Solar Roadways, a VERY expensive joke?

so some jokes can be rather expensive indeed the joke that I'm about to tell you cost over two million dollars the project in this case is called solar roadways this is their goal it's technology that replaces all roadways parking lots sidewalks driveways tarmacs bike paths and outdoor recreation services with solar panels and not just lifeless boring solar panels smart microprocessing interlocking hexagonal solar units and it's raised over two million dollars so they got this webpage up that's gonna answer folks like myself you know sorts with over a decade of glassblowing experience in designing high-performance glass apparatus and so on the paint starts with an unintentionally ironic statement that there's a lot of false information about soul roadways on the internet these days yes yes there is and if you stopped pumping it out there wouldn't be as much of it but hey nope I know that's not fair that's just a claim and claims a cheap if you want to convince the open-minded then you're gonna have to demonstrate it so let's examine this claim that they make on their website false claim you can't see LEDs in the daylight and they come out with two examples of where you can see LEDs in the daytime that's traffic lights and LED billboards well amazingly enough the one example that they didn't come up with of where you can see LEDs in the day type was solar freakin roadway seriously you make the point that you've already built these solar roadways that they're not speculation specifically say in response to Thunderfoot compares our solar Road panels to a thorium powered car in a transorbital pogo stick and says if you could make one it would be super cool and then you say we actually have made a hundred and eight of them and he's right they are super cool well why not just show us them working during the day as walter von braun said and as I've repeatedly done a single good test result is worth a and expert opinions but instead again and again we only ever see the LEDs working in the dark huh I wonder why that might be so I decided I would make my own solar roadway using LEDs that look very similar to theirs and this is the result so in reality this is actually about as sophisticated as the solar road project although Tom's got some solar panels some LEDs which is you see in full daylight really aren't so good but they do have two examples of light emitting diodes being visible during the day firstly traffic lights and you're quite right they are visible during the day as long as you put a shade on them to keep the direct sunlight off them to keep the direct sunlight of them I think I see where they're going here that if they put a Sun Shade up to say keep the sunlight of the solar roadways then you'll be able to see the LEDs ah such genius seriously ideas of that caliber I'm surprised they've only raised two million dollars well the second example LED billboards up those wonderfully environmentally-friendly powerful LED billboards up firstly look LEDs really aren't a good if you're looking at them at a very shallow angle which is curiously exactly the angle you'll be looking at them if they're between two glass plates in the road so then I thought why not put some LED is for aluminum foil this would be like driving in a video game or on a runway it's almost impossible to think of a worse place to use LEDs and this probably also explains why in none of our resident Genesis footage do we see the LEDs from the angle you would see them in a car now instead you're always looking at the road from above now sure that's great if you're a bird but if you're in a car not so much however it turns out that's just the beginning of the problems the big kahuna here it's what's known in the trade as a vision of energy look our roadways already have solar powered lighting of one sort or another now let this guy explain though this is just to give you a rough order of magnitude feel for how much light you can actually really get out of a solar roadway and this piece of paper here I'm just going to use as a unit area and the reason it's good is because when that B's paper is in the full sunlight that's basically with that that's putting out as much diffuse light release you can get out of all of that solar energy so on solar energy is basically hitting this and being reflected as diffuse light very little bit is actually transferred to heat in the white paper and basically everything else is turned into light now the reason that's great is that means that this is the absolute most amount of light that you can get out of light falling on this sort of area so if you wanted to get this out of a solar panel what you got to do is you've got to cover that with solar panels you've got to transform that into electricity and then transfer that back into LED light and each time along the way you lose some energy now it turns out that even good solar panels are only about 20% efficient so if I coated all of this with solar panels 20% it's going to be about that if I would cut all of this with solar panels I automatically lose that much energy which means that that's now the most amount of light energy that I can get out of this and then if I hire these both day and night of course that means that I only get solar energy returned the during the day that now means that I lose all of them and of course that's only the amount of light reflection I can get the light generation like it's pointing directly at the Sun the whole time now when the solar panels are lay down like this you lose probably two-thirds of your energy compared to if they're tracking the Sun but we're just going to say half so now we're going to lose all of that and then you're you've got to convert that electricity to light again and LEDs they were in the efficiency but let's say 50% efficiency so realistically if you have to code something with this sort of size with solar panels that is the sort of area of brightness that you would light up 24 hours a day and just to put that into perspective let's turn our LEDs on there we go so as you can see our LEDs really ending that much for us so I mean this is the the primary reason why the solar roadways is just a non-starter it could barely light enough of the road to actually produce the center marking let alone to actually power the whole nation and at this point usually going to be honest that compared to coating this area with solar panels all the losses from the solar panel from only having a power when the sun's up and so forth better off just painting a white line down the middle of the road it doesn't have any real cost in terms of infrastructure and it's very efficient for producing a white light during the day we are simply using solar powered lighting here I looked at another way the average square meter of the Earth's surface receives about 340 what per square meter now your typical billboard in order to be visible during the day they run at somewhere between 350 and a thousand watts per square meter that is to run these things such that they're visible during the day and they've got to put out more energy than is actually falling on them from the sunlight otherwise there would just be a washed out and of course remember our earlier calculation well we get a good feel for how much area we can light up with an equivalent photon density the sunlight from a unit sized solar panel but the bit where it goes completely crazy is when you calculate the energy bill for if they fulfill their Dru seems of having the roads lit up like a computer game so then I thought why not put some LEDs to illuminate the Lions this would be like driving in a video game or on a runway I mean we know how much area they want to light as 25,000 square miles of road surfaces parking lots and driveways in the lower 48 states if we cover that with solar panels just a 15 percent efficiency we produce 3 times more electricity than this country uses on an annual basis there's a rough energy consumption per square meter it means we can calculate how much energy they would use per year and how much that would cost using cheap electricity just the electricity bill alone would be about 20 trillion dollars per year that's the bargain price of 65 thousand dollars for every man woman and child in America per year this is exactly the kind of over-the-horizon thinking that has brought Idaho's own solar roadways to national and world prominence you'd be looking at increasing the electricity consumption of your average American by a factor of about 100 or looked at another way if you were to only light one hundredth of the road area like this and that would just about give you enough power to light a little white stripe down the middle of the road you know the sort of thing that we traditionally care out of painting a white line down the middle of the road that in the Solar roads project would still double the average power consumption of your typical America or alternatively we could skip the glass surface we could skip the micro processors we could skip the LEDs in the solar panels and just paint a white light on the ash valve I mean it's quite amazing that anyone ever thought these people were visionary in any way shape or form not allowing visionary enough to give them over two million dollars to pursue something which you can should be bunk with a few back-of-the-envelope calculations whether technical expertise here was about that of plugging in some LEDs on top of a solar panel and sheet of glass but if you think that's depressingly stupid they're just getting warmed up like the idea of warming the tiles to melt snow he says false claim we cannot afford to heat roads and then he quotes from the Federal Highway Administration over 70% of the nation's roads are located in snowy regions which received more than five inches of average snowfall annually each year 24 percent of the weather-related vehicle crashes occur on snowy slushy or icy pavements bear Yatta Yatta Yatta winter road maintenance accounts for roughly 20% of the department of transport maintenance budgets state and local agencies spend more than 2.3 billion dollars on snow and ice control operations annually twitch our resident genius says does the current system of snow removal sound cheaper to anyone what would saving over 1300 lives and preventing over 115,000 injuries per year be worth not to mention medical bills vehicle repairs lost wages etc what that's it that's your entire argument does the current system of snow removal sound cheap to anyone that's it your entire argument well allow me to retort look it's not exactly rocket science to understand that if it was cheaper to melt snow rather than just to move it to the side of the road then we would use flamethrowers for snow removal not snow plows and the reason we don't do that is because it is much cheaper just to move the snow to the side of the road look it's not even a matter of a discussion it's simple thermodynamics you know that conservation of energy stuff we were going over earlier if you want to turn one kilogram of ice at freezing point into one kilo of water at freezing point it requires about 300 kilojoules per kilogram and according to the Department of Transport stats the typical place in America gets saved 13 centimeters of snow which is the equivalent of about 1.3 centimeters of ice we know the target Road area and therefore we can calculate how much ice there is to melt and therefore we know how much power is needed to melt that ice therefore we can calculate the electricity bill using cheap electricity oh yeah you're right 2 billion really doesn't sound very cheap I've got a great idea for saving money let's replace it with a system that if it was 100 percent efficient would cost 5 billion dollars per year and that's ignoring the fact that these solar panels will be in the northern part of America weather isn't much sunlight in the winter when there's even less sunlight and they're going to be covered in snow which means they're not going to generate any body power to melt the snow the website isn't done with making stupid or demonstrate by a long way they go on false claim glass is softer than asphalt not even close they claim really is that so so if I rub say basalt against glass then we should end up with scratched ash rolled right let's put that to the test shall we here I get a piece of black top and some borosilicate glass err a fairly hard glass and let's see which one is harder by rubbing the two against each other so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to rub one against the other and almost immediately we'll see this is an absolute no-brainer that this would just dance on purpose ever versus glass you're just going to with ground glass in very short order so now it's true that some of the actual or this this concept might have actually got scratched up too but to be honest that doesn't really matter because you don't need your hash role could be optically clear dear I think I just demonstrated that you're talking crap but we can come back to that shortly in the meantime you go on to claim so anyone tries to tell you that glass is soft just remind them that even simple glass is harder than steel by comparison it's ashwaldt that is soft but on the steel the answer is yes yes the steel is soft so Astra still being softer than glass well the so this is just regular aura so let's lay class nothing special about it and and straight away you can see that so you know it's glass but it is steel yep I was quite quite quite right that a glass will scratch steel is their course much more ductile and such like this point of shatter this well yes you can scratch steel with glass and frankly I think you're probably confusing steels hardness with other properties like so for instance its tensile strength you see steel is very good in tension which makes it very good for making things like cables out of but steel is nonetheless soft or if you want to keep playing the The games if glass is really harder than steel why don't we meet the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge out of them also for that matter why don't we just make them out of solar tiles but let's come back to that by comparison it's asphalt that's soft because that demonstrates your utterly clueless about the materials used to construct roads and that's the charitable interpretation the term asphalt can be used to refer to either the black goo Lisa bitumen that is used to hold roots together or the composite material that includes ground up rocks and this black goo and it's cool things like tarmac or ash vaulted concrete and so on well if they're using the term asphalt here to refer to just a black goo and then they're comparing that to glass for hardness then they're just idiots because no one uses that black goo as the sole road surface so what you've got here is basically a piece of blacktop which is a so composite of rocks in asphalt or yeah sometimes this is called ash loft itself so what you've got here is basically that black goop on its own and she see it's actually pretty soft you can certainly deform it with your finger you know your fingernail your knife on it of course yeah it's really pretty quite soft and you'd know this you know when you actually get a really hot day this stuff does become softer but the what makes this a really nice road material is is the granite rocks here that actually provides a very high surface for the road and the black goop here the pitchman ass well basically should bind it hold it together keep little waterproof okay I'm so what I got here fresh off pavement these are sort of asphalt applica so what you'll find here it seems actually quite warm is quite a lot of plasticity in the actual binder by the police essentially yeah it's actually rubbery banging so you see that it's of will come apart stick back together again and that's a part of what makes it good for a composite material is there are softish bits in it that are more flexible and then the bit that actually takes all of the load these little rocks however if they're comparing asphalt as it's used to make roads from to glass then they're just demonstrably talking bull in that it's 100% demonstrable or 100% of the time that Asheville keys are much harder than glass by yourself versus glass you're just gonna end up with ground glass in very short order so yeah maybe the asphalt here does get scratched up by where but that's not a problem because road surfaces don't need to be optically transparent as they would if you were trying to make a solar roadway they continue one more thing when you tamper glass it becomes four to five times stronger than non tempered glass listed in Moore's hardness scale it doesn't make it harder just stronger Oh Bravo and congratulations on working out that tempering glass doesn't make it any harder that is it doesn't make it any more resistant to scratches it just makes it to more resistant to shattering but it also does mean that when it does shatter it does so fairly impressive like this how because side windows are made of tempered glass this makes it very hard and very resistant to blunt objects but when you fracture porcelain it creates a very very fine very hard point solar roadways will be made out of tempered glass how because side windows are made of tempered glass so congratulations this is exactly the same material that you're proposing to make glassed roads out of and one little fragment of alumina could do millions of dollars worth of damage which curiously actually made me click on the side tab about the military applications they have for solar roadways because what every military dreams of is an integrated transport power and communication system that can be crippled by one guy throwing a handful of ceramic out of his car window every half mile or so but it turns out the military applications are so stupid they really don't even require debunking seriously military applications imagine being able to put eyes and ears on the ground anywhere in the world without putting human lives in danger drop a solar road panel into the hills of Afghanistan by parachute the parachute detaches upon impact and is retracted beneath the paddle camera modules hope this is a roadway for God's sake camera modules open up a name in every direction satellite dish configures itself for the communications anywhere in the world oh my god and people gave these Muppets two million dollars of money yeah I can imagine the military sitting there now in their briefing you know what we want is a military surveillance device that we can parachute into enemy territory sort of like the Mars Lander a child with a stick of chewing-gum was just rendered your hundred million dollars worth of hardware useless any suggestions but then we want to put glass surface on it that can be used as a roadway for 20 years and that we want to put some changeable LEDs on a test in case someone wants to play basketball on it and then of course having ignored all these minor technical challenges about their ideas you know trivial details like the conservation of energy hit that glass is fundamentally unsuitable for making roads up that sort of thing they then come up with this doozy we wonder about people who reflexively dismiss our concept without trying to understand it or go on public forums and attack us it helps us to remember that there have always been people against change for some is 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 that they were out of their minds and or insisted that we would never reach the moon or perhaps the other voices of larger entities who now feel threatened by their by the paradigm shift that is solar roadways but you're just not being visionary enough you've missed the most obvious place to put solar panels on the surface of the Sun one solar panel on the surface of the Sun will generate well over a million times the energy of one here on earth which ordinate about a thousand solar panels on the Sun and that would give you this same power as covering the entire road surface in America with them saying we produce three times more electricity than this country users on an annual basis I mean just think of the savings there you could have a limitless free power now shorter will be those who reflexively dismiss this argument without trying to understand it 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 that taught the Wright brothers that they were out of their minds or insisted that we would never reach the moon or perhaps they're the voices of larger entities that now feel threatened by the paradigm shift of putting solar roadways in the most obvious place ever Oh surface of the Sun now the reason that I find solar roadways fundamentally distasteful is that they've juked people into giving them over two million dollars for a project that you in demonstrate is fundamentally unviable with a ten dollar coffeepot and a damaged piece of blacktop that is the material that they want to use is fundamentally unsuitable for its proposed purpose proposing glass roads really is as stupid as proposing chocolate frying pans please you're not being the Wright brothers by proposing solar-powered roads or chocolate frying pans you are being Bozo the Clown the really sad thing is though that enough people were duped here to give them two million dollars for this I mean you've already just got a laugh or cry at a joke that is that expensive

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 530,101

Keywords: Solar Roadways, Joke (Literature Subject), solar freakin roadways, solar, freakin, roadways, debunked, fraud, scam, energy, real, true, truth, power, panel, road, asphalt, light, recycle, green, renewable, recycling, award, pwn, pwned, win, fail, million, billion, trillion, dollars, amazing, con, indiegogo, great, idea, inventor, Julie, Scott, Brusaw, idaho, governor, crapo, technology, time, driving, debunk, solar energy, farm, glass, are they, legit, exposed, conspiracy, oil, gas, electricity, funny, dumb, stupid, clearing the air

Id: ocV-RnVQdcs

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 15 2014