While the argument over wind farms, ruined vistas and dead birds rages, U.S. inventor Scott Brusaw is quietly doing his own thing with the solar roadway model. The plan is to replace all that asphalt with solar panels laid under a high-strength plastic layer.
The panels may also feature LED road warnings and built-in heating elements that could prevent roads from freezing. Each Solar Road slab can develop around 7.6 kwh of power each day. Right now, the tech costs about $7,000 for a 12’ x 12’ slab, so replacing America’s highways will be a costly process. That being said, replacing the 25,000 square miles of roadways across the lower 48 with solar panels would create more energy than the U.S. consumes. If widely adopted, they could realistically wean the US off fossil fuels: a mile-long stretch of four-lane highway could take 500 homes off the grid. If the entire US Interstate system made use of the panels, energy would no longer be a concern for the country.
In addition, every Solar Road panel has its own microprocessor and energy management system, so if one gives out, the rest are not borked. Materials-wise, the top layer is described as translucent and high-strength. Inhabitat says it is glass, which seems odd, especially since Solar Roadways claims the surface provides excellent traction. The base layer under the solar panel routes the power, as well as data utilities (TV, phone, Internet) to homes and power companies.
Overviev, when multiple Solar Road Panels™ are interconnected, the intelligent Solar Roadway™ is formed. These panels replace current driveways, parking lots, and all road systems, be they interstate highways, state routes, downtown streets, residential streets, or even plain dirt or gravel country roads. Panels can also be used in amusement parks, raceways, bike paths, parking garage rooftops, remote military locations, etc. Any home or business connected to the Solar Roadway™ (via a Solar Road Panel™ driveway or parking lot) receives the power and data signals that the Solar Roadway™ provides. The Solar Roadway™ becomes an intelligent, self-healing, decentralized (secure) power grid.
The Department of Energy gave $100,000 to upstart company Solar Roadways, to develop 12’ x 12’-foot slabs, dubbed “Solar Roads,” that can be embedded into roads, pumping power into the grid.
solar roads
The engineering challenges are immense, adds materials scientist Richard Brow of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, another glass expert. But glass can be strengthened by compressing its surface using special heating techniques or, at a molecular level, swapping ions in the glass itself. Such enhanced glass is 10 times stronger than the conventional variety and is used, for example, in smart phones to withstand the pressures of texting.
Brow says: “Can you go from a teenager”s thumb to a truck? That”s a pretty big leap, but 10 years ago we didn”t think you could make a 15-micron piece of glass for what”s relatively rough handling in a PDA,”
Glass has been used to build footbridges, such as the Chihuly Bridge of Glass in Tacoma, Wash. And new glass ceramic composites with increased toughness have been developed for the photovoltaics industry, Brow adds—but that might boost the price of the resulting panel.
In the meantime, Brusaw is spending $40,000 of the DoT”s money to build a prototype from chemically hardened glass panels that can be purchased today. He will experiment with various types of solar cells, from thin-film to traditional monocrystalline silicon photovoltaics, and he will try to strike the right balance between transparency—so the panel works to deliver at least several thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity each day—and road-gripping texture, which will block some of the light. “If you have perfectly clear glass, you get perfect PV efficiency. But [with] perfectly smooth glass, everybody slips off the road,” he notes. “Glass manufacturers can cut grooves into the glass in a hatch-type pattern. We”ll try various methods and see what holds up.”
The solar roadway will also offer embedded LEDs to illuminate the road and display information, whether the actual traffic directions, such as lane markers, or messages such as “SLOW DOWN.” And, should electric cars become popular, powered pavement could also offer recharging stations wherever such panels are installed.
The first test of Brusaw”s crystalline vision will be when the prototype is delivered to the DoT on February 12, 2010. And the DoT”s challenges will be followed by some durability testing by the inventor with a pickax, sledgehammer and, depending on the prototype”s fortitude, guns. Then it”s on to parking lots and perhaps fast food restaurants. “Parking lots are much better than going right out onto the highway.You have slow-moving, lightweight vehicles. We can learn all the lessons there before moving into the fast lane.” Brusaw says.
