And do not get me started on our electric grid. It is not setup for the north to south transfer we need for wind energy (okey - thats not the fault of solar, but they do not help). Then the next point: We have modern gas power plant which are shut down and coal plants are getting used as "hot reserve" for a wind free day with clouds. Replacing gas with coal, stupid. But hey: Energy has a negative price on a sunny and windy day - put the subvention for the renewable energy we have to pay anyway making electricity more and more expensive. And by the way: My electricity bill is climbing because of more renewable energy, all-tough my energy provider claims "100% renewable" since more then ten years for private consumers. Marketing bull-shit and market breaking subvention.
sarowie For over a decade now I've been (voluntarily) paying a premium on my home power to ensure that it comes from audited new renewable energy infrastructure.
***** Thank you - as you can guess my primary language is german and my main English vocabulary is technical - so I have to look up financial therms but dict.leo.org was not obvious with that one. Thanks again - I will try to remember "subsidy".
One bit of very recent news much you may find interesting: Due to recent snow, and a little bit of cold (a few degrees below zero), about a 1 square meter of the top layer of that Dutch solar roadway has come loose. The top layer is an extra layer of protection that sits on top of the glass. As the roadway wasn't tested without that layer, it's uncertain if that piece is still fit for use as a road surface. It's also unclear if there are more weak spots. So far not so good, for the solar roadway.
Solar paneled roads with fancy LED lighting will only be there as a show off area, maybe at an tech exhibition area. Just for show. No one with a working brain inside his/her skull would use panels inside the roadt if just putting panels along the road would pay off much much better, i.e. pay off at all. Now I want solar panels on my roof ;)
hey Dave, I'm trying to find any data about the Korean 20mile long solar covered bike path that opened last year. Ant idea how much power it has produced and how that compares to the silly Netherlands disaster?
I made almost the same calculations and can confirm your results. Even IF you'd think about using solar energy with roadways it would be much cleverer to use it to gain warm water e.g. by building waterpipes inside the black asphalt and use that as energy source.
I don't know where you got your number for germany...The total 2013 production capacity was "only" 36GW for a total production capacity of 171GW... cf en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany. Only on a very specific day and time, ie midday of Saturday May 26, 2012, was the solar share of 40%.
EEVblog source wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#Photovoltaic_solar_power: "On Saturday May 25, 2012, solar power broke a new record high, feeding 22 GW into the power grid, or as much as 20 nuclear power stations. This jump above the 20 GW level was due to increased capacity and excellent weather conditions countrywide, and made up for half of the nation's electricity demand at midday" ;) PV should be around 5%
thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/13/3436923/germany-energy-records/ "Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent Of Power Needs From Renewable Energy" "In the first quarter of 2014, renewable energy sources met a record 27 percent of the country’s electricity demand, thanks to additional installations and favorable weather."
teh pwnerer Sounds like total BS to be honest. Quarter 1 of the year it's an alleged 27%, and then suddenly it sky-rockets to an overwhelming majority of usage? Yeah, nah, I don't think so.
teh pwnerer EEVblog This site keeps track of all the officially installed solar installations in Germany www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html It takes the amount of peak power and takes in to account the current sun power.
Dave, Good video and points made. I think people need to understand that this is presented to us not as a scientific study, but as a practical device. that is why it deserves to be scrutinized.
Having the panels under the bikes is silly, better idea is to have it above the bike riders, protect the cycle riders from the sun, snow and rain. The cycleways in the netherlands are mostly made with bitumen I did not come across any concrete cycleways, yes solar pathways are not viable unless the panels are free and the rest of the installation is almost free as well.. the ROI does not warant the installation of a solar roadway or cycleway. I agree with most of the figures, flat panels just do not cut it, I have a solar system here, the main PV I have has 24 x 250w panels with 2x 2.5kw inverters, I also have several 12 volt systems here as well and will soon be installing 6 x 200w panels for a 24v system. My ROI with the solar PV system here will be about 3 years because of the way we have change the way we use power here and the feedin tarrif being so low, the sun shines we use the power we would have used at night, we cook, clean have the aircond on when the sun shine and not at night, :)
BeachSandInspector Technologies when you include the thick glass, the constant shading by stuff, the dirt and grime and scratches it all adds up to the poor output they are seeing in their test results.
I kind of expected the results from the test site to be worse, maybe they are not having pushbikes on the track ? Or maybe they are cleaning the surface every hour ?
Entirely correct that newer bike paths are usually asphalt, though older ones are often made with those same 30x30cm concrete pavers the Dutch like to use for sidewalks, and sometimes those are still used. *Cast* concrete bike paths are more common in Belgium, and off hand I can recall only a single one in The Netherlands.
The end game is to be carbon neural ( CO2 from panel manufacturing +concrete+construction - generated power CO2 offset ). Solar panels are very costly in terms of CO2 to manufacture, they are marginally carbon neutral. Concrete generates vast amounts of CO2 ! If used in a residential setup via a grid tie inverter they can be favorable, however if batteries are incorporated it is a financial and environmental disaster. Environmentalists need to get their heads out of their asses and smell the roses . The rest of the people just need the rarest of assets.... common sense.
EEVblog Dave, you're missing an important point in your calculations that will further add up to that solar roadways bullshit - most of the energy in European homes is used for cooking, lighting and heating. And surprise! - You turn on the lights AFTER sunset. Generally you cook... in the evening. And you turn up the heaters... when you go to bed. So most of this energy has to be actually STORED which is a two-fold loss process - you lose energy while storing it - using batteries, inertial storage or whatever, and you lose even more energy while retrieving it. I'm just a computer engineer, but I do expect the losses from this process to be significantly greater than the losses you expect in the energy conversion itself hence rendering the whole idea absolute crap. Greetings from Bulgaria
OnE61811301 No, what you're saying is a non-issue unless you are trying for a really high percentage solar, no one is advocating putting all our eggs in one basket though. Electricity demand is high during the day when solar is at it's max and highest in summer. Solar already matches daily demand curves quite nicely. Tuning it to be an even better fit simply involves facing the panels slightly more towards the west and drawing power from more westerly panels, but as I said that isn't necessary yet. We are still a long, long way from the amount of solar capacity where we'd have to start worrying about storage.
flightofthejellyfish Yes, it matches the dayli curves because while the sun is up, people are at work and the house is off. It's the same as a broken glass being useful to people who aren't thirsty :) That's why engineering must focus on real things like nuclear and fusion the latter of which will make all renewable eco hypes obsolete. :)
OnE61811301 Huh??? Electricity demand is high during business hours because, well, business. You do understand that solar panels are connected to the grid, right?
flightofthejellyfish I think he is absolutely right on this! You need energy when the panels are not producing it, so you must store it. And current tech in energy storage is very inefficient, not to mention expensive and polluting!
BIll Georgoulakis "You need energy when the panels are not producing it" No one is advocating going 100% PV. You get power from other sources (wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, biogas, fossils and solar further to the west) when local panels aren't producing it. By far most power used is used during daylight hours when they *are* producing it. Solar can cover a large bulk of the hump. You do need a level of _dispatchable_ sources to deal with peaks, but utilities have been dealing with that problem for generations now often using VERY expensive sources for this because it makes sense for the small amounts necessary to cover a peak. Storage can be useful *because* it is dispatchable. Storage doesn't just mean batteries. The most common form of storage is pumping water back up to the top reservoir of a hydro plant and there are thermal and compressed air systems under development. None of these are polluting. Storage incurs losses so it does make electricity more expensive, but as I said expensive is okay for the small amount required and it's not particularly expensive next to other highly dispatchable sources that you should be comparing it to. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
I went and checked on your Solar Irradiance figures and it appears that flat mounting in Amsterdam does yield the highest average of solar power for a twelve month period. Could it be that flat mounting in Amsterdam, not necessarily in roads-n-such is the best position?
I think that the only thing I would argue against with the power consumption figures. Houses in 2014 have significantly cheaper lighting options, such as LEDs and CFLs. Energy Star Compliant electronics are not the same power vampires they used to be. There are tons of points of energy savings, which would reduce the power needs per household for similar usage circumstances. Perhaps we should work more on R&D for power savings, rather than working on power generation through bullshit technologies. Habits would also be important as a factor for this situation. For instance, if I surf the web on my power sipping Chromebook or Macbook Pro on battery, that's better than if I use my 700 watt desktop, with three monitors, amplified speakers, and peripherals. (Printers, scanners, etc.) I'm still able to consume the same content, but I'm not increasing my energy footprint by that much. Further, I can use my phone, while sitting in the dark... But that's just getting into silly territory. LOL :)
EEVblog When considering that people have more tech, perhaps the added efficiency per instance is being offset by the magnitude of increase in units. That does make some sense. I wonder how this would work out for an area that has very sparse needs, such as homes with elderly folks that don't have a lot of electronic devices, but use modern lighting options. A #BadTechTip idea that I had was that in order to save electricity, I can always run an extension cord from my neighbor's side panel on their house. :) As long as they don't find out, I should be able to save a ton! LOL :)
Have you looked at your power bill? I don't know about yours, but where I live (Alberta, Canada), the power company puts a rolling 2 year history of power consumption on each and every bill. My domicile has only 2 people living here, efficient appliances, LED lighting, and my computer with two 24" monitors is currently drawing 252 watts as I write this. That said, my average monthly consumption of electricity is 311 kWh. An "average" family home (2 parents, 2 children) consumes significantly more electricity than mine, even with modern and efficient devices. You can only go so low when it comes to consumption, and Dave's values are bang-on in the calculations he made.
When heating dominates your power bill during 2/3 of the year, more energy-efficient appliances lose most of their appeal since they simply mean I would end up throwing more money directly at heating during most of the year. During winter, one could argue that all appliances are nearly 100% efficient since every Wh dissipated in appliances is one less Wh coming out of electric heaters.
Dutchman here, NIBUD (national organization who keeps track of this kind of stuff) estimate the average household electricity usage at about 3300kWh / year, so Dave's estimate is pretty accurate.
Hi Dave, Huge fan here but I had to pause this right away when I saw you do part of the calculation. The consumption per day is 26400 Wh / day and the power produced by the panel is 380 Wh / m^2 / day. The consumption of three houses per day is not per m^2 (or you end up with a unitless quantity). What is actually required according to your calculations is (best case) 70 m^2 of solar bike path. When I watched further I noticed another similar screw up. Their bike path is 1.75 metres x 100 metres = 175 metres^2 which is actually more than you calculated they would need to power 3 average houses (70 m^2). According to this they should have more than enough solar panels to hit their target.
Err? do you mean at 11:00? 70m^2 for 3 houses is exactly what he said. What he meant my doing the further calculation (1.75m X 100m) is that 175m^2 is what they think they need, in comparison to 70m^2 which is Dave's generous figure. So in reality the engineers behind this project are expecting far worse efficiency than dave's 380 Wh/m^2/day
Renegade30 Oh I think i know what you meant, when he wrote 26400 Wh/m^2/day on the numerator of that fraction it was just a mistake on Dave's part, that figure should actually be 2600Wh/day, which is being divided by the 380 Wh/m^2/day to generate a number with m^2 as the unit (70m^2).
This is ignoring the 1 week test results that show just how little energy they are producing. Dave's estimations were very generous granting roughly 3 times the power production than the real life results. Even with his over the top generosity, the panels still didn't pay for themselves in a viable time period.
you have failed to take into account part two of the master plan... along the ''roadway'' you have street lighting... on each pole is a mirror to track the sun and shine light directly down onto the panels to increase efficiency. Under each post will be a secondary tracking mirror that will direct the sun to a solar oven cart, this will alow hotdog vendors to set up along the cyclepath and sell hot snacks to cyclist boosting the economy of hot dog vendors.... your missing these points... I want to work in government...
Adding even more costs and mechanics that can fail? Also big mirrors catch a lot of wind,street lamp posts can not handle the added weight and wind.Lamps are meters apart,so each post has to support many square meters of mirror to light all that street surface between them. Just forget it. This is such a no-brainer the fact some Dutch people even started tests with it dazzles me.
So you take these complicated mechanical devices that require maintenance and attention and could be vandalized, and you spread them out all over the place in public areas where everybody can get to them, the maintenance truck has to block traffic, etc.? I'm not saying it can't be done, but there are so much easier and cheaper ways to generate solar power.
Could you also go into the numbers for cost of labor, repair, and maintance? I think after all the cost the returns could come from the drastically reduced time it takes to repair and maintain this stuff
EEVblog Good entertaining video - as said, nothing really new to the old video. But there is something badly wrong Dave: even if I like the Germans to (I am one) Germany does not cover anything near of 50% with solar Energy. Actually we produce 5.7% of our overall energy consumption with solar. Even all renewable engergy sources together ''just'' make 29% of our consumption. It is the target of our government to reach 50% production (renewable, not only solar) in Year 2030. Maybe what You heared is, that the amount of solar cells in Germany can - at the sunniest non-working days of the Year - produce 50% of the overall need. But over the nights and years - it's just 5.7%.
WuWo These articles are wrong?www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak value of course, but still technically 50%?
EEVblog As the article says: "And on Monday June 9th, which was a national holiday, solar power production peaked at 23.1 GW, which equalled 50.6 percent of total electricity demand - setting another milestone." So it was a very sunny Day and low electricity need - but with "Germany producing over 50% of their energy requirement from solar power'' You left out an important part of the truth.. ;-) And for Your German audience: the source is www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/aktuelle-fakten-zur-photovoltaik-in-deutschland.pdf
I don't get what the fixation is with putting the solar panels underneath a surface which is going to be well abused by wheels and shoes et. al. Why not just put up solar panels that aren't roads or walkways.
I´dont know where you have you Data from. I´am a really big fan of your work, but i was shocked when you said that the germans (me included, i live near Munich) produce 50% energy from solar power. I wish this could be true, but we are not near to that. We intruduced a law stopping Atomic reactor, so we a trying to produce as much regenerative energy as possible, in the year 2013 it was around 5%, Wind+Water generated energy was about 10%. Thank you for your Videos, but in this case, check your sources.
surfalex2000 This guy is full of bullshit, dont listen to him. What would be great is if he could try teach without shitting on technology thats still under development. This guys a douche, dont support him.
Hey there, i'm new here, saw that in video suggestions. There is something that i can't get to understand, please enlight me : at 11:25 , he's saying that it needs 26400wh/m², but doesn't it needs 26400wh per day ?
EEVblog You make very good points in the video, though I think there is one more financial aspect to cover. Local council governments may have access to its road real estate, but have no legal right to install panels on roofs. Netherland land value, per square meter, is €4,907. There is a local property tax is 0.05% - 0.3%. (www.shelteroffshore.com/index.php/property/more/property-tax-expats-in-netherlands-10540), and a wealth tax of 1.3% per year. Assuming 1.4% total taxes per square meter, the revenue received by the government is €68 per square meter. Since building the solar panel on the road means they don't have to build solar panels on real estate that can generate tax revenue, the benefit is €10 of generated electricity, plus the €68 of tax revenue that is preserved (assuming all municipal building rooftops are exhausted, already). That makes a payback of €78 per year. In 15 years, this would equate to €1170, compared to building a solar array on free land. The savings would be even greater compared to the local government renting rooftops to place solar panels. Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years, if the solar road panel is installed at the same time, the installation cost can be reduced. The "rehab" cost would have had to be paid anyway. This will reduce the cost of installation by €20 (as per your calculations). Since rooftops alone is only sufficient for 25% of netherland's electricity demand, the next best place to place solar panels, if the country is to move to a higher share of solar energy, the next lowest cost option is to install solar panels on roads, as opposed to unused land, which can generate many times more in taxes than in installation cost over 15 years. Therefore I think this prototype is a good idea, and now we see how much dirt, scratches, broken panels and traffic get in the way.
Eric Man .. *"Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years, if the solar road panel is installed at the same time, the installation cost can be reduced. "* You understand that solar roadways requires a concrete roadway to mount the panels on, right? *"Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years,"* Try 10 or more years. *"the next lowest cost option is to install solar panels on roads"* Do you know how much solar roadway tiles cost? Because they haven't told anyone yet. Speaking of the Netherlands, they installed a $3M solar bike path that can power only THREE homes. It admittedly cannot pay for itself in its operational lifetime. Its a novelty. So no, its not the lowest cost option.
You've made all true points, but I said 'next lowest'. Once you've filled *all* the existing rooftops of Netherlands, it's only sufficient for 25% of electricity demand. www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/ The marginal cost of new panels (which now have to be free standing solar plants) will be a lot more expensive than solar panels on roads, due to he dominating cost of realestate alone. Unless you plan to forcefully make all households install 100% coverage solar power, and settle on 25% electricity from solar, powering the rest with coal or nuclear (wind has realestate costs too, but maybe it's possible it's denser), I think road solar power panels should be looked at.
Eric Man If there is a problem with real estate then why not put them alongside roads? Or above roads like a canopy? I'm also not sure about that 25% stat as there is no data backing that up. The core problem here is a solar road's ability to pay for itself. A rooftop panel takes 10 years to pay for itself then lasts another 10 years. A road panel will take much longer to pay for itself since it has to pay off its tempered glass, concrete base, and electronics. That alone could double its cost and push its payoff time up to the 20 year lifespan mark. Factor in weekly cleaning costs and you have something that will die WAAAY before it ever pays for itself.
As EEVblog said in the video, these are engineers who act professionally. It doesn't matter if it's 15% or 30% the fact is roof tops are very far from being sufficient. Imagine how much effort to get to every roof top on the first place. Sure roof canopies might be more economical while remaining politically acceptable, but as the author of the video said I think it's worth doing these experiments anyhow. I think it's inevitable road real estate needs to be harnessed if solar is going to be the bulk of electricity generation in countries where land is at a premium.
Eric Man EEVblog said that he can't believe that an engineer would support this idea. He thinks Brusaw would know better. As for doing the experiments, what's the point? Scientists and engineers already understand solar panels. Experiments won't prove anything we can't already predict. As for 15% or 30% check out EEVblogs other video where he demonstrates that his own rooftop panels are far beyond your 15-30% conjecture bullshit.
I did a bit of research on solar panels during my bachelor studies in electrical engineering. Efficiency is just one problem. The amount of energy needed to manufacture them is just ridiculous. There are some nasty chemicals inside (Cadmium Telluride etc) and the inverters and wires needed are not environment friendly at all. Don't get me wrong, for some applications they are just perfect, especially low power applications, it's way more efficient to have a solar panel than a power supply which is idling most of the time, maybe you need long cables which is not environment friendly again. Even those solar roads, there might be locations where it actually is a great concept. I once visited a research area for renewable energies, there was a 2MW Peak Wind Turbine producing 1-1.2MW while I was there (average day). Then there had been solar panels next to it, a HUGHE field, producing 200kW... Its great people are interested in the environment but I would like to encourage them to see the overall picture which is including: Resources and the steps required to get those resources (beginning with the silicon and a lot of other things). Are there enough resources available to make that happen and will there be enough of that resource for other generations? lifecycle: Production: most of those panels and inverters come from china, you know how much they care.. Operation: How much is the output? How reliable is it? How long is the lifetime? Can it be reused? Solar panels need buffer batteries, a lot of them... usually lead battery.. naaaah, not environmental friendly at all! Disposal: Where to put all those nasty things, can they be recycled? In the end you will find out that solar panels are not the solution to our energy problems (in the Electrical grid). Not even close! How to solve our energy problems: Its tricky! I think we should accept the fact that we need to consume less energy and also we need to accept that we have to live with compromises (yes, maybe you have to accept they will build a power line close to your house to get the energy from a windy region to another). Lets hope we soon find a way to produce and store(!) electricity cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly, currently I can't see such technologies.
You could use the solar road way concept to make an integrated system for traffic signals, this would make for an easy to maintain system for the lights and car detection loops all in one. As a bonus you get a bit of independence from the grid for your traffic lights. It would not be cheaper, but it would be far easier to maintain and more flexible, to change a defect loop you would no longer need to gut open the road surface and relay it, just unbolt a panel, change it, seal it and be gone, a job done in a few hours instead of a day or two.
Solar roadways are admittedly a bit foolish. But, what about my new idea - solar mine shafts. There are loads of disused mine shafts in the world. And people complain about the look of solar panels when you put them on your house. The answer has been staring us in the face all long. Solar - freakin' - mineshafts.
I was thinking of solar-powered underground parking garages. Imagine having LED lights that power solar panels in the pavement that in turn power the LED lights. When you want to generate more energy, you just turn up the brightness of the LEDs. Now would someone now please give me $2 million in indiegogo money!!!!!
EEV, and about the opportunity cost from energetic and enviromental parts? Do you think did they must put in the calculation? Since this "seems" a clean energy (I can think about the residuum from maintance only) and the idea behind the "green technology" is harm less our enviroment... How could we add this value to "not worth"/"worth" results?
Excellent calculations Dave. I also can appreciate all the effort you put in producing this video. One thing you ignore is the price for extremely high volume products. That 2 euro/watt of roof top solar PV installed is just not good for comparison. Solar cells are almost free you can just not take them in calculation. They now put solar cells even on the bottom of the solar panels where they get at best 10% of what the top ones are getting. Glass and lamination is expensive but if you already have that thick glass for the road you do not consider that. As for the installed cost that can be reduced extremely as well since you just build an automated machine that can build this road no need for workers. The road panels are manufactured also in an automated factory in large scale. So the price will not be much higher than the price of the raw materials involved. As a side note. I'm an electrical engineer that lives offgrid so just solar panel and wind is what I use with a bit of Lithium battery storage. My cost is under 20 cent/kWh for battery used energy and about 3 cent/kWh for energy directly from solar panel. I will use Solar PV to heat my house it was a crazy idea just a few years ago when I designed the house but now is the cheapest form of energy equal at the moment with natural gas here also 3 cent/kWh. The heating will use just Solar PV panels and resistive heat elements embedded in the concrete floor that acts as thermal mass no inverters or battery's are necessary. I hope I can do this for next winter since now I'm using as temporary heating propane that is 10x more expensive than direct solar PV and way more complex and prone to failure. My small and well insulated house requires just under 1000kWh / worst winter month for heating and is quite cold here in Canada with temperatures regularly in the -20 to -30C during the day and -40C during the night but with great solar irradiance.
***** I said solar cells are practically free, it's the labour. You still need that labour of connecting up the panels, inverters, testing, fusing, cabling etc for either rooftop or road systems, likely by the same contractors that do the roof systems, and at the same rates. It all comes out in the wash.
EEVblog Roof installations are extremely small and not standard at all can not be easily automated. Expensive and unreliable humans are still needed there. But road can be highly automated. You can imagine a huge machine that will just install solar roads not even with human supervision. Then you only need to take in consideration the cost amortisation of that machine and the energy it requires is if can not directly use the solar energy from the road it already paved :)
***** In the physical aspect, yes. But ultimately it's still a solar system that needs to be connected up to the grid, and all the paraphernalia and red tape that goes along with that.
***** Road construction is no easy task either. A huge machine alone won't do it, you will need (lots of) manual labour to prepare the surface before installing the panels. The Northern European in me also wonders if such panels can handle ground frost, which has a major impact on the lifespan of traditional roads. Also, with traditional roads, you shape the asphalt as you lay it. Solar road panels have to be prefabricated, and you'll need more than one type of panel to complete a stretch of road. For turns and slopes, you'll need angled panels and/or angled spacers for the joints. I'm far more impressed with this solution than the "Solar Freakin' Roadways". This seems much more sensible and down to earth. Still, I can't imagine that this will be economically viable, at least not with today's technology.
pesshau I do not say there are no problems to be engineered. Like the winter frost problem or the spacers to join the panels in parts of the roads that are not strait. But I do not think there are problems that can not be solved. You will need to design technology specific for this task but the R&D cost will be lost in the size of such a project. You can imagine something like those huge tunnel boring machines but work on the surface clearing and installing those panels. There is no technology missing that can prevent something like this from being designed. You can think even further when most if not all cars will be self driving and electric and when the road can directly provide power to the cars either trough some sort of induction or direct contact. That way use the battery for city driving where this roads will not make much sens do to shadows and help the cars with small batteries to travel large distances on solar highways.
Great analysis, Dave. I love your thorough explanation and referenced facts. I haven't yet seen much mention about the impact of traffic on electricity yield of solar roadways. I'd say about 20% of the road surface in my medium-sized American city is shaded in some manner by vehicles during daylight hours. The yield would be practically zero directly underneath the vehicle, and moderately lower within the footprint of its shadow. Perhaps these solar roadways are destined only for lightly traveled roads on the outskirts of towns. Anyway, keep up the great work!
No more solar road way videos! Lol, I remember when this first was a big thing. I swore it was going to be a fad, that it was a feel good thing and eventually people would realize how dumb it was, but here we are, still having to prove to people how dumb it actually is. Unless our roads magically materialize into solar roadways on their own, it will remain a bad idea, and now we have an hour of Dave to tell people why! haha
I feel sorry for anyone who lives in the netherlands, you have inadvertently become to susceptible to solar roadway jokes. Those silly dutch, stickin' their solar panels where the sun dont shine.. much
Kakunapod Ehhhmm, not exactly, its not my idea for them to experiment their plan to put solar panels on bike lanes.. And to be honest it wasn't the idea from the public to do this to begin with.. If its considered an experiment in Amsterdam (Alone) and not where i live, then its fine for me..
Why do you even bother... Shit like that is like religion.... There are always going to be religious fanatics knocking on your door saying how righteous the path of solar roadways is!
Eviltech it wouldn't actually matter what people did in their free time, until these sorts of people start tapping into real taxpayer's money (which they have), that'll never repay itself.
Dismissing critiques without arguments is also just like a religion. Dave makes a calculation. He may be right or wrong, but dismissing anybody who disagrees as a religious fanatic is definitively wrong!
i think it'd be way more feasible to roof over parking lots with solar panels. gives shade on hot days ==> way less running motors for AC and it'd partially provide power for nighttime illumination of the lot.
something to point out is that the costs for making a road and its maintenance are costs that will have to be payed for regardless of whether or not its a solar roadway. Not sure how that should fit into this calculation,
Road maintenance, especially of residential streets that don't get a lot of freight traffic, is not really that expensive. If the road is well built, the foundation and drainage can last for centuries (there are Roman roads still in use!) and you only have to replace the surface, every, oh, say, 10-20 years, maybe. And it consists mostly of dumping on another layer of tar and gravel, not exactly the most expensive materials known to man. In fact, aggregate for concrete or asphalt is the sort of thing that is so cheap that transportation cost becomes a big factor, which is why you see a lot of local variation in what exactly gets used: pebbles, crushed stone, crushed construction debris are probably most common, but on the island of Ameland, I've seen seashells used as an aggregate (mostly for light-duty applications like cycle paths). Tar is basically a by-product of the petroleum industry. If you're a neat freak (as the Dutch are wont to be), you may want to grind off the old top layer first, but there are truck-mounted machines that do that with amazing efficiency. There is no way you're going to get a carefully engineered electronic system to come close in price to the cheapest local source of tar and rocks.
***** i had no idea, so its as good as it gets. I remember when i went on a school trip to an old volcano in france and they had the volcanic shingle everywhere.
Clearly Dave is talking about the extra costs associated with keeping a solar panel road up and running. Some of these would include electrical engineers to keep all the wiring working, mechanical engineers to make sure drainage/connections are working correctly, and also road engineers. These panels essentially have a road under them (the foundation), so most normal maintenance would also have to occur for these. Not to mention you'd have to clean these.... often. That'd mean buying street cleaners and outfitting them with non scratching brushes, and employing people to work them.
now imagine if all the people spending 30 min watching why something is crap spend 30 min thinking of how to make something better. let's assume the video gets 200k views. pretty generously - that only half of the people are not half brain-dead. that's about 50k man-hours.....so what 6-7 years worth of mental work.
EEVblog no man couldn't care less about solar roadways in general and what the dutch are doing with their money - which by the way they do have more that they should, also doesnt move one string in my soul. just imagined 7 years nonstop thinking over something good - whatever it is should give good results.
If everyone is hung up on roadways and solar, even though we don't tend to drive where we use electricity, you could probably mount solar panels along the roadways and actually find some reasonable return, but you will never get a PV laying flat on the ground with a sheet of thick glass to be practical. Once every roof is covered with panels, then we can also get the open areas, and the sides of the road, and it would still not be practical to place these things on the roadbed.
One major accident will destroy it. It's also in the shade at least half the time, cars and trucks covering them. I think he is way low on the cost too.
what I find astounding is that so far this guy has received over 3 million bucks from people .. I am continually stunned at lack of critical thinking by people these days.. This is just one example but it's across the board ... From Green to politics to religion to race to sexuality we seem to have a larger number of people these days that never get past the surface claims before jumping on board
douglas brinkmeyer He recieved over 2 Million in donations through one of those Crowd Funding sites and received over 800k in Solar Energy research grants ... He does not have to actually build anything that works... He can stick the cash in the bank and live off it...
Paul Mays YT has a "Donation" option on their site. Some of the videos I have about my 66 C10 rebuild has that turned on. I don't get squat...boooohhhooooooo whine cry
I wonder if a solar roadway could be done utilising the heat capturing aspect of asphalt. low grade hot water boosted to produce steam. Just lay some polypipe or similar under the surface to draw away excess heat, this could also create a method of strengthening the roads, and so minimise maintenance. Who needs high tech when a low tech solution might be more feasible.
For the solar road ways, I can see why they would want the ability to have the road light up, and heat up, but they might as well make it without solar panels built in. Instead they should just make a raised platform above the road with larger, more efficient solar panels. that is still a bad idea, but it is better.
will Philip 'Instead they should just make a raised platform above the road with larger, more efficient solar panels.' And have all the cars drive with their headlights on?
Raspoetin a it wouldn't be blocking all the sunlight, it would just be held up but posts on either side of the road. Either way, there could be motion sensors that make led lights turn just ahead of the car. And during winter, they could have it be self heated to melt snow, and it would prevent snow build up on the road. The road would still need salt though to prevent ice.
will Philip It can get rather dark in the winters in Holland. Even with a 50% cover over the road it would get dark enough to having to drive with the lights on. Melting snow takes way to much more energy then the panels produce. Lighting up the road or having cars drive with their lights on defeats the purpose of having solar panels in the first place. It certainly reduces their effectiveness. And they are an eye sore. There would be a lot of 'skyline pollution'.
On the other hand, it would be very interesting to hear Dave thoughts about the feasibility of covering, for instance, the Simpson Desert in solar panels?
Great calculations Dave. You eventually got to a point which should have been obvious from the beginning, but wasn't (to me, at least): If we want to install more solar panels, we can just put them in actually decent locations. Laying solar roadways is more labor intensive than laying asphalt, asphault is less expensive than their special glass, and solar panels are more efficient when properly angled and placed. Put the asphault on the road and the panels on the roofs, and blow the rest of the budget on golden toilet seats. You'll still be doing 10 times more good than this project ever could.
i'm no engineer or anything, just a very curious person and i've got a question... if you put a rough surface on the glass (i'm thinking pyramid shapes), wouldn't you achieve the same sort of light-pipe effect that's used for leds or glass fibers? wouldn't that catch (at least slightly) more light entering from the side as just the flat solar panels dave talks about and thereby lowering the loss at least slightly?
What about thermal generators (Peltier units) absorbing heat from the panels? The temp difference from the concrete with embedded heatsinks could improve its efficiency... maybe
Would the efficency (a question that applies to solar panels as well) increase if you were to place mirrors next to the target that would reflect the sun certain hours of the day?
Your calculations seem very accurate to me, i think you are being kind to them by about 15-20% . Do they even have a cost per sqm yet for the Roadway project?
what do people around here think about solar powered sunshades for parking lots, is it worth it?. with the cost of maintenance (even if it's low). covering them up at night and at bad weather. energy storage, energy transport etc. share your thoughts.
Has anyone addressed the problem if we need so much solar energy? I read the site of those dutch project and they basically said costs are not important it's the need to find new spots when all the roofs will be already occupied by solar panels and you need more renovable energy, as all the roofs in netherland will provide all the energy used in the country. But how much of this total energy can be provided with solar panels? What are the projects to compensate the enrgy outside the peak hours and of course during the night? Huge batteries?
What I don't understand is why they are putting it on the road. Why not put it on the roof of building like everyone else does? I've been to Amsterdam and there is still a lot of unused roof space available. Do many disadvantages on the road.
On a vaguely related, tangential note: In terms of rooftop solar systems, people assume that producing the most power possible is the best scenario, which is why we see so many rooftop panels facing South in the US. The truth is that it matters less about the total amount of power produced by those panels versus when that power is produced. Western facing panels produce power during the morning, when the plurality of power is used, and usually simultaneously, which puts additional strain on any power grid. This is something that can be vaguely applied to these solar roadways, in terms of how storing that power adds additional costs or how it doesn't provide its peak output when it is needed most.
as a mechanic, the friction co-efficiency between glass and rubber is just about 0... add water and it's actually negative....put a 40 tonne 18 wheeler on their sample. What happens when a car looses a wheel, a Jeep catches alight, someone graffitis 200 panels... even if the infrastructure was free, and the replacement parts were free, the cost of maintenance would be astronomical... I smell an ID-10-T error :D
Great explanation, it really shows that putting solar panel on the road is not viable unless the efficiency will go up.... which is not going up anytime soon. Though I've got a nitpick on the return; you say that it'll be €10/M²/year but that's on a €0,20/kWh return rate. Realistically the consumer of the electricity will pay for the generation. Lets say a Dutch household pays €30/month which means €360/year, which is the estimated cost of a 1 person household. So in 15 years it will be €5400 or €16.200 for 3 households. For a 2 person household is €55/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €29.700. For a 3 person household is €69/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €37.260. For a 4 person household is €77/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €41.580. For a 5 person household is €94/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €50.760. For a 6 person household is €100/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €54.000. That means the whole 100 meters would need to cost less than €54.000 if there were 6 people in every 1 of the 3 households. But more realistically it would 3 or 4 person household, which means it needs to be less than €41.580. Let's say the road is 2 meters wide, so it's 200m². €41,580 / 200 = €207,9/m². So it's no possible. But what about the 6 person household? €54.000 / 200 = €270/m². Again not possible, unless you want to drive over rooftop solar panels. Also some "fun" facts; the Solaroad test road after a month it had damage to a 1m² part panel and a portion had to be replaced. 11 months later the whole surface had to be replaced because it was in a really poor condition. So yeah, households would need to pay more for solaroad energy than gray energy or even solar panels on their own roof.
EEVblog Are you going to do a video about the Hendo "hoverboard"? I have my thoughts and opinion but i would like to see if you can find any problems with it and what those possibly are.
I'm no engineer but about the energy loss from heat. The ground will be cold half the year correct? That would transfer heat from the panels much better then wind plus not sucking heat from the shingles on a roof correct?
Would having solar panels above parking lots / walkways be a good idea? I know here in Florida I sure wouldn't mind walking on the path under the shade of solar panels above. Parking my car under panels at the store and keeping it from the heat would be great too.
Excellent breakdown; The ONLY bone I could possibly throw them is that it's November so their week of practical data is at the lowest end of the chart, and the summer months might be a bit more forgiving...but it won't be the quadruple insolation that it needs to fix the glaring problem. Keep being awesome!
frollard Yes, true, but I compared their test results with the same test data from November for a typical rooftop system. So it was a very fair comparison.
Dave, can you make the same calculations but if the pannels are over the road on some kind of construction, positioned in right angle and etc.? Not suitable for city streets, but I wonder about the inter-city roads, thinking in regard about the land price ent, service needed, safety issues, constructions price and whatever other costs that comes to your mind.
Food for thought: building and maintaining roads also generates budget losses. Not saying "solar roadways" is the way to go but the cost gap between standard blacktop and some form of solar energy harvesting tech might or might not make it a viable solution in the future.
General DON'Ts when considering your options for solar panel installation. DON'T: - Install panels under a surface whos transparency may deteriorate in any appreciable manner. - Install panels in a manner that allows other objects to partially or entirely put them in shadow during sunlight hours. - Install panels at a sub-optimal angle for your particular region of the earth. - Install panels in a place that permits free general public access to their surfaces. Follow these simple rules and then you may expect the best from your panel :)
Thank you for technical proof of this nonsense! I recently talked about this kind of project with my friends and i did not have enough information. Besides energy efficiency there are one big argument against this roadways. Solar panels need light to produce energy so you need to cut down all trees beside road or street. So streets become much more hot during summer for some minor energy production. It is much better plant tree besides road and put panels on the roofs. We have lot of trees besides roads in here (old tradition). Greetings from Czech Republic! PS: I love your channel!
Hi Dave! Just upfront: Love your channel, keep up the good work! Regarding your argumentation: As I understood, you calculated that if you have to choose between a solar panel on the roof or a solar panel within a road, you should definitely choose to put in onto a roof. What I think, would be worth calculating as well is this: If you have to choose between building a concrete road or a solar panel road (or bicycle way), what would be the better choice? Roads have to be build (or at least renewed) and they are not free to build and maintain either. So might solar panel roads be a valuable alternative in this respect? (Personally I cannot imagine they are - but it would probably a nice follow up video)
What about under ground tracking panels? 15m wide pathway with 1m wide or wider panels under it. Then you could get close to roof top efficacy. I do agree the cost would be very high for roi.
Is there a way that they could use the heat of the roads to generate power? I've wondered if there would be possible to use the massive amount of heat that builds up in the road's pavement to generate electricity. Esp. in the summer the roads get really hot.
Thermoelectric power generation is theoretically possible and is used on space probes. But it's quite expensive and inefficient. That's why steam is used in coal, biofuel, and combined cycle gas generators.
He allready said: Even if the cell's are at ZERO €/m² it will not work! The cells itself are not the main cost factor and they can't survife long enoug there to produce more energy than it takes to place them there. Sad but true! If they could do a road that lasts 100 Years without doing more than somtimes brush them, it will pay out... but who can do that?
I'VE GOT IT! Drive on roofs! Just modify the shape of vehicles to conform to the tilted surface. Should be easy.
14 likes aren't near enough for this comment. You win the internet for the day!
Thanks Dave. There is a fundamental difference between a new technology being investigated, where optimizations and innovations are just beginning, and an established technology like solar panels and roads. We could, for example, imagine that instead of refrigerators we would all have a tube from the government which gives us a steady supply of liquid nitrogen; think of all the energy we would save by not having those fridges running! But of course, this is completely impractical. Pointing out that fact is not anti-innovation or anti-green energy, it is just scientific and economical facts.
TheSignalPathBlog Good point and analogy!
I read this in your voice
How much juice would it take to power this so called 'liquid nitrogen' system? lol
Talking of refrigerators, one technology which is easily achievable and has the potential to save quite a lot of base load power, is a secondary heat exchanger on the domestic freezer / refigerator. Farms here use industrial scale ones and it saves money both on water heating, and on improved refrigeration efficiency.
Julzilla Much less than it takes to run all those refrigerators. though that doesn't mean it's practical lol
I didn't expect to see so many numpties in the comment section. The bottom line is, as Dave said, no matter how much R&D they do to get costs down and improve on this idea, the cost per watt is always going to be much worse than simply putting the panels on poles or roofs. Even if they get the panels for free and the road costs are identical to a regular road, it would still be better to simply put the panels on poles or roofs. I've seen car parks that use solar panels as the roof/shelter for vehicles. This makes a lot more sense than having the road itself as solar panels.
It is a "Dazzle the Masses" psy-Op! Right up there with landing on the Moon & Walt Disney's "Tomorrowland".
There is a ton of unused deserts to fill with solar panels.
The folks behind solar roadways are trying to invent trains before the invention of the engine. If you have solar panels good enough to work in roads, then why not first sell them as improved solar panels that can be used to replace what we are already using? Because, let's face it, the improved solar panels would be more important to focus on than the fact they can be used in roads - so why not focus on improved solar panels?
Oh, yeah, because this couple haven't got a clue.
I'm starting to think that they went into this as a way to fleece stupid gullible liberal hipsters. But after all the praise, adoration, and attention they got that they started to believe their own lies and bullshit. A good example is the 19th century charlatan Joseph Smith.
fubecabr Dumb-dumb dumb-dumb dummmb.
(South Park reference)
It's amazing how people can deceive themselves, though I'm sure we all do it to at least some small degree.
NoNameC68 There's a lot of parallels between the Horny Joe story and the Stupid Freaking Roadways. Instead of rocks in a hat, it's solar road panels. Instead of a ridiculous plagiarism of the KJV Bible, the Brusaws have a flashy video, made by stupid people for stupid people. Anyone that criticizes is characterized as evil, in the case of Stupid Freaking Roadways, they're accused of working for Satan (BIG Oil). Mormonism claims to have gold plates that no one ever saw. Solar Roadways claims to have solar road panels that no one's actually seen working and that are supposed to be able to handle 250,000lb of weight.
Same with the critical thinking, "Why would he make it up?"
fubecabr So true.
NoNameC68 The space program people. When I worked for Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin on the Shuttle project they were definately building "trains before engines" so to speak. It's called "innovation", ya know that 10 pt word in Buzz Word Bingo?
I have an even better idea!
SOLAR FREAKIN ROOFTOPS!
Oh wait..
Fleegsta Oh my God, this idea is Perfect. Most of the problems that he listed will be lowered. Why people hasn't thought about it??
Oh wait.
Fleegsta Oh my God, this idea is Perfect. Most of the problems that he listed will be lowered. Why people hasn't thought about it??
Oh wait.
Fleegsta How would you get the cars on the roof?
*****
We'll make them fly.
*****
God dammit. I forgot that Internet doesn't understand sarkasm, if you don't write that it is sarcasm
This is the difference between science fanatics and actual scientists.
Scientists will calculate stuff, consider everything and give you a truthful conclusion even if it goes against their deepest beliefs.
Science fanatics will just say "Hey that's just like in the sci fy movie I saw! Why can't everything be like that? let's blindly support this idea and defend it with our lives"
Luna Indeed!
I'd go one further. It's a difference between geeks and engineers. Geeks want it to be viable and engineers know it's not. It's not even in the ballpark of viability.
The only time it might be viable is if we ran out of room because every other inch of available space in the world was covered by solar panels already. And we wanted to squeeze everything we could from the roads. And even then just creating these solar roads might require more energy which would not make them viable.
Instead of wasting time and energy talking about solar roads. How about we concentrate in turning roofs solar. We already know it's viable and it works, yet most of them aren't solar.
Instead of "actual scientist" I'd say scientifically literate. I'm not an actual scientist but I'm skeptical of everything.
Sadly, there are lots of science fanatic scientists, such as anyone who believes in a technological singularity.
As i'm working in the PV solutions, i believe a big part of the industry relys on cheating the client and convince him about some fantasia ideas. especially with battery backup systems.
Just few things I was thinking about.
1. road costs
A traditional road needs high-costing maintenance works across 15 years. So I think that the value of 22 €/m2 should be multiplied by 3 as minimum.
More than this, I think that they plan to use "solar-roads" to create paths for bicycles and/or secondary roads where traffic is light. So road costs cannot be compared to the ones of an highway (with bridges, tunnels, truck traffic and so on )
2. Electricity costs
Here in Bayern (Germany) we pay around 0.28-0.30 € per Kw/h, not 0.20€.
Anyone going to mention the fact that when it rains, traction will turn to shit and people will die? It's glass.
Yeah, lol, they dont have half a brain on them, even in amsterdam. Its fine to experment, but not when you can tell on the board that there is nothing good about a project, now or in the near future.
There is no question here. Not a single thing about this makes sense.
At least you gotta respect the guys,after 6 years they still havent gave up
and well its pretty cool
Of course not, they are conning people into giving them grants to support their lifestyle...sorry 'research'
6 months of actual data from this Netherlands project now! and yup it doesn't work.
192Wh/m^2/day is about half the generous maximum you calculated. SPOT ON MATE!
Thomas Baldwin '192Wh/m^2/day is about half the generous maximum you calculated.'
1) so it does work!
2) Average output in the Netherlands is 342 Wh/m2 /day for angled panels. Flat panels deliver about 87% = 298 Wh/m2/day.
The loss due to being used as a road is about 35%.
But the bottom line is not if it works or not (it obviously does), but if it is economically viable.
Yeah no Shart! At 13 million to power one single person house. That's a power bill of $520,000 for the next 25 years.
It's extremely not economical and, therefore, it doesn't work. It's a huge waist of time and money.
How many house could you power with the same 13 millions with solar panels angled on roofs?
Thomas Baldwin Not 13 million but 3 million Euro's.
And the majority of that cost is related to the R&D, not the actual cost of the road.
It produced 3000Kw during the winter months which was enough for 1 house. The actual annual energy production over 1 year will be enough to power 2 to 3 houses.
You have the right numbers, do the math
3 million euros ($3.7 million) for 3 "single person homes"
1 million euros per small house hold?
If roadway lasts 50 years it would be
20,000 euros ($24,500) a year per small home
Just put them on the roof. WTF.
Its a Joke!! 70 KwH over 6 months for $3.7 million
70 kwh/ 6 months = ~ 12 kwh/month
It would probably take $250,000 dollars in solar panels on roofs. (12x 15 kwH system, at $20,000 a piece)
If, 250,000
over 25 year (realistic)
10,000 a year/ 3 single person house hold
Solar Roofs = ~$3,500/yr/person (25 yrs)
Solar Roads = $48,000/yr/person (25 yrs)
you could bought 13 more people solar roofs instead. "i call that getting swindled and pimped"
Thomas Baldwin The major part of the 3.5 M euro is for R&D, not the actual cost of the road.
They expect the road to pay for itself in 20 years or so.
"Just put them on the roof. WTF. "
If you were to cover every roof in Holland, you would only be able to produce 25% of the energy needs.
The road is not meant to replace the rooftops but to be used in conjunction with them.
Let's not forget about winter months which means that the panels will get less light. It also means that the panels will continuously get covered in snow which only adds to the problem!
TheTundraTerror My average solar insolation numbers factored in the winder months. But a bad snow season will drop it dramatically of course.
EEVblog Good. Of course, with snow comes cleaning and how to clean the glass of snow can be an issue. Using the wrong tools can lead to someone cracking/chipping the glass, or scratching it up, or any number of things.
Oh, and heaven forbid there's ice covering the panels! I doubt I need to go into this!
Let's also not forget the potential for vandalism as well!
TheTundraTerror As Dave told in the earlier solar road video,glass is a pretty soft material so just sand under your shoes will allready scratch it.Also here in the Netherlands we use salt in the winter to de-ice the streets I hope those solar panels like salt.
One of the great advantages is that they can use the solar power to melt the snow!:) That's a joke. It's also one of the stranger claims made by the Solar Freaking Roadways people.
We have years without snow in The Netherlands, and if we have is most times only for days. But in county that have long winters you are right, but almost all panels have that problem, more or less.
In moments like these, I acknowledge how amazing the educational part of TH-cam is, let alone, that educational videos exist on TH-cam. Great video, Dave.
are people really whining about you using 70% as your assumption (100-10-10-10) instead of 72.9% (100*.9*.9*.9)
11:54 >literally installing solar panels in the shade of trees.
The world has only gotten stupider since this video was made.
Where did you get the 50% solar production figure for Germany? All I can find is 7% solar, 10% wind.
QuantumFluxable It was all over the news months back: @news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak@news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak
EEVblog I believe that was a brief period over the summer not a yearly average (Europe had quite a good summer this year). I remember seeing a news story in the summer about wholesale electricity prices in Germany briefly going negative because so much solar power was being put into the system. The problem Germany has at the moment is an awful knee jerk reaction to nuclear power after Fukushima. Their other main power generation source burns brown coal and it doesn't get much worse than that - impressive mining machinery though.
EEVblog Ah, I see, it seems CNCtrl is right though. And yes, we still have to demonstrate against the coal lobby in Germany because democracy doesn't seem to work as soon as money is involved.
QuantumFluxable Democracy is not the problem. The reason for why coal is still a big thing in Germany is more technical. Nuclear power plants were shut down after Fukushima and reserve capacities from coal plants wer already there. Secondly, the renewable sources have greater fluctuations, sometimes there is not enough, sometimes there is too much, there are now between 10 and 20 days a year where electricity prices are negative (a fairly new phenomenon, getting money for using up electricity). Coal plants are favored sometimes because they can guarantee the energy output and it's less efficient when they run at lower energies, nobody wants to just waste-burn coal.
Until there are more storage systems for electrical energy installed in order to even out the varied output of solar and wind, it will stay as it is. But since there will be more and more days with low or even negative energy prices, energy storage systems begin to become profitable, this is in progress already, it just takes time. When this is established, the safety is established and the coal plants can safely be shut down (the same energy giants will get the money from renewables instead of coal, the lobby will be ok with this)
EEVblog
The unfortunate fact in Germany is that the power companies here are forced by law to accept any electricity generated by PV solar and wind. As they can't do rapid load-following with the mostly coal plants (some of the nuclear plants here probably can do it, I know France does it a lot), they end up with this glut of electricity they have to do something with.
This leads them to the European Electricity Exchange. Here EU countries can buy and sell power on the EU-wide market, via the EU-wide grid. Having this massive glut of power unfortunately means that German power companies cannot sell it, because it's just too much. As a result they are forced to sell it at a loss, i.e. they have to pay other countries money to accept the power (which can then spin down some load-following plants, etc.). This is pretty expensive.
Then, as the sun sets and the wind decreases during the night, power production in Germany sags to below demand and power companies here are forced to buy power via the EEX. This is then done at regular price, which means that so far it's been a complete loss for them. Naturally it's the consumers who then have to pay the price for this, as can be seen by the super-high electricity prices in Germany (among the highest in the EU).
Recently subsidies for PV solar have been massively cut back as the German government is beginning to realize that the 'Energiewende' it began in 2000 is wrecking havoc on the German economy. Recent data shows that German industry is leaving for countries like France and Belgium where there is plenty of cheap, clean (nuclear) power, while German private consumers are often having trouble paying their electricity bills.
At this point it's becoming painfully clear that without capable storage, PV solar and wind power are worse than anything else, as they both destroy the grid and the economy. Japan is also just beginning to learn this lesson after following the same course for a few years (massive subsidies, no limits on solar installations). Unfortunately there's no type of storage which could possibly store the power produced by all of the PV solar and wind turbines here in Germany without completely bankrupting the country a hundred times over.
It's a downright shame that the government lacked a backbone in 2011 when they decided that despite zero major incidents at German nuclear plants they would phase out nuclear power. The coal lobby must have rejoiced at that news. It's clear at this point that the Energiewende has brought nothing but misery and gloom to a country which was doing so very well. I really hope that people here will see this reality soon so that we can turn things around.
Sorry for the long post, BTW. Bit of a pet peeve of mine :)
Besides that all, we got here a company which bought the parking areas for the park&ride system run by our train company (Deutsche Bahn) and they began to install big roofes tiles over the whole parking area and angled it 60degrees towards the sun.
I think this is a very good idea as the parking lots are for 60cars each lane and they got some 18 lanes. They got finally all their roof installed with solar panels. You just have two major benefits.
As the former parking lane was expensive (2.50 EUR/day per car) and in summer your car got very hot, as the sun heated it up as there was no sade at all. Now your car stay cool and out of the sun, and they add a huge amount of energy to the city.
If it´s raining you can get to your car without getting too wet,as most of the time you´re walking underneath the roof...
Ive seen Street lights and other pole systems run with angled solar panels and even windmills, I totally agree that these are a much better idea than using the ground.
FYI a piece of clear glass allows around 90% light to pass through, putting any sort of coating and texturing will reduce this amount by a considerable margin. Also, in the uk a piece of toughened 10mm glass will cost around £40 per square meter, much much more than your estimates.
I pay $0.10 per kilowatt where I live. Just the cost of the special maintenance to keep the solar roadways clean would consume far more than they generate.
+jburr36 , this guy and thunderf00t haven't even touched on that because its one of the smaller problems; even so like, you said it is still a mammoth task that we are not use to (since we don't have to clean our roads to the same extent) so it would mean designing specialist adaptions for vehicles, staff training, quality control, cleaning fluids etc to clean the roads to an acceptable standard! The whole thing is rotten, right to the core.
Gene I highly doubt your 8.5 kW system is on the ground with cars parked or driving on it. Solar panels work better when they are directly pointed at the sun. Not flat on the ground with traffic on them. This is idiocy.
That is not even close to being accurate. The most efficient photo voltaic cell out there is only 24.2% efficient and those are the best of the best cells. The average consumer panel is about 17% to 19% efficient average with standard installation. the remaining 81% to 83% is converted to thermal energy rather than electrical energy.
But lets say we get the 34% efficient cells and put them in a roadway instead of a mount with a solar tracking system. their average efficiency would be 50% to 60 percent with a huge curve during the day and during a year. Plus obstructions like vehicles, road debris, dirt, road damage, etc. You can cut that in half or more. You'd be looking at the most 5% to 6% efficiency. Nothing compared to the cost.
www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/appendices/solar-cell-efficiency-results2
Sorry, nothing is 100% efficient. There is always a loss when converting one form of energy to another. And I highly doubt you have these on your roof or a road
He's just one of those over unity nuts, and he's trolling us. Check out the article, specifically the date. This guy *_is_* a brazilian nut.
Off-Topic Pro Tip: If you don't use the Expo Low Odor markers you won't get that gross cloudy look after multiple uses.
Dave (or someone else) I'm trying to understand the calculation to get to needing 175m of panels.
I understand taking the required wh, and dividing by the power output per square meter gives 70 square meters. (70m of 1m wide pathway). How then does a path that's 1.75m wide need to be longer for the same result?
I still think the idea of putting panels in the road is silly, but I'm trying to understand the math.
I just wondered the same; Dave incorrectly transferred the 26.4 kWh/Day over to the formula and made it 26.4 kWh/(m² Day). IMO that's the correct calculation:
(26400 Wh/Day) / (380 Wh / (m² Day)) = 26000 m² / 380 = 70 m², so w/ 1.75m panel width you'd need just about 40m of such a solar way.
***** That's what I was thinking. Still no contest to roof-mounted panels, considering the cost on the project was 3M euros for 3-4 houses is stupid.
Andy Plater I just realized. Dave said it was 3M euros, but calculated the cost per square meter to be 300 euros. where the heck did the other 24,000 euros per square meter go?
*****
yup, was just about to post the same!
He says they need 70m² of panel, and somehow gets to a 1.75 metre wide path would have to be 175m long, obviously wrong.
Yeah, that's where I first got confused, would be nice for Dave to confirm the flaw.
Yeah but just think over a 20 year period you can save enough money to buy a solar roadways hoodie. Thunderfoot 2018 ( I think!!)
You go DAVE! Keep teaching! Even though i am an electrical engineer you've stopped me from falling into many "traps for young players" So thanks!
Here, have 1 USD worth of strictly negative feedback *****
As someone who worked at PPG in a quality assurance lab testing tempered glass and spent over 25 years in electronics manufacturing including in the renewable energy sector, I can tell you this is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams "not worth a load of fetid dingo's kidneys"
Also, I don't know what time of day the picture of the panel being installed was taken but you can clearly see in the photo the bulk of the generating surface is in the shade of the adjacent trees so for at least a portion of the optimal daily insolation the cells are shaded further reducing the ROI.
I'm going to make solar clouds...after I find a way to mount solar panels to clouds. After that I will make solar skies and solar oceans!
+ArcadeGames I'm inventing solar powered bacon. Because everything goes well with bacon. You can eat it & power your house at the same time!
Jonathan Tan
Genius! I will make solar powered solar panels!
+ArcadeGames You're doing it wrong! You're waiting for the necessary technology to exist, where you could be bathing in crowdfunding money today!
Everyone knows Lunar Power is the tech of the future! Geesh!
Or solar deserts but honestly putting solar panels on clouds is not a bad idea if you can do it
I like that you gave best case scenario throughout the whole thing. One thing I noticed that you didn't mention is the additional loss incurred as soon as you put traffic on the road. If this were done somewhere closer to the equator it would be closer to feasible because of shorter shadow, and more direct sunlight. Keep up the good work.
Just put the freakin' panels on the roof. You'll get 5x more energy at half the cost.
The answer is simple, to make it payback electricity has to be priced 1000x higher
I don't understand why they don't approach the problem from a more practical point of view: What exactly is the issue they are wanting to solve with this solar cycleway test? They want an economically feasible and ecologically sound way of providing electricity to homes. Well, there's a much better solution to that problem: Why not simply install solar panels on rooftops instead of roads? A lot cheaper, a lot more efficient, and achieves the same goal. I don't think you need 3M€ to figure that out.
So, what happens when snow falls on this solar roadway - can we clear it with a plow, or do we only install these below the 30th parallel? Do we need to make sure all trees are cleared new the solar road to make sure that they do not shade the roads and that their roots do not grow under the road to cause cracking? What happens when I have a tire blow out and my rim scrapes down the road, or when there is an unsecured load on a trailer that falls off onto the roadway? I hope there are a lot of fuse links to protect these panels from internal shorts. Even if it were financially viable, it would create a massive maintenance headache for municipalities and utilities. Not to mention you can't have pretty trees going down the median or lining the sides anymore - these solar roads will be ugly.
In germany, solar energy gets so much subvention (that we as private people have to pay, not the energy consuming industry), that it is breaking the market. Breaking the market you may ask: During "solar prime time" Negative prices for electricity on the big share market. That is flat out broken - you can not pay money to someone for literally wasting solar energy. And do not get me started on our electric grid. It is not setup for the north to south transfer we need for wind energy (okey - thats not the fault of solar, but they do not help). Then the next point: We have modern gas power plant which are shut down and coal plants are getting used as "hot reserve" for a wind free day with clouds. Replacing gas with coal, stupid. But hey: Energy has a negative price on a sunny and windy day - put the subvention for the renewable energy we have to pay anyway making electricity more and more expensive. And by the way: My electricity bill is climbing because of more renewable energy, all-tough my energy provider claims "100% renewable" since more then ten years for private consumers. Marketing bull-shit and market breaking subvention.
sarowie For over a decade now I've been (voluntarily) paying a premium on my home power to ensure that it comes from audited new renewable energy infrastructure.
FYI, the English word is subsidy, not subvention.
*****
Thank you - as you can guess my primary language is german and my main English vocabulary is technical - so I have to look up financial therms but dict.leo.org was not obvious with that one. Thanks again - I will try to remember "subsidy".
One bit of very recent news much you may find interesting: Due to
recent snow, and a little bit of cold (a few degrees below zero), about a 1 square meter of the top layer of that Dutch solar roadway has come loose. The top layer is an extra layer of protection that sits on top of the glass. As the roadway wasn't tested without that layer, it's uncertain if that piece is still fit for use as a road surface. It's also unclear if there are more weak spots. So far not so good, for the solar roadway.
Solar paneled roads with fancy LED lighting will only be there as a show off area, maybe at an tech exhibition area. Just for show. No one with a working brain inside his/her skull would use panels inside the roadt if just putting panels along the road would pay off much much better, i.e. pay off at all. Now I want solar panels on my roof ;)
Chip Guy Vids Get your own panels, it's fun logging the data!
hey Dave, I'm trying to find any data about the Korean 20mile long solar covered bike path that opened last year. Ant idea how much power it has produced and how that compares to the silly Netherlands disaster?
So at a 3M euro installation cost, their test installation should turn a nice profit by the year 4,500. Great! Oh, wait...
I made almost the same calculations and can confirm your results. Even IF you'd think about using solar energy with roadways it would be much cleverer to use it to gain warm water e.g. by building waterpipes inside the black asphalt and use that as energy source.
I don't know where you got your number for germany...The total 2013 production capacity was "only" 36GW for a total production capacity of 171GW... cf en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany. Only on a very specific day and time, ie midday of Saturday May 26, 2012, was the solar share of 40%.
lacombar Germany made big news recently as having hit 50% of it's supply from solar. I have not verified this, but it was in many news reports.
EEVblog
source wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#Photovoltaic_solar_power:
"On Saturday May 25, 2012, solar power broke a new record high, feeding 22 GW into the power grid, or as much as 20 nuclear power stations. This jump above the 20 GW level was due to increased capacity and excellent weather conditions countrywide, and made up for half of the nation's electricity demand at midday"
;)
PV should be around 5%
thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/13/3436923/germany-energy-records/
"Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent Of Power Needs From Renewable Energy"
"In the first quarter of 2014, renewable energy sources met a record 27 percent of the country’s electricity demand, thanks to additional installations and favorable weather."
teh pwnerer Sounds like total BS to be honest. Quarter 1 of the year it's an alleged 27%, and then suddenly it sky-rockets to an overwhelming majority of usage? Yeah, nah, I don't think so.
teh pwnerer EEVblog This site keeps track of all the officially installed solar installations in Germany www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html It takes the amount of peak power and takes in to account the current sun power.
Dave, Good video and points made. I think people need to understand that this is presented to us not as a scientific study, but as a practical device. that is why it deserves to be scrutinized.
Having the panels under the bikes is silly, better idea is to have it above the bike riders, protect the cycle riders from the sun, snow and rain.
The cycleways in the netherlands are mostly made with bitumen I did not come across any concrete cycleways, yes solar pathways are not viable unless the panels are free and the rest of the installation is almost free as well.. the ROI does not warant the installation of a solar roadway or cycleway.
I agree with most of the figures, flat panels just do not cut it, I have a solar system here, the main PV I have has 24 x 250w panels with 2x 2.5kw inverters, I also have several 12 volt systems here as well and will soon be installing 6 x 200w panels for a 24v system.
My ROI with the solar PV system here will be about 3 years because of the way we have change the way we use power here and the feedin tarrif being so low, the sun shines we use the power we would have used at night, we cook, clean have the aircond on when the sun shine and not at night, :)
BeachSandInspector Technologies when you include the thick glass, the constant shading by stuff, the dirt and grime and scratches it all adds up to the poor output they are seeing in their test results.
I kind of expected the results from the test site to be worse, maybe they are not having pushbikes on the track ?
Or maybe they are cleaning the surface every hour ?
EEVblog
The output is only going to get worse as time goes on too.
BeachSandInspector Technologies Ask yourself, what IS wrong with putting solar panels on roofs? We do not have a shortage of roofs.
Entirely correct that newer bike paths are usually asphalt, though older ones are often made with those same 30x30cm concrete pavers the Dutch like to use for sidewalks, and sometimes those are still used. *Cast* concrete bike paths are more common in Belgium, and off hand I can recall only a single one in The Netherlands.
The end game is to be carbon neural ( CO2 from panel manufacturing +concrete+construction - generated power CO2 offset ). Solar panels are very costly in terms of CO2 to manufacture, they are marginally carbon neutral. Concrete generates vast amounts of CO2 ! If used in a residential setup via a grid tie inverter they can be favorable, however if batteries are incorporated it is a financial and environmental disaster. Environmentalists need to get their heads out of their asses and smell the roses . The rest of the people just need the rarest of assets.... common sense.
EEVblog Dave, you're missing an important point in your calculations that will further add up to that solar roadways bullshit - most of the energy in European homes is used for cooking, lighting and heating. And surprise! - You turn on the lights AFTER sunset. Generally you cook... in the evening. And you turn up the heaters... when you go to bed. So most of this energy has to be actually STORED which is a two-fold loss process - you lose energy while storing it - using batteries, inertial storage or whatever, and you lose even more energy while retrieving it. I'm just a computer engineer, but I do expect the losses from this process to be significantly greater than the losses you expect in the energy conversion itself hence rendering the whole idea absolute crap.
Greetings from Bulgaria
OnE61811301 No, what you're saying is a non-issue unless you are trying for a really high percentage solar, no one is advocating putting all our eggs in one basket though. Electricity demand is high during the day when solar is at it's max and highest in summer. Solar already matches daily demand curves quite nicely. Tuning it to be an even better fit simply involves facing the panels slightly more towards the west and drawing power from more westerly panels, but as I said that isn't necessary yet. We are still a long, long way from the amount of solar capacity where we'd have to start worrying about storage.
flightofthejellyfish Yes, it matches the dayli curves because while the sun is up, people are at work and the house is off. It's the same as a broken glass being useful to people who aren't thirsty :) That's why engineering must focus on real things like nuclear and fusion the latter of which will make all renewable eco hypes obsolete. :)
OnE61811301 Huh??? Electricity demand is high during business hours because, well, business. You do understand that solar panels are connected to the grid, right?
flightofthejellyfish I think he is absolutely right on this! You need energy when the panels are not producing it, so you must store it. And current tech in energy storage is very inefficient, not to mention expensive and polluting!
BIll Georgoulakis "You need energy when the panels are not producing it" No one is advocating going 100% PV. You get power from other sources (wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, biogas, fossils and solar further to the west) when local panels aren't producing it. By far most power used is used during daylight hours when they *are* producing it. Solar can cover a large bulk of the hump. You do need a level of _dispatchable_ sources to deal with peaks, but utilities have been dealing with that problem for generations now often using VERY expensive sources for this because it makes sense for the small amounts necessary to cover a peak. Storage can be useful *because* it is dispatchable. Storage doesn't just mean batteries. The most common form of storage is pumping water back up to the top reservoir of a hydro plant and there are thermal and compressed air systems under development. None of these are polluting. Storage incurs losses so it does make electricity more expensive, but as I said expensive is okay for the small amount required and it's not particularly expensive next to other highly dispatchable sources that you should be comparing it to. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
I went and checked on your Solar Irradiance figures and it appears that flat mounting in Amsterdam does yield the highest average of solar power for a twelve month period. Could it be that flat mounting in Amsterdam, not necessarily in roads-n-such is the best position?
I think that the only thing I would argue against with the power consumption figures. Houses in 2014 have significantly cheaper lighting options, such as LEDs and CFLs. Energy Star Compliant electronics are not the same power vampires they used to be. There are tons of points of energy savings, which would reduce the power needs per household for similar usage circumstances.
Perhaps we should work more on R&D for power savings, rather than working on power generation through bullshit technologies. Habits would also be important as a factor for this situation. For instance, if I surf the web on my power sipping Chromebook or Macbook Pro on battery, that's better than if I use my 700 watt desktop, with three monitors, amplified speakers, and peripherals. (Printers, scanners, etc.)
I'm still able to consume the same content, but I'm not increasing my energy footprint by that much. Further, I can use my phone, while sitting in the dark... But that's just getting into silly territory. LOL :)
sbrazenor2 I found a more recent estimate that says 3500kWh / year.
EEVblog When considering that people have more tech, perhaps the added efficiency per instance is being offset by the magnitude of increase in units. That does make some sense. I wonder how this would work out for an area that has very sparse needs, such as homes with elderly folks that don't have a lot of electronic devices, but use modern lighting options.
A #BadTechTip idea that I had was that in order to save electricity, I can always run an extension cord from my neighbor's side panel on their house. :) As long as they don't find out, I should be able to save a ton! LOL :)
Have you looked at your power bill? I don't know about yours, but where I live (Alberta, Canada), the power company puts a rolling 2 year history of power consumption on each and every bill. My domicile has only 2 people living here, efficient appliances, LED lighting, and my computer with two 24" monitors is currently drawing 252 watts as I write this. That said, my average monthly consumption of electricity is 311 kWh. An "average" family home (2 parents, 2 children) consumes significantly more electricity than mine, even with modern and efficient devices. You can only go so low when it comes to consumption, and Dave's values are bang-on in the calculations he made.
When heating dominates your power bill during 2/3 of the year, more energy-efficient appliances lose most of their appeal since they simply mean I would end up throwing more money directly at heating during most of the year.
During winter, one could argue that all appliances are nearly 100% efficient since every Wh dissipated in appliances is one less Wh coming out of electric heaters.
Dutchman here, NIBUD (national organization who keeps track of this kind of stuff) estimate the average household electricity usage at about 3300kWh / year, so Dave's estimate is pretty accurate.
Hi Dave,
Huge fan here but I had to pause this right away when I saw you do part of the calculation. The consumption per day is 26400 Wh / day and the power produced by the panel is 380 Wh / m^2 / day. The consumption of three houses per day is not per m^2 (or you end up with a unitless quantity).
What is actually required according to your calculations is (best case) 70 m^2 of solar bike path.
When I watched further I noticed another similar screw up. Their bike path is 1.75 metres x 100 metres = 175 metres^2 which is actually more than you calculated they would need to power 3 average houses (70 m^2).
According to this they should have more than enough solar panels to hit their target.
Err? do you mean at 11:00? 70m^2 for 3 houses is exactly what he said. What he meant my doing the further calculation (1.75m X 100m) is that 175m^2 is what they think they need, in comparison to 70m^2 which is Dave's generous figure. So in reality the engineers behind this project are expecting far worse efficiency than dave's 380 Wh/m^2/day
Renegade30 Oh I think i know what you meant, when he wrote 26400 Wh/m^2/day on the numerator of that fraction it was just a mistake on Dave's part, that figure should actually be 2600Wh/day, which is being divided by the 380 Wh/m^2/day to generate a number with m^2 as the unit (70m^2).
Renegade30 Exactly.
This is ignoring the 1 week test results that show just how little energy they are producing. Dave's estimations were very generous granting roughly 3 times the power production than the real life results. Even with his over the top generosity, the panels still didn't pay for themselves in a viable time period.
you have failed to take into account part two of the master plan...
along the ''roadway'' you have street lighting... on each pole is a mirror to track the sun and shine light directly down onto the panels to increase efficiency.
Under each post will be a secondary tracking mirror that will direct the sun to a solar oven cart, this will alow hotdog vendors to set up along the cyclepath and sell hot snacks to cyclist boosting the economy of hot dog vendors....
your missing these points...
I want to work in government...
Adding even more costs and mechanics that can fail? Also big mirrors catch a lot of wind,street lamp posts can not handle the added weight and wind.Lamps are meters apart,so each post has to support many square meters of mirror to light all that street surface between them. Just forget it. This is such a no-brainer the fact some Dutch people even started tests with it dazzles me.
So you take these complicated mechanical devices that require maintenance and attention and could be vandalized, and you spread them out all over the place in public areas where everybody can get to them, the maintenance truck has to block traffic, etc.? I'm not saying it can't be done, but there are so much easier and cheaper ways to generate solar power.
***** but we have to have the mirrors, for the hotdogs...
Could you also go into the numbers for cost of labor, repair, and maintance? I think after all the cost the returns could come from the drastically reduced time it takes to repair and maintain this stuff
EEVblog Good entertaining video - as said, nothing really new to the old video. But there is something badly wrong Dave: even if I like the Germans to (I am one) Germany does not cover anything near of 50% with solar Energy. Actually we produce 5.7% of our overall energy consumption with solar. Even all renewable engergy sources together ''just'' make 29% of our consumption. It is the target of our government to reach 50% production (renewable, not only solar) in Year 2030. Maybe what You heared is, that the amount of solar cells in Germany can - at the sunniest non-working days of the Year - produce 50% of the overall need. But over the nights and years - it's just 5.7%.
WuWo These articles are wrong?www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142306-25725.htmlwww.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-powerPeak value of course, but still technically 50%?
EEVblog
www.sciencealert.com/news/20142306-25725.html
www.thelocal.de/20140619/germany-produces-half-of-electricity-needs-with-solar-power
FTFY
EEVblog As the article says: "And on Monday June 9th, which was a national holiday, solar power production peaked at 23.1 GW, which equalled 50.6 percent of total electricity demand - setting another milestone." So it was a very sunny Day and low electricity need - but with "Germany producing over 50% of their energy requirement from solar power'' You left out an important part of the truth.. ;-) And for Your German audience: the source is www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/aktuelle-fakten-zur-photovoltaik-in-deutschland.pdf
WuWo Yeah, but technically it was still 50% of demand at one point, right? That's pretty damn good any way you look at it.
I don't get what the fixation is with putting the solar panels underneath a surface which is going to be well abused by wheels and shoes et. al. Why not just put up solar panels that aren't roads or walkways.
I´dont know where you have you Data from. I´am a really big fan of your work, but i was shocked when you said that the germans (me included, i live near Munich) produce 50% energy from solar power. I wish this could be true, but we are not near to that. We intruduced a law stopping Atomic reactor, so we a trying to produce as much regenerative energy as possible, in the year 2013 it was around 5%, Wind+Water generated energy was about 10%.
Thank you for your Videos, but in this case, check your sources.
I meant Solar Power generated in Germany about 5% in 2013
surfalex2000 This guy is full of bullshit, dont listen to him. What would be great is if he could try teach without shitting on technology thats still under development. This guys a douche, dont support him.
Hey there, i'm new here, saw that in video suggestions. There is something that i can't get to understand, please enlight me : at 11:25 , he's saying that it needs 26400wh/m², but doesn't it needs 26400wh per day ?
EEVblog You make very good points in the video, though I think there is one more financial aspect to cover. Local council governments may have access to its road real estate, but have no legal right to install panels on roofs. Netherland land value, per square meter, is €4,907. There is a local property tax is 0.05% - 0.3%. (www.shelteroffshore.com/index.php/property/more/property-tax-expats-in-netherlands-10540), and a wealth tax of 1.3% per year. Assuming 1.4% total taxes per square meter, the revenue received by the government is €68 per square meter. Since building the solar panel on the road means they don't have to build solar panels on real estate that can generate tax revenue, the benefit is €10 of generated electricity, plus the €68 of tax revenue that is preserved (assuming all municipal building rooftops are exhausted, already). That makes a payback of €78 per year. In 15 years, this would equate to €1170, compared to building a solar array on free land. The savings would be even greater compared to the local government renting rooftops to place solar panels.
Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years, if the solar road panel is installed at the same time, the installation cost can be reduced. The "rehab" cost would have had to be paid anyway. This will reduce the cost of installation by €20 (as per your calculations).
Since rooftops alone is only sufficient for 25% of netherland's electricity demand, the next best place to place solar panels, if the country is to move to a higher share of solar energy, the next lowest cost option is to install solar panels on roads, as opposed to unused land, which can generate many times more in taxes than in installation cost over 15 years.
Therefore I think this prototype is a good idea, and now we see how much dirt, scratches, broken panels and traffic get in the way.
Eric Man .. *"Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years, if the solar road panel is installed at the same time, the installation cost can be reduced. "*
You understand that solar roadways requires a concrete roadway to mount the panels on, right?
*"Asphalt roads needs to be replaced every few years,"*
Try 10 or more years.
*"the next lowest cost option is to install solar panels on roads"*
Do you know how much solar roadway tiles cost? Because they haven't told anyone yet. Speaking of the Netherlands, they installed a $3M solar bike path that can power only THREE homes. It admittedly cannot pay for itself in its operational lifetime. Its a novelty. So no, its not the lowest cost option.
You've made all true points, but I said 'next lowest'. Once you've filled *all* the existing rooftops of Netherlands, it's only sufficient for 25% of electricity demand. www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/ The marginal cost of new panels (which now have to be free standing solar plants) will be a lot more expensive than solar panels on roads, due to he dominating cost of realestate alone. Unless you plan to forcefully make all households install 100% coverage solar power, and settle on 25% electricity from solar, powering the rest with coal or nuclear (wind has realestate costs too, but maybe it's possible it's denser), I think road solar power panels should be looked at.
Eric Man If there is a problem with real estate then why not put them alongside roads? Or above roads like a canopy? I'm also not sure about that 25% stat as there is no data backing that up.
The core problem here is a solar road's ability to pay for itself. A rooftop panel takes 10 years to pay for itself then lasts another 10 years. A road panel will take much longer to pay for itself since it has to pay off its tempered glass, concrete base, and electronics. That alone could double its cost and push its payoff time up to the 20 year lifespan mark. Factor in weekly cleaning costs and you have something that will die WAAAY before it ever pays for itself.
As EEVblog said in the video, these are engineers who act professionally. It doesn't matter if it's 15% or 30% the fact is roof tops are very far from being sufficient. Imagine how much effort to get to every roof top on the first place. Sure roof canopies might be more economical while remaining politically acceptable, but as the author of the video said I think it's worth doing these experiments anyhow. I think it's inevitable road real estate needs to be harnessed if solar is going to be the bulk of electricity generation in countries where land is at a premium.
Eric Man EEVblog said that he can't believe that an engineer would support this idea. He thinks Brusaw would know better. As for doing the experiments, what's the point? Scientists and engineers already understand solar panels. Experiments won't prove anything we can't already predict. As for 15% or 30% check out EEVblogs other video where he demonstrates that his own rooftop panels are far beyond your 15-30% conjecture bullshit.
Did your calculations take into account the blocking effect of traffic as it travels on the solar roadway?
I did a bit of research on solar panels during my bachelor studies in electrical engineering.
Efficiency is just one problem.
The amount of energy needed to manufacture them is just ridiculous. There are some nasty chemicals inside (Cadmium Telluride etc) and the inverters and wires needed are not environment friendly at all.
Don't get me wrong, for some applications they are just perfect, especially low power applications, it's way more efficient to have a solar panel than a power supply which is idling most of the time, maybe you need long cables which is not environment friendly again. Even those solar roads, there might be locations where it actually is a great concept.
I once visited a research area for renewable energies, there was a 2MW Peak Wind Turbine producing 1-1.2MW while I was there (average day). Then there had been solar panels next to it, a HUGHE field, producing 200kW...
Its great people are interested in the environment but I would like to encourage them to see the overall picture which is including:
Resources and the steps required to get those resources (beginning with the silicon and a lot of other things).
Are there enough resources available to make that happen and will there be enough of that resource for other generations?
lifecycle:
Production: most of those panels and inverters come from china, you know how much they care..
Operation: How much is the output?
How reliable is it?
How long is the lifetime?
Can it be reused?
Solar panels need buffer batteries, a lot of them... usually lead battery.. naaaah, not environmental friendly at all!
Disposal: Where to put all those nasty things, can they be recycled?
In the end you will find out that solar panels are not the solution to our energy problems (in the Electrical grid). Not even close!
How to solve our energy problems: Its tricky! I think we should accept the fact that we need to consume less energy and also we need to accept that we have to live with compromises (yes, maybe you have to accept they will build a power line close to your house to get the energy from a windy region to another).
Lets hope we soon find a way to produce and store(!) electricity cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly, currently I can't see such technologies.
You could use the solar road way concept to make an integrated system for traffic signals, this would make for an easy to maintain system for the lights and car detection loops all in one. As a bonus you get a bit of independence from the grid for your traffic lights. It would not be cheaper, but it would be far easier to maintain and more flexible, to change a defect loop you would no longer need to gut open the road surface and relay it, just unbolt a panel, change it, seal it and be gone, a job done in a few hours instead of a day or two.
Solar roadways are admittedly a bit foolish.
But, what about my new idea - solar mine shafts.
There are loads of disused mine shafts in the world.
And people complain about the look of solar panels when you put them on your house.
The answer has been staring us in the face all long.
Solar - freakin' - mineshafts.
I was thinking of solar-powered underground parking garages. Imagine having LED lights that power solar panels in the pavement that in turn power the LED lights. When you want to generate more energy, you just turn up the brightness of the LEDs. Now would someone now please give me $2 million in indiegogo money!!!!!
EEV, and about the opportunity cost from energetic and enviromental parts? Do you think did they must put in the calculation? Since this "seems" a clean energy (I can think about the residuum from maintance only) and the idea behind the "green technology" is harm less our enviroment... How could we add this value to "not worth"/"worth" results?
Excellent calculations Dave. I also can appreciate all the effort you put in producing this video.
One thing you ignore is the price for extremely high volume products. That 2 euro/watt of roof top solar PV installed is just not good for comparison. Solar cells are almost free you can just not take them in calculation. They now put solar cells even on the bottom of the solar panels where they get at best 10% of what the top ones are getting.
Glass and lamination is expensive but if you already have that thick glass for the road you do not consider that.
As for the installed cost that can be reduced extremely as well since you just build an automated machine that can build this road no need for workers. The road panels are manufactured also in an automated factory in large scale.
So the price will not be much higher than the price of the raw materials involved.
As a side note. I'm an electrical engineer that lives offgrid so just solar panel and wind is what I use with a bit of Lithium battery storage. My cost is under 20 cent/kWh for battery used energy and about 3 cent/kWh for energy directly from solar panel.
I will use Solar PV to heat my house it was a crazy idea just a few years ago when I designed the house but now is the cheapest form of energy equal at the moment with natural gas here also 3 cent/kWh. The heating will use just Solar PV panels and resistive heat elements embedded in the concrete floor that acts as thermal mass no inverters or battery's are necessary.
I hope I can do this for next winter since now I'm using as temporary heating propane that is 10x more expensive than direct solar PV and way more complex and prone to failure.
My small and well insulated house requires just under 1000kWh / worst winter month for heating and is quite cold here in Canada with temperatures regularly in the -20 to -30C during the day and -40C during the night but with great solar irradiance.
***** I said solar cells are practically free, it's the labour. You still need that labour of connecting up the panels, inverters, testing, fusing, cabling etc for either rooftop or road systems, likely by the same contractors that do the roof systems, and at the same rates. It all comes out in the wash.
EEVblog Roof installations are extremely small and not standard at all can not be easily automated. Expensive and unreliable humans are still needed there.
But road can be highly automated. You can imagine a huge machine that will just install solar roads not even with human supervision.
Then you only need to take in consideration the cost amortisation of that machine and the energy it requires is if can not directly use the solar energy from the road it already paved :)
***** In the physical aspect, yes. But ultimately it's still a solar system that needs to be connected up to the grid, and all the paraphernalia and red tape that goes along with that.
*****
Road construction is no easy task either. A huge machine alone won't do it, you will need (lots of) manual labour to prepare the surface before installing the panels. The Northern European in me also wonders if such panels can handle ground frost, which has a major impact on the lifespan of traditional roads.
Also, with traditional roads, you shape the asphalt as you lay it. Solar road panels have to be prefabricated, and you'll need more than one type of panel to complete a stretch of road. For turns and slopes, you'll need angled panels and/or angled spacers for the joints.
I'm far more impressed with this solution than the "Solar Freakin' Roadways". This seems much more sensible and down to earth. Still, I can't imagine that this will be economically viable, at least not with today's technology.
pesshau
I do not say there are no problems to be engineered. Like the winter frost problem or the spacers to join the panels in parts of the roads that are not strait. But I do not think there are problems that can not be solved.
You will need to design technology specific for this task but the R&D cost will be lost in the size of such a project.
You can imagine something like those huge tunnel boring machines but work on the surface clearing and installing those panels.
There is no technology missing that can prevent something like this from being designed.
You can think even further when most if not all cars will be self driving and electric and when the road can directly provide power to the cars either trough some sort of induction or direct contact. That way use the battery for city driving where this roads will not make much sens do to shadows and help the cars with small batteries to travel large distances on solar highways.
Great analysis, Dave. I love your thorough explanation and referenced facts. I haven't yet seen much mention about the impact of traffic on electricity yield of solar roadways. I'd say about 20% of the road surface in my medium-sized American city is shaded in some manner by vehicles during daylight hours. The yield would be practically zero directly underneath the vehicle, and moderately lower within the footprint of its shadow. Perhaps these solar roadways are destined only for lightly traveled roads on the outskirts of towns. Anyway, keep up the great work!
Roads that vehicles don't go on :-)
No more solar road way videos! Lol, I remember when this first was a big thing. I swore it was going to be a fad, that it was a feel good thing and eventually people would realize how dumb it was, but here we are, still having to prove to people how dumb it actually is. Unless our roads magically materialize into solar roadways on their own, it will remain a bad idea, and now we have an hour of Dave to tell people why! haha
I feel sorry for anyone who lives in the netherlands, you have inadvertently become to susceptible to solar roadway jokes. Those silly dutch, stickin' their solar panels where the sun dont shine.. much
Kakunapod Ehhhmm, not exactly, its not my idea for them to experiment their plan to put solar panels on bike lanes..
And to be honest it wasn't the idea from the public to do this to begin with..
If its considered an experiment in Amsterdam (Alone) and not where i live, then its fine for me..
What about the loss of power generation due to things being on top of it e.g. cars. Some busy roads may not see much light at all.
Why do you even bother... Shit like that is like religion.... There are always going to be religious fanatics knocking on your door saying how righteous the path of solar roadways is!
Eviltech I know, I couldn't help myself *facepalm*
EEVblog Yeah but your facepalm is epic. It's mathematical. The best kind of facepalm.
Eviltech it wouldn't actually matter what people did in their free time, until these sorts of people start tapping into real taxpayer's money (which they have), that'll never repay itself.
***** Exactly! Money that are desperately needed somewhere else!
Dismissing critiques without arguments is also just like a religion. Dave makes a calculation. He may be right or wrong, but dismissing anybody who disagrees as a religious fanatic is definitively wrong!
i think it'd be way more feasible to roof over parking lots with solar panels. gives shade on hot days ==> way less running motors for AC and it'd partially provide power for nighttime illumination of the lot.
LOL at the calculator.
djshex Bonus for those watching in HD.
EEVblog What about the calculator Dave? This computer lags out in HD.
I'm not sure how carbon credit trading works but could they sell the carbon credits from solar usage to increase the returns per square meter?
Too many people with silly idea's.
something to point out is that the costs for making a road and its maintenance are costs that will have to be payed for regardless of whether or not its a solar roadway. Not sure how that should fit into this calculation,
Road maintenance, especially of residential streets that don't get a lot of freight traffic, is not really that expensive. If the road is well built, the foundation and drainage can last for centuries (there are Roman roads still in use!) and you only have to replace the surface, every, oh, say, 10-20 years, maybe. And it consists mostly of dumping on another layer of tar and gravel, not exactly the most expensive materials known to man. In fact, aggregate for concrete or asphalt is the sort of thing that is so cheap that transportation cost becomes a big factor, which is why you see a lot of local variation in what exactly gets used: pebbles, crushed stone, crushed construction debris are probably most common, but on the island of Ameland, I've seen seashells used as an aggregate (mostly for light-duty applications like cycle paths). Tar is basically a by-product of the petroleum industry. If you're a neat freak (as the Dutch are wont to be), you may want to grind off the old top layer first, but there are truck-mounted machines that do that with amazing efficiency. There is no way you're going to get a carefully engineered electronic system to come close in price to the cheapest local source of tar and rocks.
***** i had no idea, so its as good as it gets. I remember when i went on a school trip to an old volcano in france and they had the volcanic shingle everywhere.
Clearly Dave is talking about the extra costs associated with keeping a solar panel road up and running. Some of these would include electrical engineers to keep all the wiring working, mechanical engineers to make sure drainage/connections are working correctly, and also road engineers. These panels essentially have a road under them (the foundation), so most normal maintenance would also have to occur for these.
Not to mention you'd have to clean these.... often. That'd mean buying street cleaners and outfitting them with non scratching brushes, and employing people to work them.
now imagine if all the people spending 30 min watching why something is crap spend 30 min thinking of how to make something better. let's assume the video gets 200k views. pretty generously - that only half of the people are not half brain-dead. that's about 50k man-hours.....so what 6-7 years worth of mental work.
fuzz labrador are you implying that solar roadways can be made viable?
fuzz labrador Why do you watch videos on youtube?
You educate or entertain yourself... this video is for doing the latter. At least in my case :)
EEVblog no man couldn't care less about solar roadways in general and what the dutch are doing with their money - which by the way they do have more that they should, also doesnt move one string in my soul. just imagined 7 years nonstop thinking over something good - whatever it is should give good results.
fuzz labrador are you stoned?
Johannes Balzer Yes, I'm not really teaching anything here that isn't pretty obvious to the vast majority of my engineering audience.
If everyone is hung up on roadways and solar, even though we don't tend to drive where we use electricity, you could probably mount solar panels along the roadways and actually find some reasonable return, but you will never get a PV laying flat on the ground with a sheet of thick glass to be practical. Once every roof is covered with panels, then we can also get the open areas, and the sides of the road, and it would still not be practical to place these things on the roadbed.
Agreed
One major accident will destroy it.
It's also in the shade at least half the time, cars and trucks covering them.
I think he is way low on the cost too.
what I find astounding is that so far this guy has received over 3 million bucks from people .. I am continually stunned at lack of critical thinking by people these days.. This is just one example but it's across the board ... From Green to politics to religion to race to sexuality we seem to have a larger number of people these days that never get past the surface claims before jumping on board
Paul Mays
Thru donations?
OR paying him to push solar for home use?
douglas brinkmeyer
He recieved over 2 Million in donations through one of those Crowd Funding sites and received over 800k in Solar Energy research grants ... He does not have to actually build anything that works... He can stick the cash in the bank and live off it...
Paul Mays
YT has a "Donation" option on their site. Some of the videos I have about my 66 C10 rebuild has that turned on. I don't get squat...boooohhhooooooo whine cry
I wonder if all the values saying .... per day and ... per year should be 1/2 or 1/3 due to day/night cycle, snow and cloudy weather.
I wonder if a solar roadway could be done utilising the heat capturing aspect of asphalt.
low grade hot water boosted to produce steam.
Just lay some polypipe or similar under the surface to draw away excess heat, this could also create a method of strengthening the roads, and so minimise maintenance.
Who needs high tech when a low tech solution might be more feasible.
For the solar road ways, I can see why they would want the ability to have the road light up, and heat up, but they might as well make it without solar panels built in.
Instead they should just make a raised platform above the road with larger, more efficient solar panels. that is still a bad idea, but it is better.
will Philip So completely ignore the whole concept they worked on and just go by the conventional method?
will Philip 'Instead they should just make a raised platform above the road with larger, more efficient solar panels.'
And have all the cars drive with their headlights on?
Raspoetin a it wouldn't be blocking all the sunlight, it would just be held up but posts on either side of the road. Either way, there could be motion sensors that make led lights turn just ahead of the car. And during winter, they could have it be self heated to melt snow, and it would prevent snow build up on the road. The road would still need salt though to prevent ice.
will Philip It can get rather dark in the winters in Holland. Even with a 50% cover over the road it would get dark enough to having to drive with the lights on. Melting snow takes way to much more energy then the panels produce. Lighting up the road or having cars drive with their lights on defeats the purpose of having solar panels in the first place. It certainly reduces their effectiveness.
And they are an eye sore. There would be a lot of 'skyline pollution'.
Raspoetin a I see what you are saying.
Either way, I already said it is a bad idea. Better then the solar roadways, but still bad.
On the other hand, it would be very interesting to hear Dave thoughts about the feasibility of covering, for instance, the Simpson Desert in solar panels?
Great calculations Dave. You eventually got to a point which should have been obvious from the beginning, but wasn't (to me, at least): If we want to install more solar panels, we can just put them in actually decent locations. Laying solar roadways is more labor intensive than laying asphalt, asphault is less expensive than their special glass, and solar panels are more efficient when properly angled and placed. Put the asphault on the road and the panels on the roofs, and blow the rest of the budget on golden toilet seats. You'll still be doing 10 times more good than this project ever could.
i'm no engineer or anything, just a very curious person and i've got a question... if you put a rough surface on the glass (i'm thinking pyramid shapes), wouldn't you achieve the same sort of light-pipe effect that's used for leds or glass fibers? wouldn't that catch (at least slightly) more light entering from the side as just the flat solar panels dave talks about and thereby lowering the loss at least slightly?
What about thermal generators (Peltier units) absorbing heat from the panels? The temp difference from the concrete with embedded heatsinks could improve its efficiency... maybe
Would the efficency (a question that applies to solar panels as well) increase if you were to place mirrors next to the target that would reflect the sun certain hours of the day?
Did you ever figure it out?
Your calculations seem very accurate to me, i think you are being kind to them by about 15-20% . Do they even have a cost per sqm yet for the Roadway project?
what do people around here think about solar powered sunshades for parking lots, is it worth it?. with the cost of maintenance (even if it's low). covering them up at night and at bad weather. energy storage, energy transport etc.
share your thoughts.
Has anyone addressed the problem if we need so much solar energy? I read the site of those dutch project and they basically said costs are not important it's the need to find new spots when all the roofs will be already occupied by solar panels and you need more renovable energy, as all the roofs in netherland will provide all the energy used in the country.
But how much of this total energy can be provided with solar panels? What are the projects to compensate the enrgy outside the peak hours and of course during the night? Huge batteries?
What I don't understand is why they are putting it on the road. Why not put it on the roof of building like everyone else does? I've been to Amsterdam and there is still a lot of unused roof space available. Do many disadvantages on the road.
I'd like to see the calculations in total energy needed to get these roads up and running.
@19:00 you used a Wdc rating. So this is even before invertier losses etc.
On a vaguely related, tangential note: In terms of rooftop solar systems, people assume that producing the most power possible is the best scenario, which is why we see so many rooftop panels facing South in the US. The truth is that it matters less about the total amount of power produced by those panels versus when that power is produced. Western facing panels produce power during the morning, when the plurality of power is used, and usually simultaneously, which puts additional strain on any power grid. This is something that can be vaguely applied to these solar roadways, in terms of how storing that power adds additional costs or how it doesn't provide its peak output when it is needed most.
as a mechanic, the friction co-efficiency between glass and rubber is just about 0... add water and it's actually negative....put a 40 tonne 18 wheeler on their sample. What happens when a car looses a wheel, a Jeep catches alight, someone graffitis 200 panels... even if the infrastructure was free, and the replacement parts were free, the cost of maintenance would be astronomical... I smell an ID-10-T error :D
+fleuroman Don't forget the costs of a 24/7 cleaning crew. Tires tend to blacken things rather quickly.
Great explanation, it really shows that putting solar panel on the road is not viable unless the efficiency will go up.... which is not going up anytime soon.
Though I've got a nitpick on the return; you say that it'll be €10/M²/year but that's on a €0,20/kWh return rate. Realistically the consumer of the electricity will pay for the generation.
Lets say a Dutch household pays €30/month which means €360/year, which is the estimated cost of a 1 person household. So in 15 years it will be €5400 or €16.200 for 3 households.
For a 2 person household is €55/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €29.700.
For a 3 person household is €69/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €37.260.
For a 4 person household is €77/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €41.580.
For a 5 person household is €94/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €50.760.
For a 6 person household is €100/month and for 3 households for 15 years it's €54.000.
That means the whole 100 meters would need to cost less than €54.000 if there were 6 people in every 1 of the 3 households.
But more realistically it would 3 or 4 person household, which means it needs to be less than €41.580.
Let's say the road is 2 meters wide, so it's 200m². €41,580 / 200 = €207,9/m². So it's no possible.
But what about the 6 person household? €54.000 / 200 = €270/m². Again not possible, unless you want to drive over rooftop solar panels.
Also some "fun" facts; the Solaroad test road after a month it had damage to a 1m² part panel and a portion had to be replaced.
11 months later the whole surface had to be replaced because it was in a really poor condition.
So yeah, households would need to pay more for solaroad energy than gray energy or even solar panels on their own roof.
EEVblog Are you going to do a video about the Hendo "hoverboard"? I have my thoughts and opinion but i would like to see if you can find any problems with it and what those possibly are.
I'm no engineer but about the energy loss from heat. The ground will be cold half the year correct? That would transfer heat from the panels much better then wind plus not sucking heat from the shingles on a roof correct?
Just wondering would path like that make sense on the equator?
Would having solar panels above parking lots / walkways be a good idea? I know here in Florida I sure wouldn't mind walking on the path under the shade of solar panels above. Parking my car under panels at the store and keeping it from the heat would be great too.
Excellent breakdown;
The ONLY bone I could possibly throw them is that it's November so their week of practical data is at the lowest end of the chart, and the summer months might be a bit more forgiving...but it won't be the quadruple insolation that it needs to fix the glaring problem.
Keep being awesome!
frollard Yes, true, but I compared their test results with the same test data from November for a typical rooftop system. So it was a very fair comparison.
EEVblog
No contention here...it's debunked thoroughly...was the only possible avenue I could think of for wiggle room!
Dave could you do a video on Electrostatic motors/ generators and why they can't be scaled up to power homes? Love your vids! Cheers!
Dave, can you make the same calculations but if the pannels are over the road on some kind of construction, positioned in right angle and etc.? Not suitable for city streets, but I wonder about the inter-city roads, thinking in regard about the land price
ent, service needed, safety issues, constructions price and whatever other costs that comes to your mind.
Food for thought: building and maintaining roads also generates budget losses. Not saying "solar roadways" is the way to go but the cost gap between standard blacktop and some form of solar energy harvesting tech might or might not make it a viable solution in the future.
General DON'Ts when considering your options for solar panel installation.
DON'T:
- Install panels under a surface whos transparency may deteriorate in any appreciable manner.
- Install panels in a manner that allows other objects to partially or entirely put them in shadow during sunlight hours.
- Install panels at a sub-optimal angle for your particular region of the earth.
- Install panels in a place that permits free general public access to their surfaces.
Follow these simple rules and then you may expect the best from your panel :)
Thank you for technical proof of this nonsense! I recently talked about this kind of project with my friends and i did not have enough information. Besides energy efficiency there are one big argument against this roadways. Solar panels need light to produce energy so you need to cut down all trees beside road or street. So streets become much more hot during summer for some minor energy production. It is much better plant tree besides road and put panels on the roofs. We have lot of trees besides roads in here (old tradition).
Greetings from Czech Republic!
PS: I love your channel!
Hi Dave!
Just upfront: Love your channel, keep up the good work!
Regarding your argumentation:
As I understood, you calculated that if you have to choose between a solar panel on the roof or a solar panel within a road, you should definitely choose to put in onto a roof.
What I think, would be worth calculating as well is this:
If you have to choose between building a concrete road or a solar panel road (or bicycle way), what would be the better choice? Roads have to be build (or at least renewed) and they are not free to build and maintain either. So might solar panel roads be a valuable alternative in this respect?
(Personally I cannot imagine they are - but it would probably a nice follow up video)
Did you ever figure it out?
What about under ground tracking panels? 15m wide pathway with 1m wide or wider panels under it. Then you could get close to roof top efficacy. I do agree the cost would be very high for roi.
Is there a way that they could use the heat of the roads to generate power? I've wondered if there would be possible to use the massive amount of heat that builds up in the road's pavement to generate electricity. Esp. in the summer the roads get really hot.
Thermoelectric power generation is theoretically possible and is used on space probes. But it's quite expensive and inefficient. That's why steam is used in coal, biofuel, and combined cycle gas generators.
Could you do the calculations on how much cheaper it would be to just solar power every home versus this backwards approach?
He allready said: Even if the cell's are at ZERO €/m² it will not work! The cells itself are not the main cost factor and they can't survife long enoug there to produce more energy than it takes to place them there.
Sad but true!
If they could do a road that lasts 100 Years without doing more than somtimes brush them, it will pay out... but who can do that?