The most brilliant thing you've ever heard ofFollow

Alright.

Now where did I put that bit of the M20?

There was less about "Here's why roads are the best place for these solar panels" and more about "Here's why these solar panels would be awesome roads" with talk about LED signals & lane lines, ease of replacement for damaged panels, ability to melt snow, etc. They do mention that if every roadway was converted, it would provide enough a kajillion barrels of electricity but you could presumably do the same by covering a bunch of non-road places instead. Probably need less surface area as well since the panels would be more efficient.

I doubt it would. Seems that concrete is the answer for that (just expensive, so asphalt it is).

Wild guess, but probably because roads are one of the few things that receive constant public funding for construction/maintenance and perhaps they're hoping someone wont actually stop and think "this makes no damn sense at all!". It's probably purely about tapping into public budgets. As several people have pointed out, it would be vastly more cost to energy efficient to put solar panels on parking garages and rooftops. Or heck, any surface that doesn't regularly have large heavy objects moving on top of them. But because roads have large heavy objects moving on top of them, they are constantly wearing down and therefore constantly require repair. It's a hard sell to have someone create a new budget to build solar panels on a structure that's already built. It's relatively easier to hijack an existing budget for the latest green energy boondoggle.

And as Kao's numbers kinda point out, assuming every mile of roadway should be resurfaced every 5 years, at .24m/year, that's a pretty large potential budget to tap into. Even if (especially if) you never actually build a single mile of roadway, you can still probably siphon off enough millions of dollars researching the issue to keep a moderately sized business running, and the executive salaries flowing. I'm not cynical though!

Never underestimate large numbers of hippies.



vs. number of gas stations...



Yes I know, different capacity stations, blah blah blah, how long does it take to charge, etc etc.

Edited, May 27th 2014 5:33pm by someproteinguy

I was mainly laughing about the picture showing a (presumably) downtown street with no cars on it at all except the one BMW parked in front of the single charger. Total fantasy image.

The Leaf comment (which applies to other models as well, but really hit the fan when the Leaf came out), was about the promises made regarding numbers of stations that would be built versus the reality. Obviously, things have improved since the initial roll out, but one of the big problems (around here at least) was that the navigation system has this handy locator for finding nearby charging stations. And while this did differentiate privately owned chargers from public ones, it failed to note whether "public" chargers were actually located in places where any random person could access them. This was almost certainly just a matter of communication and configuration of the chargers themselves, but a lot of businesses purchased them and installed them in their company lots for use by their employees (for free even). Which resulted in a lot of Leaf owners thinking there was a charger available in a given area, only to arrive there and find that it was in a lot that required some kind of security badge to get to.

Actual public pay chargers were really few and far between, but if you looked at your navigation map you wouldn't realize it. And those few that were out there were found quickly and therefore nearly 100% used all the time. I know that Leaf owners in this area started communicating via social media and actually scheduling with each other who would be using which public charging stations and when, so as to try to minimize the problem. Of course, that didn't prevent some bozo who wasn't on the site from driving along, seeing an open charger and parking there anyway, so it was hit or miss even then.

I know a lot of people who purchased Leafs and Volts when they first came out, and there was a huge amount of complaining about these issues. I'm honestly not sure if the charging station shortages were ever really addressed, or the owners just adjusted to the problem and stopped complaining about something that couldn't really be fixed.

Uh huh.

Hyuck hyuck. It's like... these car adverts with their unrealistic fantasies. I know right?



Like there'd totally be giant humanoid monsters chasing after the vehicle in this commercial. The rocky terrain would totally scuff their giant bare feet.

Mostly fixed, the 3 or 4 gray circles on that map I linked were the ones in use, for reference (on a Tuesday evening of course...).

The biggest problem you usually hear about is the charge time (you'll notice very few orange circles on the map there, which are the quicker charging stations), or the lack of stations in more remote locations. I mean most people I know who have an electric also have a conventional car, and there's still a good reason for it. But if you live in an urban area (or at least this one) and are primarily going to use the car to drive around the urban area, it's not really that much different than a normal car.

Remember you can't fill a normal car up with gas at home.

Edited, May 27th 2014 7:12pm by someproteinguy

Nothing like carrying a generator to convert gas into heat, into mechanical energy, into electricity, then using that electricity to charge your electric car so it can convert that into mechanical motion...

I'll never buy an electric vehicle... but I'm glad there are people out there who are. Tesla's caused a boom at my job. Doubled our operating margin last year which lead to a nice profit sharing contribution and a 15% bonus.

Lol! Yeah. Although, interestingly enough, it can be more efficient than converting gas into heat, into mechanical energy, then running a driveshaft directly (even with a transmission in the middle). It's the principle behind the Volt (not implemented as well as it could have been unfortunately). The idea is that any internal combustion motor has an "ideal" RPM rate at which it will generate the most mechanical energy for the amount of fuel consumed. Deviating from that ideal results in significantly decreased conversion of the fuel into mechanical energy (ie: power to the wheels). But driving a car requires a constant amount of changing mechanical energy needs. Accelerating, coasting, idling, etc. Connecting an internal combustion motor directly to a drive shaft is incredibly inefficient because you have to meet those changing mechanical needs by changing the rpms of the motor itself. So the motor is being used inefficiently pretty much all the time.

If you run a generator at a constant (efficient) rpm rate, and then store that energy somehow (like say a flywheel or a battery), and then draw on that stored energy as needed to drive the car, then you'll actually expend less total fuel operating the vehicle than you would otherwise. The Volt is the first example of a large scale production attempt at this (it's not a perfect example, but it's close). Part of the problem is that we're caught almost in a definitions war between "electric" and "hybrid", which actually result in the Volt being used in a less than efficient manner. Ideally, the generator should always be kicking in based on load on the battery system over time, but instead it's designed to drive purely electrically for the first X miles (so as to simulate being a plug in electric car), then shift to using the generator to charge things. The problem is that you actually decrease the total range potential doing this because you're waiting until your battery is already about half discharged before activating the generator. If you think of it as being a super efficient gas powered car rather than an electric car, you could have the generator active all the time, significantly increasing the time you can run the car before the battery runs out.

It's really about what you want the vehicle to do. Do you want it to be an electric car, with a generator that extends range (but not super efficiently at that point), or a gas powered car that leverages a battery system to store energy and make the fuel use as efficient as possible (a true Series Hybrid)? I'd prefer the latter since it would allow you to leverage existing fueling systems while massively increasing efficiency. Done properly, it should be possible to operate such vehicles as direct replacements for existing internal combustion powered cars, with even long trips being possible. It's a pet peeve of mine that even though this is technically possible right now, various bits of infighting amongst the different EV/hybrid schools of thought have prevented this from being realized. The "all or nothing" approach to electric vehicles largely means we have to choose between a car that has a very limited cruising range *or* not bother with one at all. I happen to think that's counter productive and harmful to the implementation and adoption of new technologies and actually has resulted in an increased fuel dependency than we should have right now.

Edited, May 27th 2014 8:05pm by gbaji

Why in God's name would anyone look at map to see where things are located? I mean, that's only the map's sole purpose in life.