When will people learn that hydrogen is safer than petrol/gas

[K^2]

Reasoned argument isn't a baseball game. You didn't refute the points about heating water on roads, LEDs during daylight conditions, or the issue of using tiles instead of a flat surface. If even one of the latter two or correct, this is a bad idea.

I've covered LEDs. I don't consider it significant. Who cares if these only work during night? That's really when you need them most. For day time, one can use conventional paint. The total surface area that gets painted is very small, so it'd be an acceptable sacrifice. And I covered flat surfaces.

Again, the system needs to only to conform to the following: 1) Have good traction, 2) Be cheaper in the long run than asphalt. I've shown that energy generated covers costs of the tiles, making them cheaper in the long run. Traction qualities are good. That's all you need from the road.

Everything else is secondary concerns. If we were discussing asphalt right now, you'd have a much longer list of problems with it. Like, it melts in the sun. It gets totally destroyed by winter weather. It gets rolled into waves by vehicles. All in all, it can go from seemingly undamaged to absolutely undrivable, potentially leading to major accidents, in a matter of days. Compared to that, all of your complaints about solar roadways are irrelevant.

[drakesdoom]

Whoah there slow down.

Asphalt is fine in winter weather. Dumping salt on it because people are too stupid to get winter tires ruins it because that induces a repeating freeze/ thaw cycle in the water around it. It has to be around 120+ to melt in the sun not many places face that problem. And it's deformation under load is less than any non continuous road surface, most of the holes and such you see are from poorly laid roads not an inherent flaw in the material.

[phoenix_ca]

Nothing ironic about it, if a mod was post word on the censored list then it should still be censored .. The issue here is that im dyslexic, and as such at the time I could not get a good spelling on bitumen, so I fell back on a more phonetic solution.. I didn't see the 2+2 their.

I was pointing out just how stupid and non-productive censorship is. Especially since I still can't get any idea what you're talking about in that post. If I start from the premise that the censorship is for a good reason (vulgar language, which frankly isn't much of a reason), then I have to conclude that since your post was censored, it was censored because you did something against the rules that the censorship is there to enforce.

I've covered LEDs. I don't consider it significant. Who cares if these only work during night? That's really when you need them most. For day time, one can use conventional paint. The total surface area that gets painted is very small, so it'd be an acceptable sacrifice. And I covered flat surfaces.

...

Is the problem of having to paint your lines anyway not self-evident? If you paint over the lines, you block the LEDs, so they won't work at all. If you don't they aren't visible in the day. The only solution would be to move all the lines around entirely at night-fall, and then you have the absurdity of having two sets of lines, offset from each other, and drivers will see both because we put headlights on cars. I explained why these won't work in daylight already, citing how actual LED road studs work, and your solution is to paint over them; it's entirely nonsensical.

[ZetaX]

Asphalt is fine in winter weather. Dumping salt on it because people are too stupid to get winter tires ruins it because that induces a repeating freeze/ thaw cycle in the water around it.

Have you ever been somewhere with serious winters¿ Traction does not magically get tenfold by using winter tires, ice is still ice. Only getting rid of the ice will do that.

[magnemoe]

Have you ever been somewhere with serious winters¿ Traction does not magically get tenfold by using winter tires, ice is still ice. Only getting rid of the ice will do that.

Traction might become 10 times better in some situations like ice with water on top. Deep snow is another aspect however here you are unlikely to crash hard.

[Aghanim]

Striped line? So like paint - LED - paint -LED .... n you get the idea

With tiling the entire thing could be done in factory

[Seret]

Is the problem of having to paint your lines anyway not self-evident? If you paint over the lines, you block the LEDs, so they won't work at all. If you don't they aren't visible in the day. The only solution would be to move all the lines around entirely at night-fall, and then you have the absurdity of having two sets of lines, offset from each other, and drivers will see both because we put headlights on cars. I explained why these won't work in daylight already, citing how actual LED road studs work, and your solution is to paint over them; it's entirely nonsensical.

Whether the solar road panels include LED lighting or not isn't really relevant to their main role. There job is to do two things: provide a safe and reliable driving surface and generate electricity. Integrated lighting is a "nice to have", but not essential. Not including them would in fact simplify the panels a fair bit, as you wouldn't need to be able to control them remotely.

Personally I think it's too early to say whether it's a good idea. It's worth testing so that we can get some numbers on how much it would cost both up-front and ongoing, and to find out how practical they are. Personally I suspect that the high up-front costs would put a lot of people off, even if they turned out to be easier to maintain than current roads. I wish them luck, but they've got an uphill battle.

[drakesdoom]

Have you ever been somewhere with serious winters¿ Traction does not magically get tenfold by using winter tires, ice is still ice. Only getting rid of the ice will do that.

You sir have not been anywhere with serious winters. Go to North Dakota where it is below freezing for 6 months of the year, there is no ice on the roads.

[PakledHostage]

Go to North Dakota where it is below freezing for 6 months of the year, there is no ice on the roads.

Not wanting to derail the thread but I have to point out that correlation is not causation... Maybe there's no ice on the roads because there's only limited precipitation? It doesn't have to get above freezing for sublimation to occur. How do North Dakota road conditions compare to other equally cold places that also get a lot of snow (i.e. Rogers Pass)?

[ZetaX]

You sir have not been anywhere with serious winters. Go to North Dakota where it is below freezing for 6 months of the year, there is no ice on the roads.

Wow, so the (presumed) existence of cold places without ice totaly proves me wrong! Are you also claiming there is no ice in antarctica as it's even colder there¿ </sarcasm>

Ice on the road is formed in several ways, and one of them is snow molten by the cars. Obviously that won't happen if it is really cold, but, apart from the most extrem cases, almost everywhere there are times of temperatures close to 0, where melting is easy. If you live somewhere where the roads get fully cleaned from all snow and ice (be it with salt or not), then you might never even encounter the slipperyness of ice. I experienced that for myself and saw others struggle with it, too, despite winter tires even being mandatory here.

But yeah, continue your unfounded belief that winter tires magically make it possible to drive on any kind of ice despite physics telling you something different...

[phoenix_ca]

Whether the solar road panels include LED lighting or not isn't really relevant to their main role.

Funny, I thought it seemed like it was one of the primary selling points of their video.

Striped line? So like paint - LED - paint -LED .... n you get the idea

That would require rewriting the traffic code of most jurisdictions.

[lajoswinkler]

I can't believe someone on KSP forum is actually trying to defend that moronic solar roadway idea.

[KvickFlygarn87]

This thread got derailed pretty damn hard.

[The Jedi Master]

Hydrogen safe. Right...

If someone can give me a good argument, I'll reconsider.

[phoenix_ca]

The fire on the Hindenburg was caused primarily by the coating on the outer shell, not the hydrogen itself (at least if you believe a MythBuster's case study is indicative of anything; in this case I seems reasonable).

And when I'm back home and not using my phone...it's broken record time.

Edit: Alrighty! It's broken record tiem!!1!

There are other ways of storing hydrogen:

See also:

Reading:

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/june/feather-fibers-fluff-up-hydrogen-storage-capacity.html

http://cleantechnica.com/2009/06/24/hydrogen-fuel-tanks-made-from-chicken-feathers-could-save-55-million/

Edited June 9, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[phoenix_ca]

Regarding solar roadways, here's more fun from Thunderf00t. Are you seeing the absurdity yet?

[Seret]

Funny, I thought it seemed like it was one of the primary selling points of their video.

It may well have been, but the effectiveness of any integrated LED lighting doesn't either invalidate or validate the idea of solar a roadway.

What isn't clear from their promotional material is what type of inverters they're using. Do the panels have microinverters or are they wired into strings with inverters at the roadside? They're suggesting on their site that we should be using more DC loads, but that's somewhat beside the point. If existing grids are AC their roadway will need to be an AC output.

[phoenix_ca]

It may well have been, but the effectiveness of any integrated LED lighting doesn't either invalidate or validate the idea of solar a roadway.

Not wholly, no. There's rarely ever an argument against something that's a proverbial "silver bullet" that completely obliterates the justification for a complex idea. The problem here is that that's just one problem among a multitude of problems.

And they're suggesting what about DC vs AC now? There's a really, really good reason that AC won-out over DC when it came to power transmission along electrical cables, and that's that it requires half the bloody cable. For DC to work, you need a continuous, closed circuit (just like in a land-line phone). For AC, you just stick one end into the ground instead.

Also, they did happen to write a response to various claims made:

http://solarroadways.com/clearingthefreakinair.shtml

I still have my reservations about the LEDs and the glass. You might be able to get LEDs visible in daylight, but it's not like that doesn't take power. O.o

There's also this fun bit of paranoia:

We wonder about people who reflexively dismiss our concept without trying to understand it, or go on public forums to attack us. It's helps us to remember that there have always been people against change. For some it's just too scary. They want to just keep things the same. Perhaps they are the descendants of those who argued that the earth was flat, that we didn't need cars because horses worked just fine, told the Wright Brothers they were out of their minds, or insisted that we'd never reach the moon. Or perhaps they are the voices of larger entities who are now feeling threatened by the paradigm shift that is Solar Roadways.

You know what? Just because people laugh at someone, doesn't mean that they're a genius. Address the specific arguments against your idea and you might gain some traction. This allusion to people like myself and Thunderf00t being some sort of puppet of the...what, the road industry I guess...is absurd.

Edited June 10, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[Seret]

And they're suggesting what about DC vs AC now?

It's from their FAQ.

They're not entirely wrong. Over short distances and low current DC would be fine. If we really did have a shedload of DC microgeneration down at local level in the grid it would be worth looking at. Somewhat putting the cart before the horse for them to suggest it though. Classic suggestion from an engineer looking at things from a purely efficiency-based optimisation perspective and missing the big picture. Not only would we have to replace the whole grid after the last transformer, people would have to replace all their devices. No thanks.

This solar roadways thing is just one guy's personal project, so a bit of idiosyncrasy is to be expected.

Edited June 10, 2014 by Seret

[ZetaX]

Regarding solar roadways, here's more fun from Thunderf00t. Are you seeing the absurdity yet?

Some of his arguments are quite bad, despite him probably being right on the main result:

- He calculates the electricity costs without considering that energy would get a lot cheaper of that stuff is installed everyhwere. He argue sthat the LEDs would need all that energy, but that is wrong: only some of the LEDs would be on.

- His argument that it now takes blocking the road to change the lights; but LEDs have lifetimes in a magnitude similiar to the average times it takes for a road to need replacement anyway, thus this argument is null. Additionally, changing one such hexagon might be faster than repairing a normal road.

- You could integrate the silicon cells into the glass, therefore his argument on statics is invalid.

Edited June 10, 2014 by ZetaX

[ZedNova]

While i love their whole "revolutionize the world" attitude, i don't believe their roadways will work as well as expected, not until these problems are fixed. Otherwise i'd love for this project to succeed.

Maybe someone should start a separate thread to discuss this?

[lajoswinkler]

These problems can not be fixed. They are fundamental, intrinsical.

Look at this comedy sketch and you'll understand how stupid some people can be.

[Nibb31]

His remarks on the poor choice of glass as a road surface are correct though. It has poor resistance to abrasion. After a couple of days, the glass would end up opaque.

His remarks on the upfront cost are also true. The whole thing would cost billions to implement on a wide scale and would never pay for itself.

[Aghanim]

I agree. We need to spin off that solar road to another thread because we derailed this thread too much

Link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/82658-Solar-roadway?p=1205648#post1205648

[PakledHostage]

Look at this comedy sketch and you'll understand how stupid some people can be.

Hey! I think I actually attended that meeting by teleconference!

Edited June 10, 2014 by PakledHostage