The link I mentioned states the path uses tech which could support cars. They’re working in a version which can handle buses and trucks.
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Korea has the bike-highway one I was thinking of.
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Huh. I’ve backed well over 150 kickstarters, mostly textual/book projects for role-playing games, science fiction, or art, as well as a large dose of electronics focused on hacking/making. I’ve had probably…three or four fail to deliver.
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It’s crap tech. First off, a small bike path isn’t any where near what the highways were supposed to be - complete with light up lanes and LEDS everywhere.
It is a hugely dumb, unpractical idea. Has anyone besides me driven on a road lately? They are constantly under construction or needing repair. That bike path was showing wear and tear from foot traffic and bikes. No way actual cars running on it wouldn’t tear the bejesus out of it. The article even said that it couldn’t withstand commercial trucks. Asphalt gets slippery when wet, but I bet your tires grip it 10x better than what ever they plan to make solar panels from - peeling anti-slip surface or not.
Aside from that, I’ve seen people crunch the numbers where the power needed to light up everything to a proper brightness you could see during the day, would not only mean you aren’t making any extra energy, most days you wouldn’t make enough energy to power the roadway.
Maybe way off in the future we can revisit it, but right now it is a huge waste of time and resources and tax money. Though I DO like solar power and would like to see it used more - like on roofs where as the article mentions they are 30% more efficient than the roadways due to their angles.
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Wow. That’s a lot.
I have only backed one - an indie animation project. They are trying to get a pilot out to shop around the concept. It is Daft Punk means Aeon Flux. I so loved every thing about it I put in $150 - which is no small change to me. I wish I could have paid enough to get a character cameo, but that was enough to get my company name to show up as graffiti in the background somewhere and an art book.
I may have mis-spoke though their count includes projects you back that aren’t successful (don’t get funded) and ones you cancel, which I’ve done a few times.
128 games (including computer games and table-top games as well as cards)
62 technology
12 film/video
25 design
I saw Urbance after the KS happened. I hope it goes somewhere.
They got enough for the Pilot, and they are having some big anime guy in Japan head it. All this from French Canadians. You find neat things in the weirdest places.
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Don’t you mean this is a pyramid scheme?
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Maybe so, but there’s a difference between “crap tech” and a “scam”.
And as I’ve always understood it, the reason why asphalt roads constantly need repairs is because asphalt is not the best surface for roads – just the cheapest not-bad surface.
Well if you are marketing something that you know isn’t going to work - at least not for the price you quoted, isn’t that basically a scam?
That assumes they know the solar roads aren’t going to work. There’s an awful lot of failed inventions in history the inventors were sure were going to work.
Like I said, the basic “math on a napkin” shows what they were proposing wouldn’t work.
It would never work where I live just due to seasons. Something like that with what’s available today needs to be someplace nearer the equator, someplace with 1 season that varies as little as possible. Asphalt or concrete, it needs frequent repair up here.
I think the tiled Kickstarter thing is far more into scam territory than the Netherlands one (the Korean one I posted is conventional usage, just shelters a bike highway which I think is cool)
But the Netherlands one, as long as they understand they are working on the future, as in abandonment of all economic principle in their pursuit, it’ll just be a matter of when/whether materials science provides the answers they need.
And why are they (the kickstarter one) trying to power a road off it by adding nifty un-necessaries that need zero power if they don’t exist? If you were going to make a huge, fairly unreliable power generator just plug it into the grid and let it do what little it can to ease the strain there. Seems to be what the Netherlands model is doing.
Jalopnik had a good post about how impractical they are, too. I always thought the solar roadway tech would be fantastic for a driveway. Especially up here in Canada, you could use the generated power to heat it in the winter when it snows. The bike path idea isn’t bad either. But for a major highway? Get outta here with that nonsense.
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Asphalt is matte black. It absorbs most solar energy that hits it already, turning that into heat (heck, that’s how my driveway goes from “a thin layer of snow” when I head off to work in winter to “completely clear” when I return).
Unless you’re talking about storing the solar energy in a battery, and then using the battery to heat up the driveway, I don’t think that a solar-powered driveway heater is much of an improvement on a plain, black asphalt driveway.
Yes, that is obviously what I was talking about.
Ah. I apologize for misunderstanding.
In that case, I just don’t get why you wouldn’t just hook both the driveway’s solar panels and heating elements up to the grid.
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