TechStuff Classic: Solar Freaking Roadways

You may have seen the Indiegogo solar roadway project. What are the goals of solar roadways? Are they realistic?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And you know what, several
years ago, there was this concept that had been a

(00:24):
few years old at that point, but it it's sort
of went viral, and it was this whole solar roadway idea.
The idea of creating roads that are actually made up
of solar panels so that your roads could be collecting energy,
uh through the sun and you know, generating electricity and
also serving as roads. An interesting idea that seemed to

(00:47):
have a lot of potential issues with it, and so
at the time, we decided on tech Stuff to cover
that topic. So this episode originally published on June six,
two thousand and fourteen. It is called Solar Freaking Roadways
because that's kind of how it was being marketed at
the time. And well, let's just listen in. There's been

(01:11):
at least, if nothing else, a spirited debate both sides
of the debate Internet. Yeah, I know, both sides have
said debate, both the the proponents and the critics of
said solar roadways have been um at times passionate on
the internet. Yeah, that's kind of my gentle tiptoeing around

(01:33):
the edgeway of saying that there's been some fairly reactionary
responses on both sides. So we're gonna cut through all
that and tell you what's going on, hopefully, and I
you know, both of us are human people who also
have opinions about things, but we're going to try very
hard to be as objective as possible, and at the
end we will spew our opinions all over the podcast,

(01:54):
so fair warning. But at any rate, let's start off
with just some fun facts, fun facts about highways. Fun
facts about highways in the United States, to be specific. So,
the U. S Highway system has four million miles of roads,
which is about six million, four hundred thousand kilometers. Not
many people know this, but Lauren capable of doing miles

(02:16):
to kilometer conversions in her head on the fly. It's amazing.
So that's according to the National Atlas of the United States. Now,
the interstate highway system accounts for only one percent of
all highway mileage, but carries twenty of total vehicle miles
of travel, which to me says, take the surface streets.

(02:37):
That's what I usually do. Yeah, at any rate. The highways,
although they are a great way of moving lots of
cars through very quickly. Uh that that's not you know,
more of the roads in our our country are surface streets.
They're not like these big interstates certainly, but but um,
but highways are are pretty They cover a wide surface

(02:58):
area none the less. The average the average width of
a highway lane is eleven feet, which is three point
three five Wow. It works on feet demeters too, It's
pretty amazing. Okay. Uh So that means that if you
were to add up all the surface area that these
roads are covering in the United States, you would end
up somewhere around seventeen thousand, nine hundred twenty nine square

(03:22):
miles in the United States, which is forty six thousand,
four hundred and thirty six square kilometers. Crap. You can
do area too if you add another paved surfaces, so
we're talking about things like parking lots, sidewalks, bike lanes,
this kind of thing. It ends up being around twenty
five thousand square miles of area or thousand, seven hundred

(03:45):
square kilometers, right, So that's a lot of space a bunch,
and it's not an insignificant amount. It's doing an important job,
you know, because some people will say that's space, that's
not doing anything. No, it is, in fact doing something wasted.
It's certainly providing a service. Yes, it provides us a
route to get from one point to another point, specifically

(04:07):
in the vehicles that we all depend upon, without very
much ruining our our vehicles or our shoes or right.
It's it's made up of stuff. That is, it's got
traction to it. It's meant to be uh as efficient
a system as we can really do with with a
lot of passive systems. Like it's a very passive system, yes,

(04:28):
and but it's relatively inexpensive and pretty functional. But what
would happen if we could make this stuff do double duty?
What if instead of just being a way, you know,
the the platform upon which our vehicles travel, it could
also help generate energy and offset our need for generating
power in other ways. What if we could perhaps turn

(04:50):
the entire road system of the United States into a
giant solar farm. In other words, we replaced the roads
with solar panels, were still driving on them, but now
not only are we all that flat space is being
put to further use, or even hilly space, well relatively

(05:10):
flat space. Yeah, so that's where the idea of solar
roadways kicked in. Uh. And then to get specific, you
have a husband and wife team, Scott and Julie Brussa,
who are the the people behind solar roadways, right, Scott
is by trade an electrical engineer and Julie as a counselor.
And apparently was Julie's idea to put solar panels on roads,

(05:35):
that was her. She just said. You know, she and
her husband were having a discussion about climate change, about
human human contributions to climate change, about pollution, about the
fact that a lot of that pollution comes from our
dependence upon fossil fuels, and she said, well, you know,
I realized that solar panel farms like these are not

(05:56):
the most efficient ways of getting energy. We've talked about
that on this show before. That even if you're talking
like state of the art, top of the line laboratory conditions,
at most you're hitting under ideal conditions. Reality, it's closer
to under good conditions and probably less than that for

(06:17):
your average performance. So you're losing a lot of the
energy that's hitting those panels, and you're not necessarily generating
a lot of electricity from the energy you're bringing in.
But what if we had a lot of them? Yeah,
what if we were able to instead of clearing out
land in order to make a solar farm, what if
we were able to utilize that space, these wide open
spaces that we already have, you know, using robust panels

(06:40):
that can withstand the traffic. Right, and so Scott in
his various videos, there are several videos that Scott Brussaw
is in where he talks about this idea, said that
he initially kind of laughed at the idea, and then
he thought, well, how would I, as an engineer, how
would I go about trying to make a practical way

(07:01):
of implementing her solution? And that was the way solar
roadways were born. This was not no this you may
have only just heard about this, but they've been working
on this since the mid two thousand's, so I believe
I think you're right. Yeah, So they started brainstorming these
different ways they came up with this, uh, this solar
panel roadway approach. But it does mean that they had

(07:22):
to think of other stuff besides and they also went
beyond just solar panels right oh right, you know they're
they're not just there to collect energy. They would also
have you know, microprocessors in them and l ed s
which would allow you to uh, you know, like like
change the lanes and on a highway based on traffic patterns,

(07:43):
or move parking spots around in a parking lot. Right
Like So, for example, the street that is near my
neighborhood is a three lane road and it has two
reversible or has a reversible lane in the center. Reversible
lanes mean that some parts of a day, traffic is
allowed to go in one direction, and in another part

(08:04):
of the day traffic is allowed to go in the
opposite direction. And they just end up designating that with
there's a sign that hangs above the road that either
it gives you an arrow saying yes you can drive
in this lane, sagred X that says please don't do that.
By the way, I cannot tell you how many times
have encountered people who absolutely have no idea how reversible

(08:25):
lanes work. They treat it like it's a turning lane.
They're a little bit terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. Yeah,
driving in the center lane on that road is something
of a crap shoot at any rate. Using this approach,
you could actually have the information on the road itself.
Those led lights could spell out which lanes were permissible
to use during what parts of the day, so you

(08:48):
could change it on the fly, responding to dynamic condition.
So if traffic is suddenly very heavy coming from one
direction versus the other, you could change the lanes in
a safe way. Or like you said, you could do
things like in a parking lot, designate different types of spaces.
Perhaps if you were expecting to have a big motorcycle convention,

(09:09):
like some parts of the country do, then you could
end up having a bunch of motorcycle parking spots as
opposed to full sized car spots that kind of stuff.
And it's interesting because it means you could change things
based upon whatever conditions were at the time. That's not
the only thing these could do though. Oh yeah. They
also proposed to incorporate heating elements so that you could

(09:30):
melt any kind of any kind of ice or snow
on the roadway, thus being able to prevent terrible, terrible
driving conditions, right, and you wouldn't have to use a
plow or actually you can't use a plow on one
of these roads, because it did you'd end up scraping
the glass glass covering. Yeah. Um. But but also um

(09:52):
providing providing an infrastructure for carrying that collected energy collected
energy and big technical quotation marks UM to to get
it to places that need it. So, in other words,
there would be a kind of a corridor that would
run alongside the road which would help deal with the
runoff from that aforementioned snow and ice. Yes, yes, you

(10:13):
would have two parts of that corridor. One part would
be a storm drain which would even include perhaps a
filtration system and pumps to move water to where it
might actually be used. So you could in theory treat
the water on site on the road essentially as as
it's running off, you can treat it so it ends
up being useful, and then pump it someplace like an
aquifer or for agricultural purposes, or to another water treatment

(10:37):
facility if the water is particularly and I think that's
the technical term. And then you could have the cable corridor,
which would allow you to put power cables so that
it could uh transmit the collected energy to some other system.
All of this. By the way, it sounds like we're
being vague, it's because right now the team is really

(10:59):
focusing on the solar panel part and and all of
this is is kind of interesting. Other ideas that they're
drawing into it. UM also reaching further out into the future,
incorporating a lot more of of smart elements to the
roadways of you know, doing things like if, um, if
a kid is crossing the street, having the street interact

(11:19):
with your car to tell you there's a kid up there,
don't hit that kid, right, And maybe even the part
of the street the kid is on lights up so
you can see that and that to see it visibly, right, So, yeah,
it would have to have some sort of pressure sensors
in there that that would somehow be able to differentiate
when a kid is on there versus say someone on
a bike or car or you know. But we're getting

(11:42):
ahead of ourselves, right right. But you know, all kinds
of interesting stuff like that is stuff that they talk
about in their promotional material. Yeah, and they obviously, in
order to get support because it was an Indigo go campaign,
which means it's crowdfunded, you know, they were asking people
to to contribute money to this project so that they

(12:04):
could test the feasibility of it. Keep in mind, this
is to test the feasibility, not saying that this is
going to to launch them into implementing this on a
wide scale. We'll get into more about that in a second,
but um, it also uh was a way of saying, hey, look,
we can improve our infrastructure in multiple ways. If there

(12:25):
is a damage a damaged panel, someone could pop out there,
knock a panel out, put a new panel in, and
they're done. It's none of this put a big sheet
of metal over a pothole business that happens in Atlanta
all the time. Or that we'd be able to take
all the power cables and telephone cables and take them
off of suspended lines and bury them within this roadway, yeah,

(12:48):
in that cable corridor, which means that when you have
really bad weather, you don't have to worry about those
power lines being snapped by ice or something and then
becoming a hazard to anyone who happens be walking by. Now,
in order to go from this sort of brainstorming proposal
idea to reality, they they noticed that there were some

(13:11):
pretty significant challenges. Sure, Um, you know, first of all,
you photovolt takes are very delicate, so you're going to
need a really strong surface in order to protect them
from you know, trucks exactly. Yeah, you have to have
something that was going to keep them from breaking under

(13:31):
the the consistent pressure they would be under from vehicles
running over them. But the early if you're talking about
like a highway where you've got hundreds of thousands of
vehicles in any given month, and some of those being
incredibly heavy, like trucks pulling huge amounts of cargo, you've
got to have something that's gonna withstand that kind of

(13:52):
that kind of wear and tear, right in order to
accomplish this, and also you know, have it be transparent
so that it can also collect sunlight. Yea, As it
turns out, if you made it really super strong but
it was opaque, the solar panel part has has problems,
right um, tempered glass they figured is the best way
to do this. The problem one of the problems with

(14:15):
tempered glass is that you can't really paint on it. Yeah,
So that's why they came up with the idea of
using the l e eds to demonstrate light. That meant
that they were going to have to pick some pretty
bright L E. D s. We'll talk about that when
we get to the criticisms part. Sure, Um, but yeah,
then also they wanted to make sure that the light
was going to pass cleanly through that glass. The glass

(14:38):
needs to be clear. It can't be you know, if
if you have a colored glass, that that's telling you
immediately that there are certain ways that are never going
to get there. Yeah, they're not going to go through
necessarily reflecting. So you want that to be clear glass,
and it needs to be arranged in a way that
the physical arrangement of any kind of coding on top

(14:59):
of photo takes is going to have very much to
do with the way that light refracts and and reflects
down through it. Yeah, So it's that ends up affecting
the efficiency of that particular solar panel. They said that
these solar panels would be around fifteen percent efficient, although
as far as I know, no independent testing has been
done of the solar panels, not that I'm aware of,

(15:21):
although I do currently only have a very small test patch.
That's uh yeah, speaking of I mean, you know, the
road systems, like Jonathan talked about at the top of
the show, are big you've got a lot of them. Yeah,
and so one of the big challenges that they really
haven't addressed yet. Uh. You know, they're looking at it

(15:41):
from the positive perspective, which I totally understand. They're so like,
look at this, this is going to create millions of jobs.
But millions of jobs means you have to pay those people. Uh,
and it also means that you're going to run into
a lot of equipment costs and manufacturing costs, materials. What
are you going to do while you are retrofitting a highway?

(16:01):
You know, what what exactly is going to take place
with this? Because we don't even know what their proposal
is for the replacement part. We don't know doesn't mean
that they're going to play solar panels on top of
pre existing infrastructure. Are we going to have to dig
up all of the roads right? What where are people
going to drive while that's going on? You know, there
are a lot of questions here that are going to

(16:21):
be a big challenges. And then of course, you know
there's cost, like we kind of just said, attached to
all of this, not only logistical costs, but very real
money dollar costs, or as very real as money, and
dollars ever, are right, that's an entirely different conversation that
we've also had. But uh yeah, I mean these are

(16:43):
things that they had to take into account, all right.
So the first prototype they built was a rectangular prototype.
It was our square really because it was it was
twelve feet by twelve feet that's about three point seven meters.
Like cow, you're on the ball today, all right, So yeah,
it was this. It was really to test the idea

(17:03):
to to try the l e eds to create the
microprocessors that communicate with each other. They do so wirelessly
by the way. They do this uh kind of messaging
system between them. Um, the videos are pretty cool, like
he showed, Uh, I guess it's I assume it's his
daughter who stands on a panel that's separate from the

(17:26):
the huge solar panel, the twelve foot one, and when
she steps on it, it creates that flashing pattern on
the panel she steps on and then it spells out
slow down on the test panel, yeah, the giant one.
Then he also did things like created a maze, a
little like Pacman style maze that kids could run through
on this solar panel, which just really showing that the

(17:47):
L E D s could in fact show Yeah, they
could be all sorts of different patterns. Um. So that
was the first prototype. But that, of course is not
what the the current panel looks like. The current panels
are hexagonal in shape. I'll talk about that in a second. Now,
they decided to use glass, like we said, to be
the protective layer because it let's light pass through and

(18:09):
the compression strength is good. Now they keep on saying
it's somewhere between steel and stainless steel for compression. I
keep in mind, there are lots of different types of strength, right,
there's tensile strength, there's compressive strength, there's the you know
how how impact sort of strength. There's all these kind
of different approaches that you have to look at. And

(18:30):
in fact, they needed to find a glass that was
going to be shatter proof, which not that unusual. I mean,
we've seen bulletproof glass, so it's not like this kind
of stuff doesn't exist. Sure, And and tempering glass is
they talk about it on the site and it's one
of the things that they get very right. I think,
and as far as I know about material science, that

(18:51):
that the tempering process does more or less that that
thing of of making things very strong and can also
involve um, you know, shatter resistant coatings or you know
the kind of glass that's used for example, in car
wind shields to uh that that will crumble rather than
charting right right, you won't end up with these these

(19:12):
incredibly sharp shards of glass. You would have this sort
of glass rubble that would be a pain to clean up,
but not so dangerous, yes, less less dangerous. Um. And
they also needed to pick one that they could add
a texture to the top of so that vehicles could
have traction on them. That's kind of important because if

(19:32):
you would imagine just driving a vehicle over you know,
like a glass mirror, that would suck. Not to be fair,
rubber against glass is that you get some attraction. But
add water to that because I don't know if you've
been outside, but sometimes it rains, and sometimes it rains
when you need to drive somewhere occasionally. So they were

(19:53):
looking at raising like they have actually another hexagonal pattern
on top of this giant hexagon that is repeated that
creates the texture so that it helps tires grip the road. Um.
They claimed that the gripping tests were outperformed asphalt. Uh.

(20:14):
I don't know exactly how all those tests were conducted,
but that's that's the claim. Yeah. I also believe that
they claimed that the the pattern of the glass acts
like a like a prism to help direct the light
down into the photovoltaics beneath it. And as for the
l E d s, those are light emitting diodes. We
talked about that in the past. Diodes are very basic

(20:35):
electronic components, one of the basic components in electronics. So
anyone who happens to have worked with electronics, like if
you build a circuit, you've probably at some time or
another wired an LED to some sort of circuit. They
don't require a lot of energy. They can put off
a fairly bright light depending upon the LED that you're using. Um.
Scott Brusol also claims that the prism like nature of

(20:58):
those hexagons that Lauren was just talking belt also allow
the led s to project light out six different ways.
I have no idea what that means. I think he's
talking about, um, you know, for for that pattern. Oh,
I see, I see capacity right right, Um, it's certainly interesting. Uh. Anyway,
then we got the heating element, right, which are you know,

(21:20):
similar to the wires that might run through your your
rear windshield. That that helps you defrost your car in
the winter. And uh, he says. Bruce Saw says that
the tests showed that heating the heating element works well
and can prevent snow and ice from forming on the
road itself. They show off a a single solar pedal
hexagon test photos yes, surrounded by others covered in snow

(21:43):
that have not had the heating element turned on. Uh.
Then you would have some form of other sensors in
the in the panel, because you would have to have
them in order to detect pressure for the other element.
We were talking about where an animal or child or
something else is in the road, and thus the road
is to acting that and alerting the drivers to it
so that they can prepare themselves. Like I could see

(22:05):
this being really useful in lots of different ways. Like
in California, my wife and I went on a road
trip where we went down a road that frequently would
get covered up by by mud slides during the rain,
and it was pouring down rain, and sure enough we
had to skirt around a couple of mud slides. And

(22:25):
when you've got a precipitous drop to the Pacific Ocean
on the other side of it. That's somewhat of a
nerve wracking experience. We have more to say about solar
freaking roadways, but first let's take a quig break. Now.

(22:46):
I mentioned that the microprocessors had little Wi Fi elements
in them that allow them to talk to each other communication. Yeah,
the important part of that would be. One of the
important parts of that, besides sending the messages so that
the right message is are displayed to drivers so that
they're alerted to changing conditions, is that if a panel
were to malfunction, let's say it was hit by lightning

(23:09):
or some other thing damaged it. Maybe a person who
knows there some issues with that as well. But let's
say something damages a one of these hexagons. What's going
on in the microprocessors is that they're constantly sending out
little signals to each other. Hey are you there? Oh
you're there? Hey are you there? Oh you're there. So

(23:32):
if one of them stops responding, then the rest can
send a message down the line to get a technician
out there to replace that guy. Yeah, so the technician
gets a message saying, hey, this one panel that's at
mile marker seventy three. It's the third one over from
the edge of the road needs to be replaced. They
can go out there. Uh, you know, the lane itself
can actually help direct traffic around the work area. The

(23:55):
worker could then pop the the dead panel out, put
a new panel in and program it with a little
handheld computer device and supposedly be in and out in
like ten minutes, and then take the broken solar panel
back for repairs. Um. At least that's the way it's
being presented. Now. What they have actually created so far

(24:17):
is this little test trip that I mentioned earlier, a
sort of parking lot outside of their workshop. It's twelve
ft wide by thirty six ft long, which is uh,
I got three point seven by eleven. It's not a contest. Um.
I've been looking ahead at those notes all podcasts long
and doing calculations in my head. Uh. This little this

(24:41):
little test strip is is meant to be a test trip.
But it's a little environment for them to work out
every everything from you know, from the stress tests to
the electronic components functionality, making sure the heating elements are working,
make sure the LEDs work. They've driven a smallish tractor
across it, to kind of demonstrate that it can withstand
the pressure of a vehicle. But that's it is a

(25:04):
smalleish tractor and it is not moving very quickly. That's
not to say that they haven't done other tests, oh certainly. Yeah,
I mean they've been working on this project. They in
fact received a few grants from the Department of Transportation
and specifically the Federal Highway Administrations to I think along
the lines of of like seven hundred and fifty thousand,

(25:27):
and then their Indigo, their indiego Go project funded right right,
so than funded. Yeah, and let's talk about that Indiego
Go campaign. Okay. So, so, like, like we said, this
project has been going on since about two thousand six,
but it really went viral in when they opened up
this Indie Go Go campaign on April one, which is

(25:49):
the day before Earth Day, which is very clever marketing.
And uh. They talked all about what this potential project
could do in an ideal implementation it. Their tagline um,
which which I think is telling about many things about
the project is i'll quote quote it for you guys,
solar panels that you can drive, park and walk on.

(26:11):
They melt snow and cut greenhouse gases by question mark,
exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point triple and taro bang. Yes, Yeah,
that's pretty incredible. Yeah, they they've extended the campaign right
as of this recording. We are recording this show on June,
they have more than doubled their campaign goal of a

(26:32):
million bucks and still have nine days left. So they've
successfully funded, more than successful. And um, so what was that?
What's that million dollars for? Exactly? Well, although the campaign
page does suggest all of these huge possibilities for the
future that we talked about earlier on in the show,

(26:55):
that million dollars is really just for hiring an initial
team of engineers and I quote to help us make
a few needed tweaks in our product and streamline our
process so that we could go from prototype to production.
And they were hoping to go into production by the
end of That's that's ambitious. Yeah, that that's one way

(27:16):
of putting it. That is incredibly ambitious because, uh, you know,
even if they produce, they then have to have a
place to put them. Um, but we'll we'll talk more
about that in a second. Yes, Um, so that this
this campaign really went viral with the help of a
particular video. At the very beginning of this podcast, I
talked about solar Freaking Roadways. Roadway Roadways. Yeah. It was

(27:39):
produced by the team and repeatedly uses the phrase solar
freaking roadways. You probably have seen it if you, I know,
it went viral on Facebook. I saw it posted by
a lot of my friends. I thought on on Tumblr
and Twitter as well. Um, and it has in fact
set an Indigogo record for the number of individual backers
attached to a single project. Currently it is sitting at

(28:01):
forty thousand, three d and seven, which in metric is
a lot. It's the same it's the same number, same number.
But you know, but but they they are all based
on a specific person who's kept in a vault in Switzerland. Uh.
Moving on to the critics, or, as some have termed them,

(28:25):
the haters. So here's the thing. You put any idea
up online, people are going to respond to it in
multiple ways some people. Some people will likely be supportive,
and some people will be critical, not not necessarily in
an effort to be mean or nasty, although that often

(28:46):
happens to that's frequently a side effect. Yeah, but sometimes
it's just to say, um, hang on. So there have
been multiple responses to this video in the are critical
in nature, and again some of them are are more
kind of measured and saying I do not understand how
they are going to achieve X. Some of them are

(29:06):
a little more direct, saying there's no way they could
possibly achieve X, and some of them are like, you
are stupid if you think you can achieve X, You're stupid,
and your face is stupid, and your cat is stupid.
Mom is stupid. Yeah. Yeah, So, at any rate, we
wanted to talk about some of the criticisms or more
of those former reasonable ones, less the cat thing. Some

(29:27):
of them got a little snarky, and we might as well.
But at any rate, there's a website called gelot Nick
that sent a request to another electrical engineer. Because you
may remember we said Scott Brusso's an electrical engineer. This
electrical engineer is named David David Forbes, so this is
we're talking about a person named Forbes, not the magazine, sure,

(29:49):
and they asked them to evaluate this solar roadways proposal,
and Forbes listed some some concerns and said that the
campaign was quote so flawed that I don't know where
to start end quote. Specifically, he pointed out the problem
with costs. Uh that installation time would be incredible, and
thus the expense for paying people to install all of
these panels into roads would also be incredible. Said that

(30:13):
laying an asphalt road pretty much involves using an enormous
machine that does all the work for you. You just
walk along to make sure the machine is still working properly.
But this would take really intensive human labor. Yeah, because
laying down these hexagonal panels would be more of a
human job less than a machine job. So if you're
just talking about replacing one road, I mean just think

(30:34):
of a typical road in your area, and imagine having
to replace all of that panel by panel with these
hexagonal panels. There are a couple of feet across, less
than a meter across, and you you have to replace
the whole thing. That's significant, And we're talking about potentially,
like if you're if you're taking the video at face value,

(30:56):
eventually replacing all roads that's and that's enormous, And that
also includes the time it takes to either prep the
existing road surface or to tear it, tear it right up.
I would imagine you would have to tear it up.
I cannot imagine just putting the panels on top of it,
because where where are the power? Where's the power coming

(31:18):
out of? Like, if if these solar panels are collecting energy,
how do you get that energy from the solar panel
to anything else that would actually be useful? And they
were also talking so much about about the trenching that
the cable trenches and all in the runoff trenches and
all that kind of stuff. Now, if somehow the hexagonal
panels interlock so that they can become kind of a

(31:39):
channel for power, I suppose you could end up having
just one side of it, be the the section that
connects to a larger cable, and then the panels in
that row would all feed. But I don't know that
that's the case, because certainly the signals that's sending back
and forth are through this wireless microprocessor. It's not a

(32:02):
circuit that's connected by edge to edge contact, So I
don't think that's actually how it's happening, Which means you
have to wire each individual panel to your conduit that
is taking the energy from the panel and sending it
to wherever it needs to go. All right, that's before
you even get to the point of where does the
power go? Because you can't just magically make it go

(32:24):
to where it needs to be. You actually have to
build the infrastructure in their little transmission stations to collect
that power and send it on and change the the
the voltage of it. I mean, that's why we have transformers,
because we need to be able to you know, there's
lots of problems, and then there's the current issue voltage
versus current lots of problems there um. That not to

(32:45):
say that it's insurmountable amountable or that they don't have
answers to those those questions, but I haven't seen them.
I have not either, So that would mean that you
have to rip up all that road. So first you
gotta rip up the road before you even do anything else.
Then you have to prepare the ground that you've just
ripped up for laying the solar panels down. And then

(33:06):
you have to lay the solar panels down. So this
is a monumental job. Um. Also that that expense issue,
you know, Okay, solar panels just from a material's cost,
just the silicone in them, silicon silicon, just the silicon
in them is really expensive. Also, l ed s also glass,

(33:27):
all of these things. I mean, you're you're talking about
twenty five thousand square miles of material. Ultimately you're talking
about so just twenty square miles of glass would be expensive.
And yes, it gets less expensive per unit when you're
buying in volume in bulk. But but but even so,
that expense can only go down so far before you

(33:47):
finally have hit at cost. And it's never going to
be less than that certainly, So there's that issue. Um.
And then Forbes brought up an interesting warning about about
the possibility if you have the complex electronics. Yes, what
happens if someone whimsically decides to mess mess with that? Yeah,

(34:07):
let's say that you have these microprocessors all communicating wirelessly
to each other. What happens if a hacker is able
to manipulate that system and is able to insert some
malicious commands so that a command that normally would say
slow down doesn't show up, or they end up changing

(34:27):
all the lanes, or they change the lanes looking like
like that reversible lane example is telling you what if
from both sides of travel, they make it look like
that center lane is the appropriate lane. That's bad times.
That's bad times. That's that's crash times, not good times.
So I mean whether or not that particular system would

(34:48):
be easy to hack or not easy to hack, I
guarantee you someone would try to do it. And eventually,
if someone is determined enough, they would be able to
do something if nothing else may be disrupted. So you
just have a big blank slate that you're driving on
that alone would be difficult because you don't have any
lanes at all, and then you just have an enormous
wide road to be like, be like our highway system

(35:09):
turned into all those country lanes I went on in
Ireland where you're like, I don't even know if this
is for two way traffic or this is a thing
that Forbes did not bring up that that that I
remember seeing. But but what if you just got a
blue screen? Yeah, yeah, if essentially crash and but now

(35:30):
presumably if you had maybe just one crash, you would
get that you know, the person or the entity that
overseasian and the whole thing. But if you're talking about
something that ends up perhaps affecting a wide stretch of road,
then you've got some serious problems. And then yeah, sending
someone out to reset a single panel, that's and then
making sure that person is safe while they are doing it.

(35:52):
I mean, it's this is not necessarily easy. Other critics
brought up lots of other concerns, like traction, what happens
when the glass gets wet um. Some people talked about
the glasses resilience to scratches. So you know, it's not
just rubber that's having those roads. It's dirt and sand
and weird gritty particles in the you know, claws of

(36:13):
animals whatever, So that ends up getting up ends up
getting rubbed in as the as the tires go over
the road. Sand especially could cause scratches and the glass
because sand is made of glass yep, and ends up
possibly making it more opaque, which means that less light
can actually get through or at the very least bouncing
around light in ways that are not ideal to getting

(36:34):
it down to the photovoltaic layers. So then your your
energy collection becomes less efficient. Keep in mind that one
of the big claims we didn't really mention this, but
that one of the big claims of this is that
if this were deployed throughout the entire United States and
did replace all those paved areas we had talked about
According to the claim, we would be producing three times
the amount of energy we currently consume. So that's not

(36:58):
to say that we would suddenly be in a energy
surplus and we'd have more energy than we need, because
as we've all seen, we'll we'll use that surplus. We
find ways we don't. We don't suddenly have a bounty.
We just have a larger pool that we work in
at any rate. Other u other criticisms were that LED

(37:20):
visibility visibility in bright light might be an issue. There's
there's debate on this because it depends on how how
it's implemented. Yeah, I feel like this is I mean,
it's certainly a concern, you know, because you know, but
we've we've got signs and traffic signals that use L
E D s, but that's usually in a perpendicular plane

(37:42):
to where sunlight's coming down. If it's if the sun's
directly overhead and it's a really bright day, there is
some question about whether or not the L E ED
lanes would be visible and night would be great. Oh,
it would be perfect at night bright sunlight situation during
the day unless those prisms, uh that that Scott was
talking about are really very well aligned. Yeah, I can

(38:04):
see how direct the lights so that you can actually
see it even in the brightest of sunlight. It's possible.
I just haven't seen any demonstration of it. By the way,
we should also mention, uh, their workshop is in Idaho,
about an hour from the border from Canada, so their
sunlight conditions are slightly different than say here in Georgia. Sure,

(38:26):
but they also get a lot more snow. Uh, So
there's that as well. Then there's the question, speaking of
snow and ice, about is that really the most efficient
way to melt it, to to use a heating element too,
Is that or does it mean that you're actually using
more energy to get rid of that snow and ice
than you would if you were to say, use salt

(38:47):
trucks and plows and uh, you know, it all depends
on how much snow there is, how cold it is. Um.
It also keep in mind that when it's snowing, there's
a problem when you're using a solar panel based techn
knowledge because in the middle of a snowstorm, you're not
getting as much sun he would during other times. Right, Yeah,

(39:08):
any sun probably, Yeah, the sunlight factors is kind of
a non factor in that case not to mention like
if it snows at night, you know, then you get
the double problem. So you need to power this heating
system in some way, and that means you would be
pumping power from back in. So then you have the
problem of Now, grant, if the United States had one
giant smart grid where power could route from any part

(39:31):
of the United States to any other part of the
United States at will, that would be a non issue.
That is not how it works at all. We have
regional power grids and most of them are working at capacity. Yeah,
and there are definitely some remote areas that would have
a huge problem with this kind of thing under our
current infrastructure. Yea, So that is a real issue there. Also,

(39:52):
there's just the question of if it's made up of tiles,
that means you do have edges. Yeah, these these places
where tiles meet up against each other. So there's the
possibility of stuff getting between those edges and disrupting the
the road system that way. For instance, just water that's freezing.
And sure, maybe the water on the surface of the
tiles doesn't freeze because it's heated, but maybe water getting

(40:14):
between tiles could freeze and then expand and push these
tiles apart, or you know, the ground moves. Yeah, the
ground can change. I mean, ground can change for lots
of reasons, not just earthquakes. Oh yeah, yeah, you know,
if if trees or other plants are growing nearby, root
systems can disrupt the shape of a flat otherwise flat
ground surface. Anyone who's walked along any sidewalk that's made

(40:37):
up of these panels has probably seen cracks in the sidewalk,
which comes from the movements and the ground, and thus
the movements of the the material itself. You know, material
can expand and contract as the heat changes, right, Oh, certainly.
I mean, you know, furthermore, any time it rains, the
ground is changing dynamically with that rainfall. No matter how
well you seeal a roadway off, it's never going to

(40:59):
be completely perfec It's time for another quick break and
we'll be back to close out the solar roadways story
as at least as far as June six thousand fourteen. Yeah,

(41:19):
you've got the hardness of glass versus the softness of asphalt.
Asphalt bends with your car as you're driving over it,
and this is intrinsic to the way that people design
cars by The Way Car Stuff is about to record
an episode about solar roadways. It should be publishing this week,
right around the same time that this episode publishes, so well, well,

(41:40):
we'll try to remember to drop a link out to
it on social I hope that this is one of
the things that they're going to talk about, because I
find I'm a little bit clueless about how that entire
thing works, and I'm interested to hear more about it. Well,
on top of that, I mean, when you think about it,
the the solar panels all that weight. Sure you've got
the glass that's protecting the solar panel technology, but it's

(42:00):
not like the glass just absorbs all the force. That
force still is going to be going through the solar
panel and then into the base of the solar panel. Uh,
depending upon what the ground is beneath it. I don't
I don't know how it's able to do this without
damaging the solar panel material. Uh if that could also

(42:21):
create wiggle room. I mean you're talking about tiles, right,
So if you're driving over the edge of a tile,
like you imagine that the pressure it's not constantly pressing
straight down on the tile, it's moving across the tile
like like a rolling pin across the dough. If you've
ever tried to roll out cookie dough, you know that
it's actually a little bit of work to get that
surface flat. And even because you're working with a curved surface,

(42:45):
that's going to affect things slightly differently, so you could
end up creating UH like tiles could be wiggling at
the edges and then they could become uneven. If they
become uneven, then you have other edges that are sticking
up higher than the one next to it, So then
it becomes a bumpy surface to drive on, perhaps even
a dangerous one. Share. These are all criticisms that people

(43:06):
have made UH that you know, it doesn't mean that
the implementation won't somehow address them, but it's stuff that
hasn't hasn't really been covered so far by by the team. UM.
And a couple more before we transition away UM the
question there's a question of whether tires could leave tread

(43:27):
marks on the glass UH, adding to the opacity and
reducing the efficiency UM and also the loudness of a
car traveling at speed over glass. UM. One of the
one of the things that makes roads noisy is the
material that that road is made of um and any
kind of gaps or cracks, and the material tend to

(43:49):
produce a lot of noise. And so if you're working
with a whole bunch of tiles, uh, that's a lot
of gaps and cracks. And also just I mean, the
surface of the glass is different from asphalt, and so
it could it could hypothetically be very noisy. If you
ever have driven over a road that's made of brick,
for example, then you've probably heard the difference, not much

(44:10):
felt the difference, but but definitely heard the difference. And
now these these panels are larger than that, so you
would actually that would mean that the noise could be
even more irritating. Actually yeah, but uh yes, So all
of these materials problems. And then there is the price.
Of course, it is completely impossible to say exactly how

(44:33):
much the project would actually cost if undertaken so massively,
you know, with all of the lowest bitter manufacturing and
installation costs that any government project has. But what we
do know is the cost of asphalt um, which is
variable at some three to fifteen bucks per square foot
once installed, depending on a whole number of factors UM.
And we know the rough cost of solar panels, the

(44:55):
very rough cost really it's it's currently some seventy five
cents per what of capacity for consumer installation UM with
a square foot of solar panel comprising some eight to
ten watts, which means that you're talking about like five
bucks to seven and a half bucks per square foot

(45:15):
for the photo voltaics alone right at on top of that,
the cost of micro microprocessors, the other sensors that are
involved the glass. One YouTuber that you looked at had
done some numbers on the glass. Thunderfoot is the name
of the YouTuber who has a twenty eight minute long
video that's a critique of this project. Uh and and

(45:37):
Thunderfoot is he's little less diplomatic than other people, but
he on YouTube on YouTube, but he makes some very
interesting points that you know, these are concerns that have
to be answered, and one of those was just he
was just looking at the sheer amount, no pun intended,
of glass needed for this project, if you're talking about

(46:00):
five thousand square miles of roads, and he through his
calculations he said, well, just based upon the amount that
this glass cost and the amount of area UM, I
come up with twenty trillion dollars just for the class.
That's more money than what I think anyone is prepared
to pay for. Yes, I have seen estimates around the

(46:22):
internet arranging close to fifty to sixty trillion dollars for
the total cost of the project. To put this in
perspective a little bit, the annual budget that the Department
of Transportation asked for for the National Highway Association uh
IN was forty one billion dollars, so less than a
ten of what this would potentially cost, according to some people,

(46:47):
could potentially cost. Maybe now. Solar Roadways has responded to
a lot of these criticisms, not necessarily effectively in my
in my opinion, but one of the things, like, for instance,
for the cost. The response to the cost I don't
think was a real response. Again in my opinion, they said, essentially,
we don't know how much a panel is going to

(47:08):
cost yet because we haven't cost out the prototype, because
this is all stuff that we're buying off the shelf
to make a working concept, right and don't have a
production model yet. Right this the dollars that we are
getting from our indio go campaign are going to people
who are very intelligent and are going to help us
make this cost efficiency, so they don't. So their response

(47:29):
to it doesn't cost fifty or sixty trillion dollars because
we don't know how much it costs yet. That's I mean,
it's a fair response in the sense that they don't
have a figure. But it also and and it is
it is fair when they say that, Um, any journalist
who reports on the exact number that's going to cost
doesn't know what they're talking about because technically none of
us know what we're talking about. Now, that doesn't mean

(47:51):
that it won't cost fifty or sixty trillion dollars. It
might it might cost more than that, depending upon what
the final cost of any individual solar panel is. Uh,
it may cost more than that to outfit the entire
United States. The point they were making is that we
don't know yet, so don't report those numbers. Because I
don't know why they're so concerned. Their indiegog project has

(48:13):
already funded, so they can at least uh continue on
and see how feasible this is. But it's one of
the responses. And it was actually a flexible, flexible funding one,
which means that even if they hadn't reached their full
funding amount, the money that people had given to the
project would have still most of it would have gone
to them. Well, Indie goog takes a bigger chunk on
that case. But uh, Then some of the other refutations

(48:36):
they had didn't seem to address what the concern was.
For example, that criticism about heating roadways being inefficient and
expensive compared to say, using a snowplow. Their response first
was that um, driving in the wind in the winter
during ice or snowstorms is dangerous, which no one, no

(48:58):
one was arguing, and no one had questioned every that's
that's evident that driving in those conditions is dangerous and
therefore reducing those conditions is a good thing. No one
disagrees with that. Then they also said that it's expensive
to run snow plows and salt trucks, that kind of thing.
No one said it wasn't expensive. Not a question, you know,

(49:19):
they were saying, is it? You know, it proved to
us that your approach of using heat is more efficient
and more cost effective than this other one. Because again,
if you are in an area that needs this service,
you are also in an area where you're not generating
that electricity dynamically and unless you have some magical way

(49:40):
of getting the electricity from sunny places to the places
that are under lots of snow. That means you're pouring
power into the system, and that trying to melt snow
or ice it caught it requires a lot of energy,
and so if you're having to use a lot of energy,
then that means that it might be costing you more
money in the long run to use that method than

(50:00):
to use a snowplow. And you can't use a snowplow
on this type of road. So once it's there, you're
stuck with you You're stuck with it until you can
melt it. Uh So, one thing that I haven't seen
addressed that I did want to mention is that, Okay,
solar energy is wonderful in theory. I've talked about this
on the show before. I think um and costs and

(50:21):
manufacturing practices are improving all the time. But as it stands,
it is not completely green that this is not necessarily
a super earth friendly technology. It is frequently better in
the long run than some other things. But okay, the
thing is is that solar panels are made with rare
earth elements, so called not because they're all that rare.

(50:43):
They're actually fairly common, but rather because they're found in
very small concentrations and surrounding or refining them is really
difficult and can involve some truly scary chemical processes. Right now,
most of this is done in China because their cheapest
from China, mostly because the minds are state run, their
employees are terrifically underpaid, and their practices are blatantly irresponsible.

(51:07):
We're talking about these sites which are situated smack in
the middle of residential areas, dumping you know, like toxic
sulfuric acid vapor into the local air and radioactive thorium
into the local water systems. It is a really huge concern.
Right So, while the generating of electricity itself is green,
the generating of the solar panels is not. Is not

(51:30):
and and of course you know the these these minds
in China, are these irresponsible minds in China are not
the only ones producing the materials for our solar panels.
I don't want to represent that because that would be untrue.
And I do believe that there are many places that
are working towards much better systems, but still a current

(51:51):
concern and anyone who's listened to Uh, there's an old
Tech Stuff episode on rare Earth minerals as well, where
we really go into the detail of what they are
and why there's this this problem with them. And also,
you know, everything from the issues you were just talking
about Lauren too to artificial scarcity, where you have a
country like China restricting how much they will deport, how

(52:16):
much they will export, not deport how much they'll export
to other countries, almost as a way of like some
people would call it extortion. It's controlling the market. Certainly,
they are forcing foreign companies to build plants in their
borders in order to do their thing right, and once
money gets into China it rarely um so, so there's that. Also,

(52:43):
I did want to point out that a lot of
the teams, the solar roadways teams ideas, really aren't related
to the solar part of the roadway at all, but
are rather, you know, to the l ed s and
the potential smart capacity of the system, which is another
are twillions of dollars more in research and development and implementation. Sure, yeah,

(53:06):
this is again we're talking about an enormous endeavor. I
guess you could argue that these early days are still
to prove the concept is viable, and if in fact
it is viable, maybe we see the rollout as an
extremely gradual role. It would have to be. I mean,
there's there's no magical manufacturing process that's going to turn

(53:29):
these things out in the volume necessary to cover all
the roads anyway. Oh, certainly not. But you know, maybe
for private practices it could be a you know, if
a company wanted to pave their parking lot. Sure, yeah,
I could see this as being something that's used on
a more modest scale. A lot of the critics also say,

(53:50):
why pour money into this particular project when we could
use a similar approach to places that are not constantly
covered by cars, like putting solar panels along the sides
of roads or on top of buildings. So, in that sense,
using this technology to uh in ways where you don't

(54:11):
have the considerations of how do you do this without
disrupting all traffic everywhere or putting things in danger or
having a an infrastructure that has to be replaced frequently
because of just the wear and tear. I'm curious about
why a system of kinetic kinetic road plates hasn't received
this kind of attention, and yeah, I mean kinetic road

(54:32):
plates would have their own issue because you're talking about
transferring kinetic motion from the car to the roadway, and
unless you do it in a very very smart way,
you're just adding more work for the car to do.
So it's just a you're not you're not generating more
energy that way. You're actually spending the same amount of
energy you would be capturing just in your car. You'd

(54:54):
be collecting it in aggregate, but your car would have
to work harder so on each you know, it's a
This is why energy problems are hard, because they're big.
You know, you can look at one individual piece of
an energy problem and you say, oh, if we just
fix this, everything's fine, But then you have to step
outside of that and look at a bigger picture, and
that's when it gets really complicated. So personally, I think

(55:17):
the idea as presented is worth exploring at least to
see how feasible it is and in what context. So
I would be amazed if this actually becomes a viable
means of replacing roads. I really would. I think it's
a neat idea. I just don't see it working. I

(55:38):
would eat my proverbial hat. Yeah, it is proverbial. She
is not wearing a hat because the headphones don't fit
over hats. Um. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm extremely dubious, you guys. Yeah,
I think it could potentially be something interesting for you know,
parking lots or paved public spaces, sidewalks that could maybe

(56:02):
be But I mean, I think in the sidewalks I
walked down and how the things like a tree growing
ends up completely destroying the sidewalk in the matter of
a couple of years. Uh. And that's that's a you know,
regular old clay ceramic dial that doesn't have any you
know in it poisonous electronics. So I mean, I think

(56:24):
it's worth looking into because if nothing else, it means
that we might get ideas for alternate approaches that could
builp down the road. I just don't think this one's
gonna pay yea. And I certainly don't want to quash
you know, scientific inquiry and and curiosity, nor do I
want to green areas and roadways. That's terrific. Yeah, And

(56:46):
if any of you have contributed to this project, we're
not even saying that that was a mistake, not at all.
What we're saying is that, uh, don't buy into the
hype wholeheartedly, go in with some skepticism, some critical thinking,
and realize that even if this doesn't end up paying
off in the implementation they're talking about, we could end

(57:08):
up coming up with some really cool ideas that are
similar to it and that we could benefit from other ways.
And and who knows. The worst case scenario with our
personal opinions is that we're wrong and it works, and
if it works, it's awesome. Actually that's kind of a
best case scenario really from the project, Like I would
take that I would love to be proven wrong, that

(57:29):
that's true. I would love that my skepticism turns out
to be unwarranted and that the problems I foresee, like
I'm still trying to think of using a hexagonal system
of tiles in areas that have lots of hills and
valleys and turns in them that would require some pretty

(57:51):
you know, how do you get it? They also have
trapezoidal half test that yeah, it just but it doesn't
make me nonetheless, Yeah, but but I would love to
be proven wrong and to see that this works perfectly,
because you know, I want to drive around in tron
world or at least have my driverless car take me
around in tron world. Oh yeah, me too. And if

(58:13):
this ultimately did work out and we were also able
to have electric vehicles everywhere and really cut back on
that pollution, that'd be fantastic. Um yeah. Some of their
further ideas are to you know, provide induction surfaces to
let these this the solar powered roadway also directly charge
your electric vehicle as you drive it around. Yeah, that'd

(58:35):
be that's pretty awesome. That'd be pretty amazing. Yeah, essentially
you have a car that you never have to refuel. Um,
this is a future that can charge in a parking
lot while you're you know, while you're at Taco bell
or whatever. Talk about sorry I said the taco bell
word has been growling this whole podcast. Um yeah, I
could eat like a king. I got like three bucks
in my pocket. Uh yeah, this is this is something

(58:58):
that we would love to see happen. We just really
think that it's a long shot, you know. Now, this
is Jonathan from one Again. Just wanted to say that,
you know, the solar roadways groups, they're still they're still active,
but you know, clearly we haven't seen an enormous revolution.
It's not like the world or even a single country

(59:20):
has replaced all of its roadways with solar panels. Such
an endeavor would be enormous, incredibly time consuming, incredibly disruptive
to daily life. Um And as it turns out, it's
really hard to get that technology to work properly so
that it is consistently reliable and doesn't require replacement super frequently. So,

(59:44):
in other words, it has seemed to proven to be
impractical at least so far. And um, you know, it
doesn't hasn't stopped people from trying. And I think it's
a worthy effort for certain applications. I'm not convinced roadways
or one of them. I think they're too many other
factors that complicate things as far as roadways go. But

(01:00:05):
being able to cover certain surfaces with solar panels so
that we can use them that otherwise would just go
unused to generate electricity, I think that's a pretty smart idea,
depending on where you are. Obviously, if you're in a
place that doesn't get a lot of sun exposure, doesn't
make much sense. It would just be really expensive. But
I like the concept. I just wish it were more practical.

(01:00:29):
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is text Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts

(01:00:49):
from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
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