Posted by MarkB_MI on March 13, 2011 at 17:29:47 from (166.203.249.83):
In Reply to: O/T solar Highways posted by Rollie NE PA on March 13, 2011 at 09:16:06:
The video was a confusing mish-mash about four different technologies that didn't seem to explain which was which or why you would use one or the other. Glass highways, photovoltaic highways, building LED signs into highways and recovering energy from vehicle motion.
I'm not an expert on glass, but it has a lot of desirable characteristics for a road surface. Glass has no crystalline structure, so it actually handles compression very well and maintains a fairly constant compressive strength over a wide temperature range. Unlike concrete, glass has tensile strength so rebar isn't required (rebar is the achille's heel of concrete in the rust belt). The question isn't so much whether you CAN make roads out of glass but whether they would be cheaper to build and maintain in the long run than asphalt or concrete.
Photovoltaic technology isn't any mystery. The cost is getting to where it is competitive with fossil fuel. But the best locations for photovoltaics (e.g. the southwest) aren't where the power is needed. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to photovoltaic roadways in a few years.
Once you get past the idea of glass roadways, it doesn't take a big leap to think of putting LED signs in them. Of course, they didn't show what those signs look like out in daylight!
The thing that is perhaps oddest but most practical is the recovery of power from wasted motion. There are actually a few places where this is being done with sidewalks: People walking over the sidewalk generate power. If you think about it, there are millions of places where roads and structures move as vehicles go over them: bridges and overpasses are examples. It's not that difficult to recover this energy which is otherwise lost. I don't know that you would want to do this with normal roadways, though: "springy" roadways would necessarily sap power from vehicles.
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