Solar Freaking Roadways

for campaign now. The reason why we're doing this is we had two different listeners ask us on Facebook, Kevin and Sherry, Right. They both wanted to hear about this proposal, find out what's the deal behind it, what's the technology behind it? Is it in fact a realistic approach? So because there's been a lot of hype about it, So thank you guys much for writing in. There's been controversy.

I think it's a safe word to use. There's been, at least, if nothing else, a spirited debate eight both sides of the debate Internet Yeah, no, 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 the edgeway of saying that there's been some fairly reactionary

responses on both sides. We're going to 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 then at the end we will spew our opinions all over the podcast. So fair warning, yes, but at any rate, let's start off with just some fun facts. Okay, fun facts about highways.

Fun facts about highways in the United States, to be specific. So, the US 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 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. 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 area. Nonetheless, the average the average width of a highway lane is eleven feet, which is three point three five Wow. It works on feet de meters too, It's pretty amazing. Okay.

Uh So that means that if you were to add up all the this area that these roads are covering in the United States, you would end up somewhere around seventeen thousand, nine hundred twenty nine square miles in the United States, which is forty thousand, four hundred and thirty six square kilometers. Crap. You can do area too if you add another paved services, 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 seven hundred square kilometers, right. So that's a lot of space, 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 space. It's certainly providing

a service. Yes, it provides us a route to get from one point to another point, specifically in the vehicles that we all depend upon, without very much ruining our our vehicles or our shoe is 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, and but it's relatively inexpensive and pretty functional. But what would happen if

we can 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 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 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 it was Julie's idea to put solar panels on roads. That

was her. She just said, you know, she and her husband were having a discussion about UH, 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 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 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, the spaces that we already have, you know, using robust panels that can

withstand the traffic. Right, and so Scott, in his various videos, there are several videos that Scott Brusaw 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 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 two six typelieve, 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 to think of other stuff bed and 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 LEDs which would allow you to, uh, you know, like like change the lanes and on a highway based on traffic patterns, or move parking spots around in a parking lot. Right like so for example, uh, 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 the day traffic is allowed to go in one direction, and in another part 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 of you an arrow saying yes you can drive in this lane X say red 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 lanes work. They treat it like it's a turning lane. They're a little bit terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. You know, 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 could change it on the fly. Responds 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, like some parts of the country do, then you could end up having a bunch of motor cycle 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 melt any kind of any kind of ice or snow on the roadway, thus being able to prevent terrible, terrible driving conditions. Right sure, 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, the glass covering yeah. Um. But but also um 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'd 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 would have of 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 facility if the water is particularly and then

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 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 yea also reaching further out into the future, incorporating a lot more of of smart elements to the road ways of you know, doing things like if, um, if a kid is crossing the street, having the street interact 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 the

physically 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 a car or you know. But we're getting 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 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 i'd 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 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, 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 to be walking by. Now, in order to go from this sort of brainstorming proposal idea to reality, they they noticed that there were some pretty

significant challenges. Sure, um, you know, first of all, you photovoltaics are very delicate. I'm so you're going to need a really strong surface in order to protect them from you know, trucks, Yes, exactly. Yeah, you have to have something that was going to keep them from breaking under 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 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. As it turns out that 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 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 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 that you're not going to get there. Yeah, they're not going to go through. 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 of photovoltakes 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 the efficiency of

that particular solar panel. They said that these solar panels would be a on fift efficient although as far as I know, no independent testing has been done of the solar panels, not that I'm aware of, although they do currently only have a very small test patch. 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 from the positive perspective, which I totally understand. They're 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?

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 place solar panels on top of pre existing infrastructure, are 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 be

uh 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 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 to to try the LEDs to create the microprocessors that communicate with each other. They do so wirelessly by the way,

they do this kind of messaging stem 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 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 slowed 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 is really showing that the LEDs 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 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 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 talked 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 that the tempering process does more or less, uh, that that thing of of making things very strong and can also involve 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

incredibly sharp yards 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 from them. That's kind of important because if 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 traction. 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 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 gripped the road. Um.

They claimed that the gripping tests were outperformed asphalt. Uh. I don't know exactly how all those tests were conducted, but that's that's the claim. Yeah. I also believe that. They claim 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 d s, those are light emitting diodes. We talked about that in the past. Diodes are very basic 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 Bruso also claims that the prism like nature of those hexagons that Lauren was just talking about also allow the l d 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, similar to the wires that might run through your your rear windshield that that help 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 panel hexabon test photos, yes, surrounded by others covered in snow 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 detecting that and alerting the drivers to it so that they can prepare themselves. Like I can see 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 when you've got a precipitous drop to the Pacific Ocean on the other side of it, that's a somewhat of a nerve wracking experience. Now, I mentioned that the microprocessors had little WiFi 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 messages 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 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 a one of these hexagons. What's going on in the microprocessors is that they're constantly

sending out little signal to each other. Hey are you there? Oh you're there. Hey are you there? Oh you're there. So 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 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 is this little test strip 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 little test strip is is meant to be a tester, but it's a little environment for them to work at every everything from you know, from the stress tests to the electronic components functionality, making sure the heating elements are working, make sure the l e d s 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 smallish 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 like seven hundred and fIF the thousand and then their Indigo their indiego Go project funded right right fund. 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 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.

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. 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 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 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, 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, now that that's one way of putting it. That is incredibly ambitious because uh, you know, even if they produced, 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 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 sawt 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 forty six thousand, three hundred and eighties 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, the hater. 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 happens too. 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 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 some 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 Brussa'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, and they asked them to evaluate this solar ROADWAYTE 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 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, but 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 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,

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 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 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 micro processor. It's not a 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 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 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 say that it's insurmount 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 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, 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 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 UM about the possibility if you have these complex electronics, Yes, what happens if someone whimsically decides to mess mess with that? Yeah, 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 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 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. Then you just have an enormous wide road to be like, be like our highway system 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 the 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, what if you're the processors crash and but now presumably if you had maybe just one crash, you would get that, you know, the person or the entity that overseesian 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, 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 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 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 to say that we would suddenly be in an 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 other criticisms were that LED visibility visibility in bright light might be an issue. There's there's

debate on this because 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 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 LED 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 that that Scott was talking about are really very well aligned. Yeah, it can see how to direct the lights so that you can actually see it even in the brightest of sunlight. Ryall 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, 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 doesn't 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 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 technology because in the middle of a snowstorm, you're not getting as much sun would during other times, right, Yeah, any sun probably, Yeah, the sunlight factors is kind of a non factor in that case. Not to mention, like, if it's 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 of the United States to any other part of the United States, 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. Yeah, so that is a real issue there. Also, 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 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, roots systems can disrupt the shape of a flat otherwise flat ground surface. Anyone who has walked along any sidewalk that's made up of these panels has probably seen cracks in the sidewalk, which comes from the movements in the ground and thus the movements of the the material itself. The 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 be completely perfect. So yeah, 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, we'll try to remember to drop a link out to it on social I 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 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

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. Even because you're working with a curved surface 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. Sure, these are all criticisms that people 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 marks on the glass, 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 road is made of, UM, and any kind of gaps or cracks and the material tend to 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 munching 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 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 is 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 very rough cost.

Really it's it's currently some seventy 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 for the foot of 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 Thunderfoot is he's little less de pblematic 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 twenty five 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 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 tenth of what this would potentially cost, according to some people, 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, their 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 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 Indigo 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 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 and doesn't know what they're talking about, because technically none

of us know what we're talking about. Now, that doesn't mean 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 indigog project has 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, indigog takes a bigger chunk on that case.

But yes, uh, Then some of the other refutations 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 winter, in the winter during ice or snowstorms is dangerous, which no one, no 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 snowplows and salt trucks, that kind of thing. No one said it

wasn't expensive, not a question. No, 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 of getting the electricity from sunny place is 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 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 manufacturing practices are improving all the time, but as it stands, it is not completely green. 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 the are all that rare, 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. 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. So while the generating of electricity itself is green, the generating of the solar panels is not. It's not 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 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 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. Uh. Also, I did want to point out that a lot of the teams that 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 twillions of dollars more in research and development and implementation. Sure, yeah,

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 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, 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 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 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 an 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 be collecting it an aggregate, but your car would have to work harder, so on each Yeah, 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 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 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 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. And that's that's a you know, regular old clay ceramic sile that doesn't have any you know,

in it poisonous electronics. So I mean, I think it's worth looking into because if nothing else, it means that we might get ideas for alternate approaches that could buil down the road. I just don't think this one's gonna pay Yeah, And and I certainly don't want to quash you know, scientific inquiry and and curiosity nor to nor do I want to green areas and roadways. That's terrific. Yeah, And 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 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 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 you know, how do you get it?

They also have trapezoidal half touch 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 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'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 parking lot while you're you know, while you're at Taco Bell or whatever.

Sorry I said the taco Bell word. My stomach 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 that we would love to see happen. We just really think that it's a long shot. That doesn't mean it's not a long shot worth taking. Just be aware that the chances of success are are there. There are a lot of challenges in the way. Yes,

that is a very diplomatic way of putting it. Um, but hey, if you guys have any opinions about this, if you think that we are dead wrong or dead right, or or if you're if you're thinking like you guys didn't even address these eighteen other concerns that I have that I think are the barrier, or maybe you think, hey, you said that this was a concern, but here's how

they're going to need it. You want to know all of that because this this is again one of those visions of the future that we would love to see happen. We just don't know if it's possible. Let us know what you think. Come join the conversation on Facebook. That's a great place to to start. Uh. You can let us know what you think on Twitter. You can let us know what you think on Tumbler, or handle it. All three of those is text stuff hs W. We are working hard. I am told on getting a new

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