June 24th, 2016: Solar Road

[xoxoxoBruce]

The headline, “Solar paving to make first public US appearance on Route 66”
Wow, that’s cool.

Then the heading…
The US state of Missouri has decided to test solar paving technology on America’s most famous road, Route 66.
Sounds interesting.

.......

OK, the story…

The state’s transportation department will use tough, electricity-generating panels developed by the pioneering
husband-and-wife team Scott and Julie Brusaw, founders of the company Solar Roadways, who captivated the
US in 2014 with their plan to pave America with solar panels.

The department hopes that the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center at Conway will get the country’s first solar
roadway panels on a public right of way, in a move one official said would bring “the history and the future together”.

Welcome center, not the actual road, hmm.
OK, start where it won’t totally screw the public if it fails… except in the wallet.

It was not revealed how large an area would be paved with the panels. According to the newspaper, to get the
most out of the project the department will seek crowd funding.

Crowd funding? Shake down the people in line for the toilets?

In this the department will be hoping to replicate the success of Solar Roadways’ 2014 crowd funding campaign,
in which they raised $2.2m in two months, more than double their target of $1m.
“We are going to go out there publicly and on the internet … and ask for money to make our solar roadway pilot
project even bigger and better,” Tom Blair said.

I don’t know about that?

The Brusaws, of Sandpoint, Idaho, have been working on their system for 12 years, and got a boost in 2009 in the
form of a $100,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration to build a prototype solar road panel.
They have since received two more research grants from the US Department of Transportation, the latest in
November 2015, worth $750,000, to study freeze-thaw cycling, moisture conditioning, shear testing, and advanced
loading on their third-generation panel prototype.

So we’ve all got skin in this game already.
They're making some mighty big claims that are hard to believe.

They have claimed that paving all of America’s roads and parking lots with the panels would generate
13,385 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than three times the amount the whole country consumed in 2009.

It says so right here on my calculator.

Color me skeptical when it comes to glass roads that 80,000 lb trucks use. Look what happens to concrete.
I remember reading that the engineers who do interstate highway planning don't care what the car traffic is predicted
they only want to know how many trucks.

link and link