If You Need Any Convincing That Solar Roadways Are The Future, This Video Will Help

I posted earlier that crowd funding was at over 500k when I donated yesterday, it doubled today lol.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Oh for the love of.........ARG! ! ! (S/F for a cool concept OP..but booo on a psychotic government)

Is there any other pie in the sky, total fantasy land B.S. we can waste the nations money on? How about flying cars again? They've been chasing that crap since the 60's and I saw another prototype just last year! Hey, I have it..how about more electric cars that cost many times more per copy to make than anyone could possibly afford to pay in buying it. (I.E....it would BE the destruction of GM if GM wasn't Government Motors in more than name only).

Naww.. Lets...find a bright new shiny thing to play with for highways! Hell ya!

Pay no mind to a few facts...of course.. I'm a mean old stuffy adult that says we gotta eat our veggies BEFORE pigging out on desert.

#1. We have 10's of thousands of bridges which aren't simply in need of help, they are below even enjoying a "Satisfactory" rating. Interstates to back roads your local school bus travels. Bridges...not just pot holes or bumps in the founded highway.

#2 We have functionally broken major city transportation networks. When Rush hour isn't an hour anymore, but pretty well calls the time from 8 am to 5 pm as a regular thing, and it's a couple breaks in mid morning and mid afternoon which forms an exception? We have a failed transpo- network.

#3. We have a chronically and terminally underfunded Interstate highway system that has, by pure design, been robbing Peter to pay Paul from damn near it's inception. All monies flow to Washington to a big general highway fund that they skim off the top of for totally unrelated Government B.S. in the way of IOU's and such..then piddle what's left back to the states in whatever bean counter formula they coughed up this year.

.....In other words, we very much have a transportation network in crisis in many completely separate but nonetheless critical ways. It's not wine...it doesn't improve with age...it totally fails and collapses with age and neglect. It's rarely seen neglect, despite the "stimulus" nonsense, at the level it's suffering it now.

Into all this? Whoo-hoo! Lets remake the collapsing system into something insanely expensive which likely won't work, based on tech which will be obsolete by the time Government gets around to calling the screw-up in progress done.

** Sorry.. After spending most of my life literally living on this nation's highways and byways, as that saying goes, it's as personal a grip for me as something wrong inside my own house. State and Federal *HAS TO BE FORCED* to eat their veggies BEFORE they can even talk about desert without a backhand slap.

Dinner is rotting in plain sight.

Forget the holes in our undies...we need a new Dress!!

All we have to do is get the government* to pay for it, then life will be peachy nirvana. Solar Freaking Roadways will solve all our problems.

The only thing freakier than the concept itself is the freaky hysterical positive reaction to it.

Earth to everyone. Are you people freaking kidding me? Is "It will pay for itself!" the limit of your economic IQ? Do you have a freaking bottomless checkbook? I'll tell you what. If this is so cool why don't you replace your driveway with these solar freaking blocks and see how it goes?

Here's how it will go. It will cost you about $40,000 to replace the average small driveway, more than the cost of a car. And the power you will derive from these freaking solar panels will be enough to light your garage with a few fluorescent bulbs. That's it. Your ROI (that's "Return on Investment") will be greater than your lifetime. And when the "But wait! The cost will drop and economies of scale will kick in!" happens it will only be thirty or forty years, at which point the whole thing will be obsolete and in need of replacement.

And that's just for your driveway.

You can't just wave a magic wand here. The amount of gold needed to make this happen is un-freaking-believable. These pie-in-the-sky freaking projections are about as accurate as the ones you looked at before investing in your IRA.

* Hello? That's us.

might as well pave the roads with gold lol

originally posted by: Kali74
I posted earlier that crowd funding was at over 500k when I donated yesterday, it doubled today lol.

Well I don't have much $$ but I contributed also, I feel like this would be a wonderful change for the world. I wish i had a driveway already!

a reply to: schuyler

You can't just wave a magic wand here.

I am pretty sure they said this and all those things when they put citywide sewage/water/gas and power lines in.

a reply to: Char-Lee

If you go back to the crowd funding site I bet you will see that most of that was less than 50$ donations. Good for you . A lot if people doing a little can add up to a lot.

a reply to: schuyler

Have you got any idea how much money the US has spent on just guarding Gulf oil?

$10 Trillion in roughly 40 years.

The US is consuming oil at a figure approaching $1 trillion annually.

So, your 40 year example would have been the same as the US has spent on oil, fighting for it, consuming it and protecting it...but the upshot would have been a better quality of life for everyone along the way.

Besides there's the small matter of peak oil to think about too.

Better to invest in something that doesn't go up in smoke for the same money isn't it?

originally posted by: Kali74
a reply to: engvbany

"... The rubber on the glass came off with the simple wipe of a finger: it didn't stick well to the glass. That wasn't the case with the porous concrete: we may now have permanent skip marks there "

Either it's a safe grippy high-friction surface , like glass-paper, or dangerous slippery low-friction wipe-clean surface like smooth-glass : you can't have it both ways.

a reply to: MysterX

that really is something!!!! would extreme temps effect it???

This is an amazing idea, I was thinking about something similar long ago while washing the salt off of my car when I cared about such things, not even considering generating anything more than the power to melt the ice and snow and not having to use salt.

I was also thinking just today about how we are bombarded with global warming and pollution reduction influences nearly constantly, never even considering how expensive anything which requires petroleum becoming which in effect is literally everything.

I then considered that those powers which RULE over us, which siphon off our wealth to power our houses and cars and everything else will not likely allow such technology to for the most part, basically put them out of business.

Ya see?, the capitalists are only kidding when they say they want to do things for the greater good and this is what really needs to be fixed.

I hope this technology takes off and I can ride my bicycle all year anywhere I am, to and from a facility which builds these or components of these on a part time basis which allows me to earn enough money to live a rewarding life-style.....

Maybe that's a teeny bit much, but why the hell not?.

They'll probably make them in China.

a reply to: MysterX

Also it will inform the authorities when anyone breaks the speed limit by a couple of miles or brakes heavy which equates to bad driving habits. This is what insurance companies want now with these black boxes in every car for safer driving(read any excuse to negate cover or put up premiums). No-one and I mean no-one drives perfectly all the time. Forget black boxes if this takes off because everyone, whether driving a vehicle or walking, would be monitored real time. Now that is big brother bought to life. Do not believe the authorities if they say"we'll never use it like that". Also at the minute the efficiency of solar generation is minimal.

a reply to: Char-Lee

The last several dresses have turned out to be faulty material and workmanship right from the planning phase.

I'll go with patching the one almost bare to being legally indecent.

After we can stand without our tails swinging in the breeze (or bridges falling down at the most inopportune moments as just the warning shot) then I'm all for a dispassionate look at what may really work for road technology. It does seem silly we're using the same basic stuff that's been around since someone found a dirt road to be..well, dirty.

a reply to: nighthawk1954

That's freakin' awsome. I want this now.

Why aren't there more flags??

I can understand the fear of being monitored everywhere one may drive, but also understand exactly why this would be desired by those who would want a reduction in traffic accidents and fatalities.

...But that ain't the reason, it's only the one you are fed...

There is no reason anyone would expect any kind of privacy while travelling considering it is use of the commons which requires everyone to follow certain guidelines for the safe travel of all, which through my personal observation most cannot handle the responsibility of, let alone a great number of them don't even need to be on the road anyway, never minding most couldn't pass a "license to walk" test and probably shouldn't even be on the road at all anyway.

Insurance companies monitoring what is done behind the wheel is nothing more than the result of their having their thumbs in everyone's pie in order to cut costs and deny coverage to those who don't deserve to get away with what they do, soon to be used will be your preferred customer card you use to buy all that junk food by your health insurance company, really.

The problem here is not being monitored, but why, and it isn't to make it safer for you or I.

Something else needs to change before any technology will be used to make life really better for any person or entities other than the minority which look upon the majority to wring the wealth out of while the majority futzes around blissfully ignorant of how exploited and abused they are.

Technology changes, people just stay #ing stoooooopid.

a reply to: crayzeed

originally posted by: Char-Lee
a reply to: schuyler

You can't just wave a magic wand here.

I am pretty sure they said this and all those things when they put citywide sewage/water/gas and power lines in.

And when they did they had engineering studies and cost-benefit analyses that showed the benefits of doing so, And they did so a small city at a time. You could say the same for the Interstate system as a whole, or electricity, or any number of other major engineering feats.

But in all these cases, even when they encountered severe cost overruns, they had an idea of what it would cost, how long it would last, and what the payback actually was. But what you've got here isn't that at all. It's a starry-eyed idea with a half-baked idea that there would be a "pay back" without knowing the costs at all. It's completely pie-in-the-sky in terms of projections, a spreadsheet gone silly with assumptions.

The ideas expressed here seem to be along the lines of "We'll just get a grant from the DOT or the DOE and THEY will pay for it!" Just exactly where do people think this money is going to come from? Do you think they are going to sell municipal bonds like they do when they build a sewer system? Really?

Cool ideal.... though I would have privacy concerns... I can see this leading to smart highways and sidewalks, soon as you step out the door they will track your every step. I don't want it!!!

I look at the idea of tracking and the deliberate policy of keeping oil flowing wherever you get it from by the British Government and I would welcome another alternative.

You know your government is playing vested interest only when something like tidal power around an island like the UK is never mentioned, or even talked about. Its all about solar power and wind farms, neither so regular and reliable as tidal power. I mean solar power in the UK, we are the country that has pretty much a permanent grey sky, regular rain and now winter floods and the odd heatwave some 9 years ago.

Even with wind power the government stopped funding to an Isle of Wight company that was making small wind turbines for houses, so you know whose oily backside the government polishes.

originally posted by: MysterX
a reply to: schuyler

Have you got any idea how much money the US has spent on just guarding Gulf oil?
$10 Trillion in roughly 40 years. The US is consuming oil at a figure approaching $1 trillion annually.

So, your 40 year example would have been the same as the US has spent on oil, fighting for it, consuming it and protecting it...but the upshot would have been a better quality of life for everyone along the way.

Besides there's the small matter of peak oil to think about too.

Better to invest in something that doesn't go up in smoke for the same money isn't it?

Gulf Oil is for the whole world, not just the US. In any case, it's already spent. If you spent a trillion dollars in the past you didn't have, does that mean you can spend a trillion dollars in the future you also don't have? That "better quality of life," assuming it COULD have been done with the technology 40 years ago, didn't happen. It's a moot point and also much more complex than the simplistic way than you have outlined. In terms of "peak oil," that's a paradigm that has some serious flaws and assumptions. But your entire argument is just a part of "This solution will solve all our problems!" claim that is unsubstantiated, unproven, and not even close to be costed out.

HOW MUCH WILL THIS COST? No one can tell you. How long would it take to implement? No one can tell you. How cost-effective would it really be? No one can tell you. What would the maintenance be like? No one can tell you. The underlying assumption here is that it would just last and last, but as a piece of technology, that's unlikely. The stress tests put to this stuff are miniscule compared to the stress of a couple of northeast winters. This idea is untested and the issues are being glossed over as immaterial.

And the funniest thing of all is that people are running to kickstarter thinking they can "help."

What you've got here, in the movie and the thread, is frenzy. You are buying off on the hype. An online FAQ does not answer the issues raised here; it's a "lite" philosophical treatment suited for internet forums and bars, but not for design reviews by construction companies and governments (and voters) asked to give their life's blood to support this thing.

This is a very good example of an investment bubble where something is being offered to you that sounds too good to be true.(3) It's the answer to all life's problems, will save the planet, and make people who get in o the ground floor here very, very rich!

This is going to be HUGE! It will be the biggest engineering project ever to be built on Earth designed to save us all from everything that ails us, from polluting the atmosphere to providing abundant near-free energy. In fact, electricity will be so cheap that there will be no need for meters!(1) Unlimited energy means unlimited jobs, employment for all, a living minimum wage, and, umm, free health care, too!

So get in on the ground floor! Invest now! the kickstarter campaign is off and running for your convenience! Invest what you can: $10, $50, $1000! (And if you have some serious bucks, contact us at the website below as a few coveted "angel investor"(2) slots are still open for a limited time.) You will be amply rewarded! Plus, you'll feel really good about saving the Earth!


(1) This was said about nuclear power in the 1950's.
(2) Net worth exclusive of residence must be at least $1 mil.
(3) And probably is.

I'm old and a bit leery of magic solutions to ages-old problems. I've seen too many of them come and go and have paid the price for them so I can manage to see some of the problems associated with them.
I have several friends and acquaintances who have 20 year-old solar panels that are needing replacing but the cost of new is not even close to affordable----despite promises that "the costs will fall with time...." sigh... Everyone I know who attempted to go solar 20 years ago is now repentant and going with conventional power as the promise of solar has proved false and too costly to be practical for the average home. In our area we're seeing massive solar panel displays being built---but in every case they are being funded by government loans. They are not being built by people who have any experience at all, just a lot of hype by people more than ready to loan them money for a dream that hasn't yet proven itself. So I have a lot of concerns.
The first being the costs as others have pointed out. However, if this is truly workable technology, it will be rapidly adopted by private industry and from there the municipalities will naturally follow.
Another concern is the availability of raw materials for these solar panels. I've recently heard several experts talking about the reason all our solar technology comes from China---they have access to the raw materials while we have far bigger obstacles to obtaining them. So will China begin manufacturing our roads? Why do I think it might not be a good thing to depend on them for our power and transportation?