Tokyo govt hopes "solar road" will lead to greener power
38 replies, posted
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0004500668
Hasn't these be debunked time and time again that its a waste of money and simply bullshit?
Well if they're made by people who know what they're doing, they should be fine, but then we've yet to see them be fine so hopefully this is the example that's set.
Not this one specifically I think, it was another companies one that got debunked.
Well, putting up an equivalent amount of solar cells in a traditional fashion would net you both way more output and a much better driving surface. It seems like a completely pointless engineering exercise, considering it's a compromise that really doesn't need to be made.
When will this solar roadway meme finally die? That shit isn't nearly as efficient as traditional panels and only increase complexity on top of an already complex problem.
Nah, making a solar road is proof that they don't know what they're doing. The panels are going to be fucked by cars being on top of them, dirt being on top of them, wear and tear, shade from buildings, sub-optimal angling toward the sun, etc. The only point here would be "promoting Tokyo as an eco-friendly city domestically and abroad ahead of the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics". But let's stay tuned for EEVblog to come in and debunk this one as well. In the meantime, this should be relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZBrHqTJk4
This sin't going to work, why not mount them on top of buildings where they have been proven to be effective? The fucking cost of maintaining this won't be worth it in the end.
and “power-generating floors” that generate electricity by utilizing the vibrations created by people walking
This seems promising at first glance if you were to put it in an area with a lot of pedestrian traffic
I'm looking forward to a future where the top of buildings are simply made from trees and solar panels.
Damn, that guy is eating up all the stupid PR those companies post.
I hope somebody with more sense will stop that shit.
Call me cynical, I feel like these solar road projects just want to catch the eyes of the news and/or eye for more funding from lazy investors/governments to make a quick buck.
Especially considering they're putting it on a parking lot, a place literally designed to be covered in vehicles. All they had to do was build a roof over the parking lot and put proper solar panels there. But then I guess that wouldn't be 'promoting Tokyo as an eco-friendly city'.
This sounds interesting, but, without knowing squat about energy efficiency, I'm still gonna go ahead and guess that it's laughably inefficient and they're going to have trouble with storing any of the energy that's generated:
According to Soundpower Corp., which developed the power-generating
floor, when a 60-kilogram person walks on the floor at two footsteps per
second, it generates an average current of about 2 milliwatts of
electricity. The energy of each step can momentarily light up 300 to 400
LEDs, said the company, which is based in Fujisawa, Kanagawa
Prefecture.
I would certainly like to see this actually storing energy and using it to keep floors lit during power outages, because it honestly sounds like you're going to need a stampede down the hallway to keep it lit for a minute. But I guess you could always use it to light up just a small area of the floor around you as you walk during a power outage, so you at least can get a sense of the layout of the rooms.
Turns out, they've been around for a while, this was uploaded in April of 2009:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMTASzOnMM
I'm getting the feeling that the whole world might be run by idiots
According to Soundpower Corp., which developed the power-generating
floor, when a 60-kilogram person walks on the floor at two footsteps per
second, it generates an average current of about 2 milliwatts of
electricity. The energy of each step can momentarily light up 300 to 400
LEDs, said the company, which is based in Fujisawa, Kanagawa
Prefecture.
Well right away you can tell it's utter bullshit, current isn't measured in watts, if they mean power then it's still shit, 2mW might light up high efficiency LEDs but it can't do much else, you average LED for use in lighting takes 1000-7000mW not including loss in the driver.
All solar roads are inherently flawed. Solar Roadways, the company that you're thinking of, is an especially bad example of such an idea because of the pointless hexagonal tiles, the LEDs that aren't visible in daylight, the thick glass layer, the snow-melting system which is vastly inferior to plows, and the energy cost of all these extra features making them consume more energy than they generate. Most solar roads don't fail quite as spectacularly, but that doesn't make them worthwhile.
i hear thunderfoots voice in the distance, ready to rev up another 30 solar road videos
That sounds hazardous, trees and heavy and the amount of soil needed to hold a tree is even more. Unless it's a low purpose built structure, you're putting everyone in that building in danger of sudden collapse.
why don't they consider adding solar pannels in strips over the road or along side the road, I'm not saying completely cover it but one array over say a 10-15 foot stretch of highway every few miles is still pretty good, they just need to build it as high as the bridges to allow for large loads to pass under
So what happened to putting solar panels on rooves exactly? is it not cool enough anymore? Or is putting tax incentives on solar powered buildings too novel an idea for a politician to think of?
Well the idea with roads is there's a lot more road then there is roofs. Problem is as thunderfoot and many others have shown the solar tiles they made for roads can't handle shit.
Seeing this again made me wonder about thermal energy though. If they could put something other the road that could transmit thermal energy into electricity I think that would work well, since you could use normal road materials. But direct thermal to electric is pretty inefficient to my understanding.
Your very close with the thermal energy. Roads generate thermal columns and you can use a simple tethered glider to generate energy. with all the finicky-ness of it though you might as well buy in bulk those tethered wind turbines and get if not the same amount of energy then more all in a centralized place that doesn't require a fleet of vehicles to maintain like a super spread out energy system prone to getting its wires chewed up by mice.
Oh yeah, I forgot the average foot traffic is one 60kg person a day.
Doesn't matter 2mW is fuck all power, if you had 1000 people walk over it a day that's 2W, minus the loss storing it you might be able to light a bunch of low intensity LEDs for a few hours, which is basically the only application for it.
So basically it will take thousands to millions of times more energy to produce and install then it will ever generate in years?
Pretty much, you're never going to make money back on it, the only use for it is emergency lighting which is a pretty good idea, like solar roads it isn't going to 'save the planet'.
I'd wager emergency lights are vastly cheaper and easier to install and maintain than a powered floor but at least its not something you drive hundreds of tons of vehicles over
Can't wait until these inevitably shatter and they never get to fix them because the roads can't be totally shut down as that would be an economic disaster.
Don't they have like, absolutely no traction? Is this a stealth revival of Initial D in the real world?
I wouldn't apply our standards to Japanese. They make public apologies for trains being late, they don't fuck around with their infrastructure.
I wish them all the best, through stuff like this improvements cant be made and eventually solar roads might be a viable solution for everyone.
Too much 1 failure = bad idea on this forum sometimes.
So far, no working prototypes of solar roads have delivered worth-while results, even those which have been up for over a year.
The angles are shit, the glass reduces efficiency, dirt on the glass reduces efficiency, it's literally more efficient and more cost-effective to put solar panels on roof-tops.
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