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50 Comments
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -1/+13Brilliant, good find...
- paulb323, on 12/29/2008, -1/+7Dugg for being cool and realising that burning fossil fuels isn't the only option
- yoda17, on 12/29/2008, -0/+6I have a friend who works with utility companies. He said they understand distributed energy production is the future and are working toward that end.
- kyoobeh, on 12/29/2008, -0/+6yeah, this is definitely very cool!
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -0/+4Highway Star?
- davidg11, on 12/29/2008, -1/+4The other part of this is installing NEW technology with power lines. I don't think people realize that we've been basically using the same technology since they were introduced in 1898. Aluminum surrounding a copper core.
There is a company that makes power lines with aluminum surrounding a carbon composite core. The advantage is that heat does not effect it as much which means you can transfer twice the amount of current over the same. Less line sag = greater space between towers = less towers needed to be built. The Chinese are eating this stuff up. Over 8000 km installed.
I think the USA is next with Obama's national grid plan.
The company is named Composite Technology Corp. Symbol CPTC. Trades for a .25 a share.
http://www.compositetechcorp.com/ - meninostongue, on 12/29/2008, -0/+3Depending on how he is defining a highway, his estimates of how much power could be pretty optimistic. I live on a road that is designated a "highway", but is residential. Solar along this kind of road would be impractical due to driveways, mailboxes, front yards, etc, interrupting any long stretches of empty roadside.
Still though, it would only take a small percentage of what he is estimating to make up a huge part of our energy needs and I hope he manages to get some of it built. This would be a great public works project to put people to work in a recession. - videographer, on 12/29/2008, -0/+3Dude, the solar panels on my roof have a 25-year warranty. What's your SUV got? Or your furnace?
Solar panels, once installed, have a very long lifespan. - malex, on 12/29/2008, -1/+3There are considerable stretches of highway across America without the ice and salt problems you complain about, in exactly the places that solar power is most efficient. Try to be a little more flexible in your thinking.
- hydr, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2Dugg cause I'm freezin' and all this sun energy talk gives me a warm tingling feeling inside.
- omega1045, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2Interstate 25 could become Interstate Wind Power as far as I am concerned. It goes right up the wind corridor of the United States. There are also long stretches of 70, 80 and 90 that I could see being used for wind power that lie in this corridor.
I am sure any number of other interstate and state highways have long, windy stretches that would make for great wind farms. The right-of-way allows for easy burying of power lines. The highway provides an easy way to get to the wind farm for maintenance. The areas where highways are located are already noisy and not places where lots of people live. Large wind towers will not impact many people in rural America in these areas. - drmangrum, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2I think it comes down to spending a quarter to save a dime. The sad fact is, "green" technologies are unproven, full of hidden costs, and hidden pollutants. For instance, the manufacturing of many solar cells require the use heavy metals and various caustic chemicals. The companies that push green technologies tend to be very duplicitous when it comes to full disclosure of the ACTUAL environmental neutrality of their technologies.
Then you have to think about the root problem. The US as a whole DOES NOT have an issue with generating enough power, nor are we in any danger of such. The bulk of our power is generated from coal or nuclear. Neither of which is going anywhere any time soon. The problem is oil and cars.
When it comes right down to it, most people give a rats ass about the "greenness" of their power. They care about how much they have to pay. - derekmas10, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2yeah... sure, they can be damaged in accidents, they need to be cleaned regularly to maximize efficiency, but I think the point of the story is that people are at least trying to find a solution to a very real problem.
- Lighthouse, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2here's why: b/c the buildings belong to someone! let people do the ***** what they want w/ their own property. it's called "freedom". if that solar ***** worked in an economic way you'd see bldg owners all over the place putting panels on their buildings voluntarily. stop thinking that "requiring" people to do this or that is the solution to every problem.
- meninostongue, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2@amightywind:
Actually, I agree to an extent. Bad ideas, and bad "green" ideas are getting in the way of real progress. The problem is people who see it as an opportunity to get rich off a trend rather than doing real research. These people usually just end up shuffling the problem from one place to another (ie from cars polluting to ethanol refineries polluting). The BS makes any real environmentalist as pissed as the anti-green movement,
I liked this article, however, because it seemed like a person who genuinely was looking for ways to make solar viable and more than a 5% solution. I also believe that by introducing a few 5% type solutions, we'll get the money into R&D to help make it more than that. If a few people never bought a 286 computer because too few people could use it, we'd never have made it to Digg. - herculez, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2How about a solar panel that can be painted ON the highway? You heard it here first, folks.
- meninostongue, on 12/29/2008, -1/+3I don't get this hatred of "greenness". Even if you don't subscribe to the idea of man made global warming or the need for environmental protection, certainly you can get behind energy independence? It seems like there are people who are against any ideas that change our energy sources simply out of spite for those that do believe in environmental causes. Making something like this work would be good for everyone, regardless of their reasoning for its necessity.
I just want to clarify that my complaint isn't with your acknowledgment of possible problems... I'd hope that this sort of project would be scrutinized for just such issues. Rather I take issue with the manner in which they are stated. - theutopian, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2I always wondered why they didn't just run high speed rail down the medians of highways or along the rights of way. For example, I-65 from Northwest Indiana to Indianapolis has a median wide enough for accommodate railroads.
Actually, I recently read that the California High Speed Rail project is going to do just that. - Moonkeeper, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2I'm still looking forward to the day solar is so efficient, I could put it a panel on my roof and have the effective price be cheaper then what is currently available. Also looking forward to going off the grid.
- trejrco, on 12/29/2008, -1/+2Agreed; my first thought was - great, now every driver needs to up there insurance by about $300k to cover repair/replacement of the photovoltaic cells they just wiped out ... not to mention that sudden loss of production, and the breaking of that circuit, would cause (yet more) fluctuations in the grid.
Also - our power grid is barely able to function now, and has minimal redundancy ... so the obvious choice is to suddenly over-burden it further ... </sarcasm> - inactive, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1lol wut
-Did I mention power plants? No, I did not. Even then, oil is used to power many more power plants than solar panels in the US. So a loser is you.
-Yes, because it's perfectly safe to breathe in dirt and carcinogens
- I think Picard has the answer to this little puzzle.
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Indeed. All the scientific evidence points to the fact that humanity is changing the climate, and that it will have disastrous effects on civilisation. This isn't the time, or place, to argue the semantics of why you are an idiot, so I'll just leave you to fester in ignorance.
Oh, and before you dish out insults saying how "stupid" I am, it would probably have more impact if you spelt stuff correctly - videographer, on 12/29/2008, -2/+3As usual, the old "It isn't perfect, so let's do nothing" argument. I hear the same tropes tossed at wind generators. Grow up.
- z3rr0, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1I've always wondered why high rises aren't required to use thin solar tech on their sun facing windows. Is there a retrofit for them? ;-)
- JoeMerchant, on 12/29/2008, -1/+2Great, until a sleeping truck driver wipes out not only an oncoming family of 4 in a compact sedan, but also a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of solar panels. But, hey, deployment is cheap, the road is right there.... Maybe the solar panels could be built as roofing over the highways to keep it cool underneath? (Those worried about snow buildup should remember that we're trying to collect solar power, first deployments are not likely to happen north of I-10.)
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -2/+3Hey, great idea! Let's keep on burning petrol that clogs up the sky with fumes and heats up the planet!
......Doh! - samcrut, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1On not this again. You put solar panels where the power gets used! Roads don't use power aside from a few lights. The farther you move the power, the more power gets lost from transmission. The most efficient solution is just to put solar on every rooftop in the country that faces south and meets the sun.
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -1/+2Power engineering should not be tainted by feel good politics. Either there is enough affordable power on the grid or their isn't. It is better to leave the status quo in power generation than deceive the public and take their money without producing results. Accountability is the height of maturity.
- vertigo32, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1Too bad nobody has invented a compound that can be mixed into the top inch or two of road surface that would generate electricity. If you could find a way to use the conductivity of the rebar that is already being built into the freeway, you could probably wouldn't even need dedicated wiring throughout the pavement.
How many square miles of pavement are there in this country? It wouldn't even need to be efficient - if you could get even a 1% return, the nations highway system could probably power the entire nation. - Spoomeister, on 12/29/2008, -1/+2Because obviously, the solar panels would be at street level, in flimsy mechanisms 3' away from either side of the highway, designed to be sideswiped by truckers and college students on marathon cross-country races. They certainly wouldn't put these fields in without any consideration to issues like vandalism, maintenance or driver safety.
If straw men were a renewable energy source, you could keep us running for quite a while, sparky. - drmangrum, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1I was thinking about this eariler. If they put in some piping full of water or any other liquid with a low boiling point, let it circulate through the road way to vaporize and pressurize, push a small generator buried in the ground, and then pool into a reservoir deep in the ground to reliquify, could have power all the time without the risk of it being easily stolen or run over. The only tough part would be how to deal with roadway repair and such.
- edebolt, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1except 2nd generation solar is like 5 times the current oil and nat gas price for energy watt/btu. I am holding out hope for 3rd and 4th gen.
- Bodhammer, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1The Roads Must Roll - RAH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll - avengingturnip, on 12/30/2008, -0/+1Cool. Easy to steal.
- inactive, on 12/30/2008, -1/+2Simple steel struts? And the untold 1000's of footings needed to support them, and the crash safety barriers, and the chain linked fence all crammed into the tiny interstate right of way? You are not thinking clearly. Jackass.
- askantik, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1I've thought this was an interesting idea for a while. It's radical, but then again, that's pretty much the kind of thing we need. And with the billions we are spending on bailing out our ***** and funding 2 wars, the money to do this doesn't look so bad after all.
Disclaimer: I don't know these people and have not studied their calculations, etc. I take them at their word for what they present to laymen, i.e. I have not delved deeply and they may be nutjobs, but it still sounds like an interesting idea.
http://www.solarroadways.com/ - bobhiggins, on 12/29/2008, -0/+1Believe it or not such systems are in development for parking lots, sidewalks, roofs, exterior walls, etc.
I've lost track of the links but you'll find them if you look around. - mousky, on 12/30/2008, -0/+1I'm thinking there are more "tough parts" than just how to deal with"roadway repair and such".
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -1/+1Stretches of interstate 10 in the southwest and possibly 20 in Texas. Of course those areas are surrounded by vast stretches of desert were such panels could be efficiently grouped together. You don't comment on my other concerns. Be a little more skeptical and thorough in your thinking.
- junkneo, on 12/29/2008, -1/+1This is Highway EuroWay. Many countries in Europe have roadside solar panels for more than few years now.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/ ...
http://digg.com/environment/Oregon_Launching_First ...
http://www.solarhighway.org/ - drmangrum, on 12/29/2008, -1/+1Of course, what he doesn't talk about is the cost of maintenance. The roads in the middle of nowhere see very little traffic and as such require very little in the way to on going maintenance. If you start adding technology, the cost start to rise. Someone will have to visit these site to insure sand/debris/etc isn't piling up.
It's a great idea, but I think it's only feasible if done near population centers or if used in concert with other technologies. Like if they were to put some sort of thermal power station in sections of the roadway at the same time (utilize the heat of road). - inactive, on 12/29/2008, -2/+2Year your right. I wonder how many 10's of billions it would cost the elevate them properly? Probably 1000x more than they could ever pay back in useful energy. Loser.
- LanceLungstrong, on 12/29/2008, -1/+1You're a ***** idiot dude. "Its better to leave the status quo" Really?
This idea is fantastic, by placing concrete barriers on the right hand sides of the road before the PV panels, damage from accidents could be avoided. Besides, most crash accidents are fender benders anyways so they don’t involve the sides of the road. This has nothing to do with feel good politics, its alternatives that help wean us off of fossils and diversify our energy production. Putting people to work building this and a smarter energy infrastructure along with wind, hydroelectric, nuclear energy production plants could help bring energy independence. This is a great idea for government because it would be a continual source of income. If homes can pay off the cost of installation after 20 years think of how soon the payoff would before a system this big with the discounts that would be given for such a project. - Spoomeister, on 12/30/2008, -2/+2amightywind: simple steel struts and wire fences costs 10s of billions? really? Doofus.
- sleestakslayer, on 12/30/2008, -1/+0Good point. A better idea might be to plant switchgrass in the medians and use it for biofuel.
- sleestakslayer, on 12/30/2008, -1/+0Chill.
The Digger was just asking a question. That's all.
Now please take some lithium. - inactive, on 12/29/2008, -5/+4The glare of the panels are a dreadful safety risk. Road salts are good for the panel tracking mechanisms I am sure, as are cold, ice, and vandalism. And every time there is an accident you risk doing millions in collateral damage. One of the dumbest 'green' ideas I have ever heard. The absurdity of greenness knows no bounds.
- dwyn, on 12/29/2008, -2/+1Dugg and brilliant, but there's an X-factor: people are going to steal the equipment and/or crash into it pretty much constantly...maybe the upkeep is a new 'green industry' in itself?
- inactive, on 12/29/2008, -4/+2If you want to get rid of the hatred, start offering credible alternatives, not marketing bad ones in the political arena. Solar is at best a 5% solution. The capital costs, lack or power storage capability, and limited geographic suitability doom it. The same goes for wind. 5% solutions are not useful in an economy whose energy use grows by nearly that much per year. If you want to get rid of the hatred stop impeding clean viable energy sources like nuclear, hydroelectric, and clean coal.
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