Highways To The Future Are Solar Roadways The Way To Generate Power And Reduce Carbon Emissions?

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Highways to the Future: Are Solar Roadways the Way to Generate Power and Reduce Carbon Emissions?

Solar roadways would be the smart roads for the future, according to Scott and Julie Brusaw, husband and wife pioneers of road reinvention. They have created a transparent road-building material which generates energy that they call a Photo voltaic Roadway. Roads soak up the sun's energy, so if you put solar panels in them you could produce electricity, and utilise that in many innovative ways, such as getting LEDs which generate road markings rather than having to paint all of them on.

But solar power panels are made of glass. Surely they are too fragile for cars to run on, let alone 38 tonne trucks? Based on the Brusaws, new materials mean that the solar roadways are extremely robust. This innovation also sounds pricey but roads tend to be today mainly made of asphalt, which contains bitumen, huge viscous material piped through oil wells. Like just about all fossil fuels it is environmentally damaging and the costs per tonne of the materials has been sky-rocketing in recent years. In Next year it rose Eleven.2% ...
... according to the US Bureau of Labor. Over the past 10 years the cost per tonne has risen tenfold. This means that the cost of creating roads has increased enormously as the oil price also drives up a number of other associated costs, for example diesel fuel with regard to machinery to surface roads. Bill Bolsover, chairman associated with Aggregate Industries, the actual UK arm of the planet's largest materials maker Holcim said: “As a large supplies business operating within current economic conditions, we are continuously playing catch-up with huge input cost inflation due to manufacturing, logistics and raw material cost increases, of which oil-related price is significant."

The storyline of Scott and Jules

Scott and Julie were childhood friends, growing up in Orange County, Ca and then Scott's family relocated away. After he joined the US Marine corps, he went to stick with Julie's family on the way to a posting in Okinawa and romance blossomed. They were married, as Julie had predicted whenever a little girl. After moving in order to Idaho, and having 2 children, the pair pursued different careers, Scott's within engineering, and Julie's in psychology. Julie's interest in environmentalism sparked them both to seek the answer to the waste of energy that conventional roads entail, and then because the concept developed, they realised that the roads could generate electricity to power built-in signals, for example to alert cars to stop when individuals are using a pedestrians crossing, and for numerous other purposes, for example heating the surface in order to melt snow and ice, transporting telecoms signals, and monitoring traffic data.

The basic concept

The solar roadway consists of three layers: the transparent, yet powerful, glass road surface area layer, which has solar power panels and heating components embedded in it, and protects the electronics beneath it; the actual electronics layer, microprocessors and electronics for sensing loads on the highway and controlling the heating unit; finally a base dish layer distributes the power and data collected and is a weatherproof coating for the electronics over it.

During testing the Solar Roadway was improved with the addition of LEDs to the Street Surface layer and making the Base Plate layer out of recycled materials.

Phase We Prototype Built

After designing their modular road construction, within 12 foot (3.9 metre) square panels, in 2009 the Brusaws received a grant from the US Federal Highway Administration to build the very first ever Solar Road Panel prototype. Instead of using an outside contractor, Scott, being a qualified engineer, led the project himself. During the building of the actual prototype, many training were learned and the final version incorporated many improvements in the original concept. It was completed in 2010 and performed sufficiently well to have a second honor of $750,000 to help develop the project into a Phase II model for a parking lot.

Solar Roadways in Depth

The objective is to create an intelligent, self-healing, decentralised - and therefore safe - power grid. Any home or business connected to the Photo voltaic Roadway using a Solar Road Panel road, driveway or parking space, receives the ability and data signals the Solar Roadway offers. These can be used for home power, accessing the internet, and of course heating the road to melt ice and snow, detecting traffic and pedestrians, and even caution of animals such as deer on the road ahead.

Initial trials showed that with regard to greater visibility the actual roadway LEDs ought to be in the surface coating rather than the electronics coating below. One of the more interesting features is that having a grid of solar roadways allows electric or plug-in crossbreed vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) to recharge anywhere, therefore extending their electrical range to that of petrol and diesel-powered fuelled transportation. A major first phase is always to start equipping garage forecourts with the panels. This would mean that power systems would be available for the storage and they could after that spread out to other places while also being available with regard to charging electric vehicles. It is not generally realised that when there is a critical mass of EVs inside a country, at any time a proportion of them is going to be connected to the grid, charging up or completely charged: this makes all of them a giant battery program and should it be required the EVs can send their power back into the power grid, to provide power quickly. This would compensate for the actual variability of renewable energy systems and integrate them into the nationwide grid system. Solar Roads would also provide an additional decentralised power system that might be flexible enough to consider this two way utilisation of the electricity grid. Of program financial compensation systems need to reflect this but as these schemes might have smart metering systems as standard, then this wouldn't be a barrier in order to implementation, and indeed might be seen as a beneficial side effect.

Several companies are working on Electric Induction charging with regard to EVs. This would mean that the automobiles could charge while travelling, rather than having to stop and connect into a recharging program. This would seem an ideal match Solar Roadways as they could incorporate fraxel treatments into the road panels. Scott Brusaw is already talking to two companies pioneering this innovation.

aSceptics suggest that the glass layer could be too slippery or fragile to be useful to vehicles. Scott Brusaw says, "When many people think of glass, they think of their kitchen window. But we are testing special traction-improved glass. At first all of us experimented with side walk glass from New York Town, but this was made to a specification for pedestrians. Now we have moved on to special glass that has traction that is nearly as good or better than cement or asphalt."

The glass they are using for the Solar Roadways is solidified glass, similar to that used in shatter proof or bulletproof home windows. It survived the maximum effect test the university they sent it to was permitted to do, so it appears like it would be able to withstand the rough usage it is intended for.

The following iteration of Photo voltaic Roadways is to be a parking lot, "So we can discover lessons from sluggish moving lightweight vehicles, before moving on to ordinary roads, then freeways." Scott estimates than if all 28,000 square kilometers of US paved surface were covered with solar freeways, the energy generated could be three times the current All of us requirement for electricity utilizing currently available solar panels that are 18.5% efficient. While this can be an optimistic view, all innovations have to start someplace. When technological inventions catch on, they spread rapidly, become cheaper, and ultimately reach market vividness. Mobile phones are a case in point, the first commercially available 1 was sold in 1983, also it took only 30 years for the technology to achieve 87% of the world's populace. If the solar roadway proves to be practical, there isn't any reason why it might not also have exponential growth.

This is nascent technology. The Phase II prototype solar parking area is due to be rolled out in spring The year 2013. Undoubtedly there will be issues to be solved as well as challenges to be conquer, but that is in the nature of new designs. Scott Brusaw states manufacturing could be were only available in 2013 or 2014 if everything goes right with the parking lot development.

Telecoms cables might be installed within the sections, which would give constant TV, internet and mobile phone coverage, without the signal losses which occur in "dead zones" nowadays.

Possible difficulties

The obvious issues of traction and strength have already been resolved. Many questions remain, for instance, what will the maintenance expenses be? Where solar roads have an advantage over standard roads is they are modular. To fix a pothole, all you have to do is actually replace the panel with it in. Under conventional conditions, many nearby authorities wait till there are plenty of potholes to reappear a whole road, because it make economic sense to do so - in this instance Solar Roadways would seem to be a better option.

The panels may become blocked with dirt or essential oil. The roadways uses self-cleaning glass, so most of the debris will be cleaned away by the rainfall. Until some roads surfaced with this materials are operational, it is hard to tell what the maintenance needs is going to be. However, roads require cleaning and maintenance anyway, which means this may not have significant price implications for whoever deploys this system.

Will the actual panels receive sufficient sunlight to actually function? Scott Brusaw says that even in the gridlocked road, sufficient mild will reach the sections as there is still a minimum of 50% of the road's surface uncovered. As the solar cells creating the roadways are modular, obscuring you don't stop the rest of the tissue from generating electricity.

What the cost per km of building roads using this material will be is not available yet. However normal roads are a "sunk cost" and have no payback, unless they are cost roads. Solar Roadways possibly could return more income than was committed to them, making them a revenue source, over their projected 20 year lifespan. Scott estimates that based on the 4.2kWh for each meter squared (the US average sunlight), "Our Solar Road Panel should typical receiving 56.28kWh of energy per day.

"Let's now consider our Sunpower 18.5% efficient solar cells and see how they'd do. They might theoretically collect (Sixty.28kWh x 0.185) Ten.41kWh per day. At that rate, it would take just under 22 years for the Solar Road Solar panel to pay itself away. Using solar cells along with slightly higher advantages will allow us to create our goal of 20 years. Again, this is let's assume that the price of electricity will not increase over '09 rates for the next two decades, and that we don't use the other methods of income collection - just electricity generation.Inch If electricity prices rise, which seems virtually certain, and the electric roadways also produce revenue from carrying telecoms or other indicators, for example, it this quite possible that the roadways would actually make money.

The plan is to result in the components reusable as well as recyclable, so if the roadway panel fails, it would be removed as well as functioning components taken out to be used in new panels and the remaining material crushed as well as recycled into the first layer for new panels.

Robbing the panels for his or her components would be useless, as they continue to give off positioning signals if they are removed from the grid. After a few arrests, criminals should get the message that stealing them leads the police straight to you.

Disasters like earthquakes and street collapses are unavoidable, and will wreck the actual panels just as they would a conventional road. The consumer electronics incorporates a cut-off mechanism, so a damaged panel would not electrocute anyone if the circuitry is exposed during an unforeseen event.

The future of solar roadways

Until there are some operating examples available it's not possible to tell whether this is a brilliant idea or a white elephant. However the project was already proven to work in the laboratory. The questions will always be to do with financial costs and scalability. Assuming that the in advance cost plus revenue payback from power generated makes photo voltaic roadways in some way competitive with conventional asphalt or even concrete roads, how quickly could they be implemented? Certainly they would make whole sections of industry obsolete - for example the manufacturers of oil-based road surfacing machines and the workers that operate them, but presumably they would have to adapt to the new technical challenge, or be side stepped.

Precedents already exist for prevalent technology implementation. The M1 had been opened in The fall of 1959, and it took about 20 years to build a substantial network of motorways across the UK. It would appear easy to implement solar roadways in a similar time-frame, possibly starting from solar parking lots and drive-ways and extending in order to local roads and then main highways.

Solar roadways, if they succeed, could produce decentralised power, reduce carbon emissions and improve street safety and communications. This is an obviously appealing technology which must be developed further. Scott Brusaw says, "We can't continue to develop roads using concrete. It's an antiquated system we have been using for far too long. We can make much better roads, we can help to make intelligent, electric streets, which enable all-electric vehicles. Let's move on, put non-renewable fuels behind us and move on into the 21st century."

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