World energy crisis solved?
- Thread starter Adam Howard
- Start date
This is by no means a "solution", it is an idea, but the fact is that we use power during night as well. And if you think that the residual heat from using the roads can supply enough power, you would have to consider the first law of thermodynamics, or the energy spent on generating the heat is far greater than the heat generated, and when you transform this to electricity you have an additional loss. Besides, the practical implementation is far off, this is not even a proven concept.
BlackJacket
Well-known member
It is a concept though, just like the first computer or the wheel...
One thing that is great with electricity is that it can be stored. Lets not forget that at night, people generally consume less electricity. With the amount of solar produced power these cells will be producing, it is possible to safely store excess for use during low light situations.
Fred Sherman
Well-known member
Impractical. The increase of cost in roadway maintenance would be exponential. The increase in time necessary to implement new roadways would be prohibitive. And don't forget the fragility of glass. Sure, they can make high tensile glass, but only when the load is evenly distributed across the surface area. That would require a level road bed. How many level graded roads do you travel on?
Don't get me wrong, this is a great concept and there has to be a starting point. But as far as a field ready, deployable product, this is still decades away.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great concept and there has to be a starting point. But as far as a field ready, deployable product, this is still decades away.
Electricity doesn't store well, it is much better to regulate production, which is the standard today, for good reason. Just take a look at the dimension of battery packs of electric cars, then try to scale that up to something that can store the a days worth of electricity consumption of a medium sized city. This is why environmental electricity production is problematic, because you cannot regulate it, it is governed by wind or sun. This means when you peak production, you are flooding the market with electricity, driving the price down, while other plants can regulate their own production.
As I said, it is an idea, but far from practical. Besides, using glass means you could very well experience friction problems during rain, and not to mention snow.
erich37
Well-known member
surely the simplest solution is to make roofs out of it?.... no significant connection issues and little risk of real damage..... something along the lines of from 2015 it is against the law to use anyting else wthout specific permission based on unsuitability of a product
what happens when a vehicle fire destroys the road bed? does half the state go dark?
what happens when a vehicle fire destroys the road bed? does half the state go dark?
SchmitzIT
Well-known member
Siumilar issues. There cannot be too little wind, and when there's too much wind, it won't operate either. Wind energy needs to be collected because it shows a lot of spikes, which wouldn't go well with the grid that requires a more stable form.
The only reason why wind energy is even affordable really is due to heavy subsidies. Remove those, and not even the most die-hard environmentalists would buy it.
Vestas is falling apart, by the way. Massive layoffs simply due to being too expensive when having to pit against companies from lower-wage countries (let alone the absurd Danish taxes).
euantor
Well-known member
If you check their website, there are actually heating coils in the road so snow and ice would just melt. Not sure about storms though.
BlackJacket
Well-known member
You're not storing as much as you think though. You will still be producing electricity, just not as much of it (except at night). What you could do is during these low volume times, switch to Nuclear energy.
I do believe they were working on the traction issue as well as the durability. What we can do is limitless given the right people in the right place with the budget to match.
As for the exponential cost, this is not true. The switch would be gradual. When a road is in need of repair, they would replace it with the new panels instead of re-paving.
AdamD
Well-known member
The future, in my opinion, has to be nuclear, fission for the mean time, hopefully fusion in the near future.
The problem is safety, both at the plant and disposing of waste.
I don't understand why they don't build the fast breeder reactors, which process the existing waste from nuclear reactors?
And there HAS to be a better solution to getting rid of it, rather than burying it in bunkers or underground.
The problem is safety, both at the plant and disposing of waste.
I don't understand why they don't build the fast breeder reactors, which process the existing waste from nuclear reactors?
And there HAS to be a better solution to getting rid of it, rather than burying it in bunkers or underground.
EQnoble
Well-known member
I said something a while ago about this..
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...itude-8-9-earthquake.13504/page-8#post-178037
I think one of the reason they don't has to do with the fact they are for the most part cooled by liquid sodium...and liquid or water vapor can cause an explosion and that would suck at a powerplant.
With enough engineering it could be done though....I think people for the most part are worried about the cost and safety issues...though keeping a couple hundred tons of plutonium uranium and things of that sort stored is not exactly optimal either.
AdamD
Well-known member
Ahh ok, well, they had hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima plant and that didn't seem to damage the reactors themselves, but did blow up the building they were contained in.
One of the problems we seem to have in the UK with regards to nuclear energy though, is it's foreign companies (I believe French) who are getting permission to build new reactors, which means the customer ends up with a huge bill, for the inevitable future.
But there has to be a safer and better long term solution to simply dumping waste under the ground.
One of the problems we seem to have in the UK with regards to nuclear energy though, is it's foreign companies (I believe French) who are getting permission to build new reactors, which means the customer ends up with a huge bill, for the inevitable future.
But there has to be a safer and better long term solution to simply dumping waste under the ground.
I hope you will all be really happy with all that solar power
.Please let us petrolheads then consume the last bit of oil that there is left on the race track.
EQnoble
Well-known member
Sure .. start building reactors powered by the waste of other reactors and turn that radioactive waste into power and reduce it's radioactive life from 100,000 years to 100 years...
Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor
They produce half of the electricity of your average reactor at 1/5th the cost.
EQnoble
Well-known member
Your average reactor costs 5 times more than a WAMSR and one of these new reactors can convert waste into 7.1 trillion dollars worth of electricity a year or in realistic terms...just by using the waste the world has now...we could power the world for the next 70 years or so assuming electricity usage goes up at the same rate that it has been increasing by in the past recent decades.
!
euantor
Well-known member
Yeah, but the governments make too much money on taxing oil to want to research other forms of energy production fully. If governments were to fully commit to nuclear power for instance, I bet we'd see a major increase in the efficiency of nuclear power stations and the standard set of processes used within them and for storing/disposing of the waste products.
