The Bogosity Forum

That's right, I said Solar FREAKIN' Roadways.

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I can't wait to see how Uncle Sam screws this up.

Awesome idea! It'd be interesting to see the 20-year TCO and how it compares to how much electricity is generated.

Start-up costs on this are obviously going to be extremely high, and it won't work properly unless you do it in big sections.  You're going to have to do at least a few miles of road (which will take a long time, since you'd need to completely remove the existing road structure to install this) and the conversion process will take decades.

I see a rather obvious problem with the self-heating feature to clear snow and ice.  Asphalt absorbs more of the incident light falling on it than any solar cell can possibly convert into electricity, and doesn't get anything like warm enough to clear any serious snowfall, even when the temperature is close to freezing.  Where I live, we can get snowfall rates of as much as four inches per HOUR with high winds and air temperatures far below freezing.  Even when there's no snow falling, in very cold conditions snow will continue to drift across roadways.  Self-heating from internal power is not going to cut it. (Not to mention, you don't just have to head the road surface, but also the entire drainage and processing system as well, given that it's so close to the surface.)

They've got a page where they post the numbers, unfortunately they're still working on the numbers from their more recent trials.

http://solarroadways.com/numbers.shtml

Quote from: evensgrey on May 20, 2014, 08:31:10 AM
Start-up costs on this are obviously going to be extremely high, and it won't work properly unless you do it in big sections.  You're going to have to do at least a few miles of road (which will take a long time, since you'd need to completely remove the existing road structure to install this) and the conversion process will take decades.

They could do it through attrition, as they get to where they need to scrape and resurface the roads. They could also work with gated communities and places like that for some initial rollouts.

Quote from: MrBogosity on May 20, 2014, 09:06:41 AM
They've got a page where they post the numbers, unfortunately they're still working on the numbers from their more recent trials.

http://solarroadways.com/numbers.shtml

I note a complete absence of any numbers for the energy requirements of road surface heating. (This was a pie-in-the-sky dream of the early 1950's, based on nuclear power providing electricity that was too cheap to meter.)

Without any estimate for this number, I don't see how it's possible to make an argument to actually do this.

Hey, look at the positives. if this works we won't ever have to hear "but what ab out the roads?" ever again! Because Solar FREAKN' Roadways!

Quote from: tnu on May 20, 2014, 06:31:18 PM
Hey, look at the positives. if this works we won't ever have to hear "but what ab out the roads?" ever again! Because Solar FREAKN' Roadways!

Yep, and that's the free market's answer, whereas GovCo's answer was Solyndra.

Quote from: evensgrey on May 20, 2014, 06:10:59 PM
I note a complete absence of any numbers for the energy requirements of road surface heating. (This was a pie-in-the-sky dream of the early 1950's, based on nuclear power providing electricity that was too cheap to meter.)

Without any estimate for this number, I don't see how it's possible to make an argument to actually do this.

We'll see when they get the new numbers up.

Still, as Harry Browne sorta said, if you don't aim for the stars, you'll never reach the top of the world.

Well, Tf00t has taken apart the whole idea.

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Darn, that's disappointing.

EDIT: And I just realized a very easy way for Uncle Sam to screw this up.

Quote from: Altimadark on May 31, 2014, 07:44:08 PM
Darn, that's disappointing.

EDIT: And I just realized a very easy way for Uncle Sam to screw this up.

You know government: If it's easy, they'll find some other way. Most likely, they'll screw up the way they're screwing it up. (Although this project does sound like something Obama would support, doesn't it? Sounds good to those who have no idea how anything involved works, and pretty much requires magic. Mind you, those cylindrical solar cells probably were a good idea, since the solar cells are more expensive than mirrors and cylindrical ones would mean you could use mirrors to concentrate light onto them far more effectively than flat ones.)

Incidentally, the notion of putting sheds over roads is an interesting one. Why isn't that done? Because it would cost more than snow clearance does over the lifetime of such a structure. And, as we have seen with the The Big Dig in Boston, government has a way of making idiot mistakes in the simplest of things. (Really, you couldn't not put dissimilar metals in contact with each other? Every physicist, engineer, plumber, and electrician knows better than that.)

Quote from: evensgrey on May 31, 2014, 05:15:28 PM
Well, Tf00t has taken apart the whole idea.

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I stopped at about 8:00 in. Unless he's got something really major he's saving towards the end, this sounds more like Julius Sextus Frontius to me.

Yes, it'll be expensive...TO START WITH. Just like EVERYTHING. So what? His whole argument seems to be based on the fact that there won't be innovations in any of these other industries, EVER. Like, there won't be a plastic or polymer replacement for the tempered glass, there won't be improvements in the mass production of these tiles, etc.

He goes on and on about how efficient it is to pave roads, and he's right, but here's the thing: it didn't start out that way! What he's looking at is the culmination of a CENTURY of innovation in making better materials, coming up with better and more efficient processes, etc. Is he saying this can't possibly happen with this technology? Or is he saying that, once you have an established, efficient system, that's it, no more innovation is allowed?

I don't know if these things will pan out--but then, neither does Thunderf00t. None of us can see the future. I just know that with every new technology you have the naysayers giving all sorts of reasons why it won't work. Remember "If God had meant for man to fly, he would have given us wings"?

Or even Frontius, whom I mentioned at the beginning: "We have now reached the limit of human invention, and I see no hope for future developments."

Frontius was a senator and governor, and one of the most acclaimed engineers of his time. Which was the 1st century AD!

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 09:20:19 AM
I stopped at about 8:00 in. Unless he's got something really major he's saving towards the end, this sounds more like Julius Sextus Frontius to me.

Yes, it'll be expensive...TO START WITH. Just like EVERYTHING. So what? His whole argument seems to be based on the fact that there won't be innovations in any of these other industries, EVER. Like, there won't be a plastic or polymer replacement for the tempered glass, there won't be improvements in the mass production of these tiles, etc.

He goes on and on about how efficient it is to pave roads, and he's right, but here's the thing: it didn't start out that way! What he's looking at is the culmination of a CENTURY of innovation in making better materials, coming up with better and more efficient processes, etc. Is he saying this can't possibly happen with this technology? Or is he saying that, once you have an established, efficient system, that's it, no more innovation is allowed?

I don't know if these things will pan out--but then, neither does Thunderf00t. None of us can see the future. I just know that with every new technology you have the naysayers giving all sorts of reasons why it won't work. Remember "If God had meant for man to fly, he would have given us wings"?

Or even Frontius, whom I mentioned at the beginning: "We have now reached the limit of human invention, and I see no hope for future developments."

Frontius was a senator and governor, and one of the most acclaimed engineers of his time. Which was the 1st century AD!

OK, so you missed most of the argument about how costly the power distribution system that would be needed to be built into the road system with this would be (and that's without addressing the question of how much it would cost to upconvert the low-voltage DC output of solar cells to high-voltage AC for relatively efficient transmission).

You did catch the fact that they appear to be suggesting making the glass blocks out of mixed recycled glass, including colored glass, which is not even possible. The cost of the glass blocks is not affected substantially by using recycled material, as glass manufacturing cost is mostly driven by the cost of fusing the glass and not by the source materials. (This is why metals are economical to recycle, while glass is economical only to reuse. The energy costs of recycling glass are as high as making new glass, while metals are much cheaper to recycle than to make new.) Asphalt is already extremely recycled, and can even be recycled on the spot if the equipment to do so is being used.

You missed the part of how illuminating the whole road network is wasteful (because you illuminate more than the bits you need to see like with car headlights), and the LEDs are not even going to be visible in direct sunlight.  (In fact, making ANY light source visible in direct sunlight cannot avoid taking a lot more energy than the solar cells could possibly produce. You might use LCDs instead, but then you don't have an optically clear road surface to get the light down to the solar cells.)

You missed the part about how the energy requirements to melt snowfall vastly exceeds the energy available from the solar cells (with numbers, unlike the proponents of the idea).  Notice how they do the heating elements as well:  They block most of the light coming down through the blocks!

You missed the part about how roads are dirty (covered in oil and dirt), which will rapidly wear down the relatively soft glass surface and make it more slipery and opaque, causing it to fail both functions it needs to fulfill.  While there are polymers that are more wear resistant than glass, they also consume more petrochemical resources (from whatever source) than asphalt does, would be far harder to recycle, and asphalt would otherwise be a waste material anyway.

Since the light shines upwards, it maximizes light pollution.

The idea that these will get cheaper with mass production is silly.  The type of glass Tf00t referenced for his glass cost estimate is already mass produced and unlikely to get much cheaper.  If you can find a polymer with the wear resistance and cost of asphalt and the transparency of glass, this idea can be revisited to see what other problems need fixing (the production cost of all the electronics comes to mind, since we're talking about more components than likely have been made thus far).

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 11:11:30 AM
OK, so you missed most of the argument about how costly the power distribution system that would be needed to be built into the road system with this would be (and that's without addressing the question of how much it would cost to upconvert the low-voltage DC output of solar cells to high-voltage AC for relatively efficient transmission).

I do think the "Replace all our power" claim is a pie-in-the-sky thing. But if it at least can power itself, it would still be cool for a number of reasons.

A lot of his more reasonable complaints involved driving on freeways at high speeds; but to start out at least, they're talking about using it for parking lots. It probably would create more power than it's using during the day, so businesses which are open during the day and close at night (and hence they use most of their power during the day) will probably see benefits from this.

From there it would more likely go to housing developments, and later on, city streets. I expect it to be a LONG time before it gets used on highways, so much time for these problems to be addressed.

QuoteYou did catch the fact that they appear to be suggesting making the glass blocks out of mixed recycled glass, including colored glass, which is not even possible.

It would be of little consequence if they started using non-recycled glass. Most recycling is bullshit anyway.

QuoteYou missed the part of how illuminating the whole road network is wasteful (because you illuminate more than the bits you need to see like with car headlights), and the LEDs are not even going to be visible in direct sunlight.

I was wondering about the sunlight thing. But right now, that's speculation. We already have LED traffic lights you can easily see when it's sunny.

Quote(In fact, making ANY light source visible in direct sunlight cannot avoid taking a lot more energy than the solar cells could possibly produce.

But OTOH, you're only lighting up a small portion of the roadway. Most of it is still black.

QuoteYou missed the part about how the energy requirements to melt snowfall vastly exceeds the energy available from the solar cells (with numbers, unlike the proponents of the idea).  Notice how they do the heating elements as well:  They block most of the light coming down through the blocks!

If you have a timecode I'll check part of that video. But remember, they wouldn't have to warm up freezing tiles to melt the snow; all they would have to do is maintain a temperature greater than 32 degrees, which is MUCH easier.

QuoteYou missed the part about how roads are dirty (covered in oil and dirt), which will rapidly wear down the relatively soft glass surface and make it more slipery and opaque, causing it to fail both functions it needs to fulfill.

We've discussed that, but that sounds like an engineering problem to me.

QuoteSince the light shines upwards, it maximizes light pollution.

This is a legitimate concern. But then, so do street lights, and if this can replace street lights it might be a net benefit.

QuoteThe idea that these will get cheaper with mass production is silly.  The type of glass Tf00t referenced for his glass cost estimate is already mass produced and unlikely to get much cheaper.

But as I said, as adoption grows people might well innovate new materials. This isn't a problem anyone's had an economic incentive to solve before.

And again, all of these problems seem to operate under the assumption that we'll be instantly replacing all of our roads with these things. It'll go in stages; parking lots first, maybe driveways, then housing developments, etc. Whatever point it becomes unfeasible to do is the point where it'll stop--and is also the point where people will have an economic incentive to improve the technology.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
I do think the "Replace all our power" claim is a pie-in-the-sky thing. But if it at least can power itself, it would still be cool for a number of reasons.

Many impossible things would be cool if they were possible.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
A lot of his more reasonable complaints involved driving on freeways at high speeds; but to start out at least, they're talking about using it for parking lots. It probably would create more power than it's using during the day, so businesses which are open during the day and close at night (and hence they use most of their power during the day) will probably see benefits from this.

It won't generate much power, and the power it would generate wouldn't even be enough to operate the allegedly useful features of the pavement itself.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
From there it would more likely go to housing developments, and later on, city streets. I expect it to be a LONG time before it gets used on highways, so much time for these problems to be addressed.

Something that will turn slick in short order won't get you very far as a paving material.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
It would be of little consequence if they started using non-recycled glass. Most recycling is bullshit anyway.

It ignores the fact that glass is no good as a road paving material anyway.  That's why nobody has ever used it anywhere.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
I was wondering about the sunlight thing. But right now, that's speculation. We already have LED traffic lights you can easily see when it's sunny.

No, we already have LED traffic lights that you can see, from the fairly narrow angle you care about a traffic light's state, when it's in THE SHADE.  Traffic lights are only of interest when you're on the road that they control, which means they can be designed to send out a narrow beam of light, and they also have a cowling that keeps them from even being in direct sunlight.  These would have to be omnidirectional, and couldn't be shaded.

Speculation is claiming that the LEDs could be made bright enough to be visible, when the video demonstrated that even quite bright LEDs are impossible to see in full sunlight.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
But OTOH, you're only lighting up a small portion of the roadway. Most of it is still black.

You're pointing the lights straight up, thus wasting most of the light AND you have to make them bright enough to be visible in full sunlight on an OFF WHITE surface, not a black one.  They do show their tiles in the video.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
If you have a timecode I'll check part of that video. But remember, they wouldn't have to warm up freezing tiles to melt the snow; all they would have to do is maintain a temperature greater than 32 degrees, which is MUCH easier.

If you look at 17:05 in Tf00t's video, he show the bit from the original video where their COMPLETELY OPAQUE heating element pad is shown.  This is the middle of his detailed description of the huge amount of energy it takes to melt snow and ice.  And, of course, it isn't any easier to keep something warm than to warm it up (unless you need to take it through a phase change, which always absorbs a lot of heat). Since these tiles are, by definition, exposed to the air (which in some parts of the Lower 48 can be easily at -40 C) they will loose vast amounts of heat to the air.  As shown in the video, the heat of fusion (the technical term for melting) of ice is enough to raise the temperature of the same mass of liquid water by about 70 C.
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Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
We've discussed that, but that sounds like an engineering problem to me.

Actually, it's a physics problem.  The proposed material is physically unsuited to the proposed application.  There's no way around that without changing the material.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
This is a legitimate concern. But then, so do street lights, and if this can replace street lights it might be a net benefit.

No, lights that shine UPWARDS are not ever going to be able to produce less light pollution than lights that shine DOWNWARDS.  Better street lights only shine downwards, and produce quite a lot less light pollution (as does using things like low-pressure sodium vapor lamps, which produce light that is easily filtered out of instruments that light pollution interferes with).  Incidentally, since the purpose of street lights is to illuminate the STREET, adding things like reflectors above the lamp that redirects light downwards not only reduces the light polution, it makes the light more effective for it's intended purpose.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
But as I said, as adoption grows people might well innovate new materials. This isn't a problem anyone's had an economic incentive to solve before.

The purpose of the grants they got was to promote research into new paving materials.  Incidentally, there are whole research labs focused solely on making better roadways (mostly in terms of reducing maintenance in harsh climates, Ottawa has one all of it's own).  There are lots of people working on improved paving materials, and nobody seems to think plastics are a good choice.  We have some pretty tough plastics, but they don't do this sort of thing with them anywhere.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 11:37:29 AM
And again, all of these problems seem to operate under the assumption that we'll be instantly replacing all of our roads with these things. It'll go in stages; parking lots first, maybe driveways, then housing developments, etc. Whatever point it becomes unfeasible to do is the point where it'll stop--and is also the point where people will have an economic incentive to improve the technology.

First we need a form of this that doesn't completely fail to work like this stuff does.  Installing this stuff won't happen on private property, because the insurance carriers will take one look at it and dump the client for installing a vehicular slideway.

Look, I've walked on CONCRETE that was overpolished, and it was slicker than glass. Fortunately, I've very good at walking on slick surfaces and didn't fall. (This was in front of the King Street entrance of the horribly ugly City Hall they built in Kitchener, Ontario back in the 90's.)  The week after it was opened to the public, they had a crew in sand blasting the shiny, slippery finish off it to prevent people falling.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 01:48:23 PM
Many impossible things would be cool if they were possible.

That's not actually a response to the point.

QuoteIt won't generate much power, and the power it would generate wouldn't even be enough to operate the allegedly useful features of the pavement itself.

Personally, I'm willing to wait to see the numbers on this. The naysayers are talking about the losses in sending this power over miles of cable; that wouldn't be necessary for a business's parking lot.

QuoteSomething that will turn slick in short order won't get you very far as a paving material.

So, just ignore everything I just pointed out. Fine.

QuoteIt ignores the fact that glass is no good as a road paving material anyway.  That's why nobody has ever used it anywhere.

No, it's because no one's had a motive to find out! Why would they choose it over asphalt? There's been no need to make a roadway out of clear material before!

Look how long it took asphalt to be developed and widely used. I can take you to places where the roads are STILL concrete, and are a mess of cracks and hastily-patched potholes.

QuoteThese would have to be omnidirectional, and couldn't be shaded.

I don't see what that's the case. Wouldn't it only need to be visible to oncoming traffic?

QuoteSpeculation is claiming that the LEDs could be made bright enough to be visible,

There are LEDs that bright. They have LED-lit phones and TV screens that you can see in full sunlight. Many businesses use LED signs that are basically low-resolution monitors that you can see in full daylight. That's actually important for my business: viewfinders and field monitors need to be that bright when doing outdoor shooting in the daytime.

QuoteYou're pointing the lights straight up

Doesn't mean they HAVE to.

QuoteThe purpose of the grants they got was to promote research into new paving materials.  Incidentally, there are whole research labs focused solely on making better roadways (mostly in terms of reducing maintenance in harsh climates, Ottawa has one all of it's own).  There are lots of people working on improved paving materials, and nobody seems to think plastics are a good choice.

Because they aren't trying to incorporate solar panels.

If it can be made viable, awesome.  I still prefer nuclear power myself, but hey, take what you can get.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 02:05:32 PM
[no actual response to anything]

You not bothering to watch the video should have clued me in that you don't actually care about the facts that show that this just doesn't work.  You ignoring so much of my post entirely proves it.  You're done.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 02:27:29 PM
You not bothering to watch the video should have clued me in that you don't actually care about the facts that show that this just doesn't work.  You ignoring so much of my post entirely proves it.  You're done.

Wow. Just wow.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 02:49:55 PM
Wow. Just wow.

Yes, I was surprised that you didn't care about PHYSICAL REALITY.

Like I said in one of the numerous parts you completely ignored, when you have a version of this that isn't a complete failure before it gets installed, you can try again.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 03:01:44 PM
Yes, I was surprised that you didn't care about PHYSICAL REALITY.

You mean, like the fact that there ALREADY ARE LEDs bright enough to be seen in daylight, on the market TODAY? (Just ONE example.)

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 03:11:41 PM
You mean, like the fact that there ALREADY ARE LEDs bright enough to be seen in daylight, on the market TODAY? (Just ONE example.)

No, there are not.  ALL the examples you gave are used EXCLUSIVELY in the shade, and most of them include their own shades.  Try looking at an LED in direct sunlight (and NOT an LCD with an LED backlight, either).

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 03:26:39 PM
No, there are not.

I'VE WORKED WITH THEM MYSELF!!! And they WORK GREAT!!!

QuoteALL the examples you gave are used EXCLUSIVELY in the shade,

Nope.

Quoteand most of them include their own shades.

Nope.

QuoteTry looking at an LED in direct sunlight (and NOT an LCD with an LED backlight, either).

Wait, why does that not count all of a sudden?

There are also LED turn signals for cars, NOT IN THE SHADE, NOT INCLUDING THEIR OWN SHADE, visible IN FULL DAYLIGHT.

They also have 15,000-lumen LED studio lights. Do those not count, either?

What about LED headlight bulbs? Those are REQUIRED BY LAW to be visible in the day!

Geez...

Goodness, I didn't think this topic would turn into a heated debate...

Just putting in my two cents, hopefully they won't catch on fire and make things worse.

I think Tfoot brings up a good point (which he highlights at the end of the video): For solar roadways to work, one needs a transparent material which can suitably replace asphalt over a decade or longer. Does the recycled glass material shown in the SFR video do this, and if not, where would one go from there?

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 01, 2014, 04:06:59 PM
I'VE WORKED WITH THEM MYSELF!!! And they WORK GREAT!!!

Nope.

Nope.

Wait, why does that not count all of a sudden?

There are also LED turn signals for cars, NOT IN THE SHADE, NOT INCLUDING THEIR OWN SHADE, visible IN FULL DAYLIGHT.

They also have 15,000-lumen LED studio lights. Do those not count, either?

What about LED headlight bulbs? Those are REQUIRED BY LAW to be visible in the day!

Geez...

Makes and models, or they don't exist.  (I need this to show you why they aren't what you're pretending.  I expect I won't get any.)

How LARGE are those studio lights of yours, and how much power do they consume?  How many square meters of these tiles does that correspond to?  How much after the surface is scratched into being opaque and the sunlight angle of maybe 30 degrees is accounted for?

Full ID information on the car lamps you claim exist, or they don't.  (These don't really help your position much anyway, since the tiles need to have omnidirectional lights or you won't be able to see them from all directions, which pavement markings need to be, especially if these are going to be used in parking lots.  Headlamps are pretty directional, and signal lamps are a lot more directional than you think. Being visible when you're looking directly into the source is rather a lot different than looking through a thick layer of glass with a frosted surface like these tiles will quickly acquire.)  It is nice that you've gotten to devices without external shades, but the lamps are still not actually exposed to the sunlight themselves.  Headlights are recessed, and so are the light sources in signal lamps.

Since you don't seem to know the difference between an LCD and an LED, an LED produces light while an LCD only dims it.  Many devices now incorporate LEDs as a light source to illuminate an LCD panel from behind.  These are generally lighter, thinner, more durable, and have lower power consumption than the CCFL technology that was previously about the only thing that was workable for backlighting an LCD panel.  They don't count because they still produce a visible image without the backlight working, it's just dim, and they can be designed to work equally well with the light from the front or the back.  There are no TVs that produce their images with LEDs, they are exclusively used for producing light to be modulated by an LCD layer in front.  Even if it would work (which it wouldn't, LCDs are quite pressure sensitive, which isn't something you want in a road) incorporating LCDs into the tiles would start by cutting the light transmittance in half (since LCDs use polarization effects to work and only work properly if they incorporate a polarizing layer).

Quote from: evensgrey on June 01, 2014, 04:58:26 PM
Makes and models, or they don't exist.  (I need this to show you why they aren't what you're pretending.  I expect I won't get any.)

ANY search will show these. Here's one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/RPS-Studio-LED-Studio-Light-100watt-5200K-10-000-Lumen-/251502835084?_trksid=p2054897.l4275

100W gives you 10,000 lumens. And yes, this is a single LED, not an array. And keep in mind: this is NOT just about seeing the LED (which is all you'd need to do with these road tiles); this is about filling in shadows in broad daylight! 10,000 lumens is almost BLINDING to look at!

QuoteHow LARGE are those studio lights of yours, and how much power do they consume?  How many square meters of these tiles does that correspond to?  How much after the surface is scratched into being opaque and the sunlight angle of maybe 30 degrees is accounted for?

IRRELEVANT. YOU claimed they DON'T EXIST. They DO.

QuoteFull ID information on the car lamps you claim exist, or they don't.

Wow. Just wow. Are you REALLY that far behind? They've had them for over A DECADE!

You're like a creationist claiming there are no transitional fossils!

Anyway, I only needed to show ONE to debunk your assertion, and I just did that.

QuoteSince you don't seem to know the difference between an LCD and an LED,

Wow. Just wow. Forget who you're talking to?

Quotean LED produces light while an LCD only dims it.

Right, which means if you have an LED field monitor backlit by LED that's visible in daylight, the LEDs have to be EVEN FUCKING BRIGHTER than necessary to just see the light from it! Didn't think through that, did you?

QuoteThey don't count because they still produce a visible image without the backlight working, it's just dim,

Wow, NOW who knows nothing about how LCDs work?

Backlit LCDs, as you said, reduce light. So in order to show something red, they actually have to produce blue and green pigments to block out all (most) of the non-red light! You wouldn't just see it dim; you'd see a VERY dim photo negative! If anything, this means that whatever reflected light you get from them will CANCEL OUT part of the color the LED is shining through!

QuoteThere are no TVs that produce their images with LEDs,

I never said there were. You're just LYING now because you're desperate. Really, I expected a LOT better from you! You've seen yourself how people behave when someone hits their dogma--look at yourself and see that same behavior right now!

Remember the rule of thumb: look at your argumentation and ask if you'd accept that from a creationist. You KNOW you wouldn't!

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 02, 2014, 06:22:15 AM
ANY search will show these. Here's one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/RPS-Studio-LED-Studio-Light-100watt-5200K-10-000-Lumen-/251502835084?_trksid=p2054897.l4275

100W gives you 10,000 lumens. And yes, this is a single LED, not an array. And keep in mind: this is NOT just about seeing the LED (which is all you'd need to do with these road tiles); this is about filling in shadows in broad daylight! 10,000 lumens is almost BLINDING to look at!

IRRELEVANT. YOU claimed they DON'T EXIST. They DO.

Wow. Just wow. Are you REALLY that far behind? They've had them for over A DECADE!

You're like a creationist claiming there are no transitional fossils!

Anyway, I only needed to show ONE to debunk your assertion, and I just did that.

Wow. Just wow. Forget who you're talking to?

Right, which means if you have an LED field monitor backlit by LED that's visible in daylight, the LEDs have to be EVEN FUCKING BRIGHTER than necessary to just see the light from it! Didn't think through that, did you?

Wow, NOW who knows nothing about how LCDs work?

Backlit LCDs, as you said, reduce light. So in order to show something red, they actually have to produce blue and green pigments to block out all (most) of the non-red light! You wouldn't just see it dim; you'd see a VERY dim photo negative! If anything, this means that whatever reflected light you get from them will CANCEL OUT part of the color the LED is shining through!

I never said there were. You're just LYING now because you're desperate. Really, I expected a LOT better from you! You've seen yourself how people behave when someone hits their dogma--look at yourself and see that same behavior right now!

Remember the rule of thumb: look at your argumentation and ask if you'd accept that from a creationist. You KNOW you wouldn't!

Indeed I wouldn't and I'm not accepting it form you.

So, each of those lights (which you have now admitted are what you were talking about, as you provided information about them instead of the LED TV displays you were actually asked about, thus leading me to the conclusion that neither they nor the LED car lamps you claimed to exist and were also asked about actually do) is equivalent to the power available per square meter of glass roadway under the worst conditions before degradation of the road itself is taken into account (taking into account the winter sun angle of 30 degrees above the horizon available in a large part of the US, the actual solar constant of 1360 watts/m^2, and the 15% efficiency quoted by the inventor).

Now, to make any sort of image at all, you need to divide that 10000 lumens into at least 7 segments, and they can't be very directional and have to be rather larger than the normal size of LEDs (the largest I've run into so far have been maybe a couple of centimeters across, and these need to be tens of centimeters, or you have to divide the light between far more LEDs to make up any characters).  How far do you think you can see them?  Keep in mind that this is effectively through a WHITE surface, not the black surface you normally find in exterior LED displays. If you want to use LCDs like all the displays you've talked about use, cut the brightness by 75%, as the polarization layer will cut the light coming in by half, and absorb at least half the outgoing light as well.  While an LCD display will operate without a polarization layer, you lose contrast and cannot produce black.  Not that this road can produce black, since it's WHITE.

And that's the available power near noon, what are you going to do at night when the thing has to draw power from outside to operate at all?  We're back to the problems and cost of adding power lines to ALL roads you convert to this.

(Incidentally, I decided to hunt up more details on this light you gave a link to.  RPS Studios, strangely, doesn't seem to retail this product themselves, from what their website shows.  The search there for "RS-5610" turns up nothing, as does "CooLED", and searching for LED doesn't turn up any light sources at all.  DuckDuckGo, on a search for RPS Studio, brings this device up as the second image hit, from Amazon.com, from a seller that also has their own web site, where they don't seem to carry this particular product either.  However, the Amazon site at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BW4C7LI/ref=s9_simh_gw_p421_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1KJB7JA87P5BRJTYNCSZ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BW4C7LI/ref=s9_simh_gw_p421_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1KJB7JA87P5BRJTYNCSZ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846) has several pictures of the device, but appears to be a different revision to the one you linked.  The third one shows it without an additional diffuser or reflector, so you can see part of what should be the actual light source, which certainly does LOOK like a tight-packed LED array. It looks very much like the third image on eBay, but the resolution is a bit higher so some detail on the yellow area is visible. Not only can I not find any data sheets indicating this isn't an array, nobody making similar products seems to think that's important in a light and doesn't indicate using an array or not.)

Here's why the LEDs cannot be directional: The glass WILL be effectively frosted.  The sediment anywhere on any continental land surface is going to contain quartz grains.  Quartz has a Mohs Hardness of about 7, while glass has a Mohs Hardness of about 5.5, meaning that when the dirt that will, inevitably, be on the road is ground into the surface by traffic it will scratch it.  In some places, the sediment will contain corundum, with a Mohs Hardness of 9.  You need to get a clear material with a Mohs Hardness of at least 8, that doesn't have cleavage, or the idea is a complete non-starter because the surface will simply wear smooth in short order.  (Asphalt doesn't have this problem because it's a composite material.  Wear away a bit, and the bit underneath is just as rough.  Glass will smooth out.)

Tf00t isn't the first to call bullshit on this, either.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/01/19/smart.roads/index.html (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/01/19/smart.roads/index.html)

This article actually digs up some numbers on what the inventor's claim the cost would be, and those numbers look like bullshit just on the basis of the cost of the GLASS.

It also asks a set of questions everyone here has previously missed:  How does this surface perform when there's a crash on it?  Annealed glass is going to react rather badly to being crashed into, as always happens in a crash.  Two cars hit each other, but at least one also must impact the road as well.  Asphalt copes with this quite well, but glass won't.  Then there's the matter of what happens when there's a crash with a vehicle fire?  What happens when there's a tanker truck fire?  (Yes, it happens, and the results can be quite severe.  I know a place where an entire tanker load of gasoline went up, and the fire destroyed the concrete overpass it occurred under.)  The common type of glass, used in ordinary windows, bottles, and so forth (and implied to be what they're using, since that's what you usually get in recycled glass) has bad thermal properties, with a fairly high thermal expansion index (making it quite prone to cracking or breaking loose from its' supports when heated sharply) and goes soft at a fairly low temperature of less than 600 C. In practical terms, that means any tiles affected by contact with a gasoline fire (which can easily reach 900 C) will have to be replaced (due to losing their annealed state) as well as any that have cracked or popped loose, before that portion of the road is usable again.

Glass is just no good for this job no matter what.  It won't help trying to use it for parking lots, because you still have all the same problems, it just won't be as lethal due to the lower speeds.

The fact these are tiles is a huge problem as well.  We stopped doing roads like this when rubber tires removed the need to protect the binding material from iron tires for a simple reason:  As Tf00t pointed out, the differential loading of different parts of a tile (or a cobblestone, although their relatively small size reduces the scale of the problem, as does the way they're embedded in the road surface) as wheels roll over them will try to work the tiles loose.  It looks like they're trying to BOLT the tiles down, which any engineer will tell you is a bad idea.  To keep high-stress bonds together, you need to use an adhesive, otherwise you just create focal points for the stress to all work at and break apart the connection.  (Things like brake pads, for instance, are glued together with special adhesives for precisely this reason.)  Asphalt itself functions as an adhesive, the tarry component binding together the aggregate and sticking quite effectively to the substrate, and one that can even self-heal a bit in very hot weather.  But now you've got the tiles all glued down to the roadbed, so how do you get them UP again quickly when you need to replace them?  (And you HAVE to replace them, there's absolutely no way to repair a damaged glass block in place.)

Now, this idea you have that if we do this in spite of the fact it's a dangerously bad idea, the materials to solve the failures will be invented.

You're contemplating a glass-like material, of cost comparable to window glass, that's much harder, has a much higher melting temperature, is far more impact resistant, and has a lower coefficient of thermal expansion.  You don't need a glass road to spur development of such a material, all the conventional glass it would displace (and there's a LOT of it) would be sufficient motivation for the invention of such a material.  And it doesn't exist.  It definitely won't be any sort of glass as we understand the term, because a glass with a higher melting temperature is pretty much physically constrained to cost more to make because you have to get it hotter to make it (and then you run into not just the problems of a hotter heat source, but also containing it, which means a more expensive furnace, and it being hotter makes it harder to contain the melt safely when you take it out of the furnace to form it, and you may need to use more expensive materials for everything that can take the higher temperature, and the higher melting point makes the whole annealing process more expensive for all the same reason because the annealing point will also go up, and the complications multiply).  It doesn't look plausible to do this with anything that isn't a glass, since polycrystalline materials are normally opaque and mono-crystalline materials with cleavage are unsuitable for stress from unconstrained directions.  While there might be plastics on the market with the right properties right now, plastics are going to cost more than glass or they would have already displaced glass, and all the clear plastics I've ever seen or heard of have a lower Mohs Hardness than glass and so are even easier to scratch.

The structure of this road is going to be substantially more fragile than conventional roads because of all the embedded channels for all the wiring and other technological bits in them.  The inventors also appear to recognize that they need to seal the tile joints to keep moisture from reaching the electronics, but don't appear to have any means of doing that so far.  Getting a material able to do this isn't a trivial task.  It wouldn't be difficult if this was NOT a roadway, but you've got a LOT of mechanical requirements to fulfill to make a road paving material that doesn't do anything else.  Adding in all the complications of making it both a solar panel (also a difficult engineering challenge to get to perform really well) AND an active display (which is another, entirely separate and also quite challenging engineering problem, particularly since it needs to be visible in daylight and with a white background) and I think you've got something that is either going to cost way to much or just not do all the jobs.

Notice also that the available power numbers I gave are actually too high, since they assumed the tiles have complete solar cell coverage, which would preclude having any room for display elements.  If you end up constraining the display elements to things like the lane boundaries, you've just defeated the purpose of having an active display built in to your road surface.  (The artist's conceptions the inventors display also indicate that the road has some kind of active sensors in it, since they show it illuminating where a deer is walking on it.  This is a weird idea to include, since glass is really hard to read that kind of pressure through.  Sure, you can do it, but that's another, again different, engineering challenge. And what happens to those sensors when a semi rolls over the sensors?  The more I consider the whole presentation, the more dubious it looks.)

Quote from: evensgrey on June 04, 2014, 11:58:18 AM
Indeed I wouldn't and I'm not accepting it form you.

Wow. Just wow. I make a point about YOUR argumentation and you turn around and try to make it seem like we're talking about MINE. Pulling out every woo trick in the book, I see.

Quoteis equivalent to the power available per square meter of glass blah blah blah

I remind you: this is STUDIO LIGHTING to FILL IN DAYLIGHT SHADOWS. It is way, way, WAY beyond what it would need simply to be visible!

I also remind you: you claimed these LEDS DID NOT EXIST. NOT that they were prohibitive as far as power consumption, but that they DID NOT EXIST. And when I told you that they did, you ridiculed me.

Time to admit you were wrong.

Time to admit you're wrong about LED screens, too.

QuoteNow, to make any sort of image at all, you need to divide that 10000 lumens into at least 7 segments, and blah blah blah

No, you just use more, smaller LEDs. And again, 10,000 lumens is WAY overkill for this application.

I will NOT respond to any more points until you ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT THIS.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 04, 2014, 04:25:44 PM
Wow. Just wow. I make a point about YOUR argumentation and you turn around and try to make it seem like we're talking about MINE. Pulling out every woo trick in the book, I see.

I remind you: this is STUDIO LIGHTING to FILL IN DAYLIGHT SHADOWS. It is way, way, WAY beyond what it would need simply to be visible!

I also remind you: you claimed these LEDS DID NOT EXIST. NOT that they were prohibitive as far as power consumption, but that they DID NOT EXIST. And when I told you that they did, you ridiculed me.

Time to admit you were wrong.

Time to admit you're wrong about LED screens, too.

No, you just use more, smaller LEDs. And again, 10,000 lumens is WAY overkill for this application.

I will NOT respond to any more points until you ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT THIS.

Yes, I was rather expecting that you wouldn't respond to the fact that glass is a completely unsuitable material to make roads out of and the fact that there's no reason to believe that there's going to be a suitable material that resembles glass that could be used to make roads out of in favor of blathering on about LED TV displays that you falsely claim exist.  There are none that are as you describe.  Get over yourself.  Going full-woo doesn't help you.

An LED-driven flood light is NOT an LED TV display.  An LED flood light is also NOT going to be visible when used to shine upwards through frosted glass over any useful distance on a road.  10 000 lumens shining in all directions doesn't produce any nice bright image on the surface being emitted from.  And that's ignoring the question of how much power you could ACTUALLY get out of a solar cell array under a glass road in any real place, and how much it would take to replace that at night or when the road is covered with snow.  How much electricity do you want to waste on this idiocy?  Do you really think 10 regular household lamps would illuminate a meter-square sign to a degree visible over a worthwhile distance, even if you could get that much power out of the solar cells under a layer of frosted glass?

The reality is you've retreated to questions of LEDs only because there's no sanity to defending the idea of glass roads.

You're totally out to lunch! 10,000 lumens not bright???

I think we'll leave it to the readers to decide which of us has gone "full woo."

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 04, 2014, 05:14:55 PM
You're totally out to lunch! 10,000 lumens not bright???

I think we'll leave it to the readers to decide which of us has gone "full woo."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy#Examples
According to this (and verified in my optics lab course), even a 60 Watt bulb is about 900 Lumen.  I don't know what sunlight would be, but from that alone, I'd say 10,000 Lumen is VERY bright.  My professor also seemed to like LED because of how many Lumen/Watt you get out of them compared to other sources, even Fluorescent lighting.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 04, 2014, 05:14:55 PM
You're totally out to lunch! 10,000 lumens not bright???

I think we'll leave it to the readers to decide which of us has gone "full woo."

Yes, we'll let the readers evaluate your claim that a light is bright in comparison to a light 6 to 12 times brighter.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 04, 2014, 05:48:34 PM
Yes, we'll let the readers evaluate your claim that a light is bright in comparison to a light 6 to 12 times brighter.

What are you comparing it to? The ONLY factor that matters is, can it be seen in daylight? And the answer is, ABSOLUTELY YES!

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 04, 2014, 05:46:02 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy#Examples
According to this (and verified in my optics lab course), even a 60 Watt bulb is about 900 Lumen.  I don't know what sunlight would be, but from that alone, I'd say 10,000 Lumen is VERY bright.  My professor also seemed to like LED because of how many Lumen/Watt you get out of them compared to other sources, even Fluorescent lighting.

Dayrunner headlights are 1500 lumens.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 04, 2014, 06:17:10 PM
Dayrunner headlights are 1500 lumens.

Then a 10,000 lumen light should be easily seen in daylight.

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 04, 2014, 06:22:26 PM
Then a 10,000 lumen light should be easily seen in daylight.

Daylight is 60 000 to 120 000 lumens per square meter.  It depends on what you mean by 'seeing'.  You can see that it's ON, but you can see that a 10 watt incandescent is on, too.  San you see the sign it's illuminating behind the frosted glass with the sun shining on the front?

Quote from: evensgrey on June 04, 2014, 06:35:16 PM
Daylight is 60 000 to 120 000 lumens per square meter.

And if these LEDs are a square centimeter each, that's 6-12 lumens hitting that particular square centimeter they have to overpower.

QuoteIt depends on what you mean by 'seeing'.  You can see that it's ON, but you can see that a 10 watt incandescent is on, too.  San you see the sign it's illuminating behind the frosted glass with the sun shining on the front?

In the case of the roadway, the LED IS what you're seeing. It doesn't have to illuminate anything! There is no sign! The LED patterns MAKE the signs!

If you don't even know THAT, then you have no business criticizing this technology you clearly haven't even TRIED to understand!

Most newer traffic signals are LED, as well. The reason is it's easier to see what color the light is if the sun is direct on it.

That being said, by the time the technology is advanced enough to make the solar roadway a practical idea, Google mobiles will be ubiquitous, and since the computer that's driving the car doesn't need visible light to see, nor a sign to tell it to stop/go, maybe by then we'll all be traveling mainly in the dark - except maybe whatever we're watching on Netflix while the car takes us places.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 04, 2014, 07:13:07 PM
And if these LEDs are a square centimeter each, that's 6-12 lumens hitting that particular square centimeter they have to overpower.

In the case of the roadway, the LED IS what you're seeing. It doesn't have to illuminate anything! There is no sign! The LED patterns MAKE the signs!

If you don't even know THAT, then you have no business criticizing this technology you clearly haven't even TRIED to understand!

Ypou already stated that you weren't going to bother trying to defend the glass roadway any more unless I admitted your magic LED TVs that you don't have.

In any case, you're just babbling again, since I already demonstrated (in a post you've already declared you won't bother dealing with unless I admit your magic) that the glass road cannot have signs that aren't behind frosted glass.  I'd suggest you try following the physical reality of what a glass road would be, but you already declared your refusal to follow.

Quote from: dallen68 on June 04, 2014, 08:57:42 PM
That being said, by the time the technology is advanced enough to make the solar roadway a practical idea, Google mobiles will be ubiquitous, and since the computer that's driving the car doesn't need visible light to see, nor a sign to tell it to stop/go, maybe by then we'll all be traveling mainly in the dark - except maybe whatever we're watching on Netflix while the car takes us places.

True, and I fully expect at one point that the self-driving cars will be able to talk to other cars in range and notify them of certain things.

But then, they could interface with a smart roadway as well.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 04, 2014, 10:57:08 PM
Ypou already stated that you weren't going to bother trying to defend the glass roadway any more unless I admitted your magic LED TVs that you don't have.

Wow. Just wow. Another creationist tactic!

I wasn't "defending the glass roadway" (I was NEVER doing that, actually, so thanks for the False Dichotomy as well); I was pointing out YET AGAIN how WRONG you were about how the LEDS would have to work!

And you STILL can't admit it!

QuoteIn any case, you're just babbling again,

No, I showed you were wrong with BASIC MATH. You gave the lumens PER SQUARE METER in an attempt to show that sunlight is too bright for LEDs to overpower. I pointed out that LEDs were much smaller: if they're a square centimeter (they're probably smaller than that), then that's 1/10,000th of the lumens per square meter that they'd need to overcome.

Quotethat the glass road cannot have signs that aren't behind frosted glass.

THERE ARE NO FUCKING SIGNS!!! CAN'T YOU FUCKING READ??? I've pointed out TWICE now that it's the LEDs THEMSELVES that light up in a pattern to make the sign--they don't illuminate ANYTHING!!! They just need to be bright enough to be visible themselves!

Geez...

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 05, 2014, 06:10:45 AM
True, and I fully expect at one point that the self-driving cars will be able to talk to other cars in range and notify them of certain things.

But then, they could interface with a smart roadway as well.

Well, yeah, they'd pretty much have to. It's just that having a signal is going to be more important than having light, so the road would be designed with that in mind.

Quote from: dallen68 on June 05, 2014, 01:54:02 PM
Well, yeah, they'd pretty much have to.

Well, no, they're doing it visually right now. Although there are still some city streets that don't have striping; I have no idea how they handle those...

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 05, 2014, 02:29:54 PM
Well, no, they're doing it visually right now. Although there are still some city streets that don't have striping; I have no idea how they handle those...

Well, it's in an early testing stage right now, as well. My understanding is there's a couple hundred testers in three cities, so it's a limited thing at the moment. I'm under the impression that the occupant has to take control of the vehicle if the navigation system isn't receiving information.

By the time they become widely available, I would suspect that would be a very rare event.

Also, I can imagine that the road could have displays/information for pedestrians and people who still drive manual vehicles.

As far as info that would be of interest to the occupants, I don't see any reason it wouldn't just be displayed on the internal HUD - and also now reason it wouldn't be built into the windshield/windows.

Also, I guess a laser guidance system would be as good as anything else for the purpose, but I would suspect it would have more than one means of connection. There's already some people that are hoping for the day when it's illegal to manually drive a car, but I don't think that's a good idea, because systems break, get hacked, etc, etc, so you would want to have the ability to over-ride the computer if necessary.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 05, 2014, 06:14:16 AM
Wow. Just wow. Another creationist tactic!

I wasn't "defending the glass roadway" (I was NEVER doing that, actually, so thanks for the False Dichotomy as well); I was pointing out YET AGAIN how WRONG you were about how the LEDS would have to work!

And you STILL can't admit it!

No, I showed you were wrong with BASIC MATH. You gave the lumens PER SQUARE METER in an attempt to show that sunlight is too bright for LEDs to overpower. I pointed out that LEDs were much smaller: if they're a square centimeter (they're probably smaller than that), then that's 1/10,000th of the lumens per square meter that they'd need to overcome.

THERE ARE NO FUCKING SIGNS!!! CAN'T YOU FUCKING READ??? I've pointed out TWICE now that it's the LEDs THEMSELVES that light up in a pattern to make the sign--they don't illuminate ANYTHING!!! They just need to be bright enough to be visible themselves!

Geez...

Indeed, your random jabbering doesn't help your cause at all, and neither does your refusal to abandon your claim of having LED TVs and similar displays, devices that do not actually EXIST, and your demand that I accept that you have them.  (Incidentally, LCD TVs have this interesting device in them called a diffusion plate that will quite readily diffuse the sunlight coming in from the font and send it back out.  I expect the fact that the light is already colored by coming in through the LCD plane will result in the image degrading somewhat, but the effect shouldn't be too bad.)

Do try to be more coherent:  You ended by first declaring that there would be no signs, and then explaining how the signs you just declared wouldn't exist would be generated.

The problem (which you have refused to not completely ignore until UI admit you possess non-existent devices) is that these signs (that you have both described the generation of and declared to not be generated at all) will be behind frosted glass.  This means you have all kinds of severe problems with illuminating them brightly enough to be seen in daylight with far less intensity per square centimeter than the floodlight you keep using as your only brightness reference.

Unless you are willing to admit that the glass road cannot generate enough power to operate the lighting system it is assumed to be using, you have to limit the power use to something like 600 to 800 watt-hours per square meter per day, because that's what it could generate on near-Solstice days in a large portion of the US, if the LEDs occupy a negligible part of the available surface and solar cells occupy effectively all of it (which you cannot do due to the problems that would create in trying to fix down the glass tile paving).  That's before attempting to account for losses due to the battery system used, the effect of the snow and ice cover on the road surface, and the portion of available sunlight lost due to the frosted surface itself simply redirecting the light away again. (We cannot ignore the fact that some areas will still have significant shading from vegetation in winter, and from the road being in cuttings that shade it when the sun is low in the sky, but those are more localized problems that degrade the overall utility from what the above does, and the above problems already make it pretty worthless.)

The further I look at this technology, the more clear it becomes that it makes absolutely no sense to try and build a road out of glass tiles covering a layer of solar cells, both because glass tiles make absolutely no sense as a paving material in any case and putting solar cells in such a location would so compromise their ability to collect energy that it wouldn't let you do anything useful to power displays embedded in the road.

Get something OTHER than glass tiles to use for the paving, and you might have a system that would work.  Glass creates far to many problems for this to be workable on any level, particularly as glass absolutely fails as a paving material.  You can't have a successful solar road if it fundamentally fails to work as a road.

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 20, 2014, 01:03:38 PM
[yt]LvYv62X-DD0[/yt]

You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 10:24:14 AM
You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

Well, if Shane and your exchange about it was any indicator it would be a waste of my time.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 10:24:14 AM
You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

I watched all of them.

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 21, 2014, 11:10:42 AM
Well, if Shane and your exchange about it was any indicator it would be a waste of my time.

Yes, if you're really into this government-funded boondoggle, they would be.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 12:10:13 PM
Yes, if you're really into this government-funded boondoggle, they would be.

Never said I was, in fact, my very first post on the subject:

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 01, 2014, 02:19:49 PM
If it can be made viable, awesome.  I still prefer nuclear power myself, but hey, take what you can get.

Also, this is the first time *anybody* has said this is a government boondoggle.  Even if that's true, it doesn't mean the technology itself = wrong/bad/a waste of resources or whatever, anymore than government funding of ENIAC and APRANET means computers and the internet respectively are a bad idea.

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 21, 2014, 12:47:32 PMAlso, this is the first time *anybody* has said this is a government boondoggle.

It's amazing how they pulled that out at the 11th hour, isn't it? And gee, someone tries to develop a new kind of road, and it's a government boondoggle because we live in a society where 99% of the roads are government-funded.

(Notice how none of them have followed up with, "And that's why government shouldn't fund roads"! As always, it's what's NOT being said that's the most telling...)

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 21, 2014, 01:18:52 PM
It's amazing how they pulled that out at the 11th hour, isn't it? And gee, someone tries to develop a new kind of road, and it's a government boondoggle because we live in a society where 99% of the roads are government-funded.

(Notice how none of them have followed up with, "And that's why government shouldn't fund roads"! As always, it's what's NOT being said that's the most telling...)

You mean like how you have absolutely no response to ANY of the numerous fatal problems already pointed out with paving roads with window glass?

Incidentally, what kind of bearing strength do solar cells have?  This matters, since they plan to go to 100% solar cell coverage, meaning that the cells will not only have to be permanently bonded to the glass, they will have to take the load of the road.  So will the circuit boards, whatever they make them out of.

I'm also wondering why they plan to light up the road a half mile ahead of cars when the maximum viewing distance for the LEDs is less than a hundred yards.  (Work out the angles for a 12 mm thick plate based on a reasonable viewing distance above the road surface, not forgetting that the still-unaddressed question of how the tiles will be gasketed to prevent water and road debris from entering the electronics layer and shorting out the road.)

The absurdity of the developers doesn't seem to have limits.  They've written semi-coherent descriptions of air dropping glass road tiles into Afghanistan (which then both release and retract their parachutes before deploying such devices as cameras, microphones, and satellite communication dishes).  They talk of distribution by trains powered by the road tiles they carry (never mind that they plan on only producing low-voltage DC power and locomotives need high voltage).  They completely ignore the MASSIVE increase in generating capacity required to feed the huge amounts of power the glass roads will consume, since they don't plan to have any storage systems incorporated in the glass roads and the roads can't, even with their outright wrong calculations, produce anything like as much power as they would consume.  They ignore the huge cost of building low-voltage DC power distribution systems (this is not something engineering can overcome, this is pure physics, relating to what is physically required to carry the large currents needed to transfer large quantities of power with low voltages) that are rather longer than existing power grids, as they would have to be built beside all glass roads.  They ignore the fact that tempered glass will shatter if it gets sufficiently badly SCRATCHED, and they outright lie about the scratch resistance of glass compared to asphalt concrete (the technically correct term for the composite used in road paving).  They've outright lied about having already passed impact and load tests, since they've produced precisely 0 units of their proposed production design (with the radical increase in solar cell coverage from about 35% to 100%, with what that means for the structure of the tiles) which could have been used in testing.

Don't forget that the only price they've dared to produce is $10000 per prototype tile.  That's going to need a 99% cost reduction before ANYONE will be willing to even consider this for paving anything.  (Sidewalks, for comparison, typically have a total cost of only a few dollars per square foot.  Replacing the standard concrete with a paving material that costs more than a hundred times as much as a standard sidewalk is not going to go anywhere.  It isn't much better for driveways and parking lots, which generally run no more than a few tens of dollars per square foot.  Their quoted cost of $4.4 million per road mile appears to just be for the glass paving, and ignores the fact that complete road construction can cost anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in the lower 48 depending on local conditions, and the pavement costs pretty close to the same for all of them, the difference being how much it costs to build a stable road bed.  This means we're talking somewhere between 4 and 10 times the price of asphalt, despite the fact that it won't last nearly as long and cannot be recycled like asphalt is.  Repair of a glass road means replacing not only the shattered tile, but replacing any adjacent tiles significantly different in elevation from the replaced tile as well.

And all this after you ignore the fact that the only reason they started this project was because there was a government grant they wanted to get.  They actually SAY THAT WAS WHY THEY DID IT.  Had you bothered watching Tf00t's first video, you would have already known about this.

I wasn't the one who claimed there were no LEDs visible in direct sunlight, and then, when told otherwise, denied it tooth and nail, even when one was showed to him, and then, finally when he could deny it no longer, immediately moved the goal posts.

Nope, wasn't me...

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 21, 2014, 03:07:13 PM
I wasn't the one who claimed there were no LEDs visible in direct sunlight, and then, when told otherwise, denied it tooth and nail, even when one was showed to him, and then, finally when he could deny it no longer, immediately moved the goal posts.

Nope, wasn't me...

Yes, you were the one pretending that a FLOOD LIGHT was a valid brightness brightness reference for a VIDEO SCREEN that doesn't even exist.

You also pretended that LED traffic lights are visible in sunlight, and screeched about how they aren't shaded.  Now, here's an interesting image to look at about that.

(http://solarroadways.com/images/freakinwrong/LED%20traffic%20light.jpg)

That's the very image that the developers use to support that very same claim.  Notice the SHADOWS FROM THE SUNSHADES.  Also notice how the image was selected for the apparent purpose of trying to disguise the existence of the sunshades they are lying about.  I've never seen an LED traffic signal without them.  The LED billboards, incidentally, not only have a fairly narrow viewing angle, they also happen to be BLACK, creating the exact same effect as shading them would:  Dark background for the LEDs to show up against.  (If you want to pretend otherwise, find an LED billboard that isn't black first.  They don't exist because it would be stupid.)  Your glass roads are going to be WHITE because of all the scratches on the surface caused by all the dirt being rubbed into the panels by the traffic.

Incidentally, your comment about how the scratches wouldn't decrease light transmittance was pure ignorance.  What color is a back-lit piece of frosted glass?  White.  What color is a front-lit piece of frosted glass?  White.  The frosting, like the scratches, scatters the light in all directions.  At a distance of 12 mm or a little more on a 500 mm wide tile, little light will be absorbed by the currently unknown gasket that will be needed to prevent road debris and water from entering the electronics layer, but about half the incident light will simply be scattered upwards.  The glare question from this is interesting.  There will be little specular reflection as the surface is pretty matte, but it will still be unpleasant driving into the sun at a low sun angle, considerably worse than on a dark grey weathered asphalt surface (probably like a wet asphalt surface, which gets painful fast if the sun is low and on the road direction).

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 03:49:04 PM
Yes, you were the one pretending that a FLOOD LIGHT was a valid brightness brightness reference for a VIDEO SCREEN that doesn't even exist.

Now you're just LYING. The video screen EXISTS. I've used them before. I showed you one. The studio light didn't have the FIRST FUCKING THING to do with the screen! It's for lighting subjects. A single LED, FAR brighter than you said was available.

And you also didn't have the first fucking clue how LED-backlit screens work, you were actually ridiculous enough to say that sunlight HELPS you see them, I had to school you on that, and now, JUST LIKE A FUCKING CREATIONIST, you're pretending that I'M the one who didn't know and that YOU schooled ME. BULLSHIT.

I refuse to discuss this any more with you if you're going to continue to be dishonest.

If you look at the panels for the proposed roads, they are textured, they also appear to be green. Also, there's no reason the technology wouldn't continue to evolve, esp. with public investment (not talking about the gov't kind ). For all we know, by the time this comes about for a real world test (other wise known as beta testing) the panels will be made out of a semi-transparent silicate composite.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 21, 2014, 05:21:31 PM
Now you're just LYING. The video screen EXISTS. I've used them before. I showed you one. The studio light didn't have the FIRST FUCKING THING to do with the screen! It's for lighting subjects. A single LED, FAR brighter than you said was available.

And you also didn't have the first fucking clue how LED-backlit screens work, you were actually ridiculous enough to say that sunlight HELPS you see them, I had to school you on that, and now, JUST LIKE A FUCKING CREATIONIST, you're pretending that I'M the one who didn't know and that YOU schooled ME. BULLSHIT.

I refuse to discuss this any more with you if you're going to continue to be dishonest.

You've showed a FLOODLIGHT ONLY (which more detailed images than you showed appears to have a cluster of LEDs, as I previously pointed out to you), and your claims indicate that you didn't know the difference between what an LED display and an LCD with LED backlighting.  The most obvious difference between them is an LED display isn't made, since they could serve no purpose on anything small enough to carry around.  LCD displays can be designed to work almost as well in direct sunlight as they do under normal conditions of use, and without the massive increase in power draw that an actual LED display would have when switched to a sunlight mode (which is the absolute last thing anyone would want in portable, and hence normally battery powered, equipment).

You showed a FLOODLIGHT when you were asked about the LED-generated DISPLAYS you were claiming to have.  You were told that you had to produce makes and models or they didn't exist, and you didn't, demonstrating that you don't have them and know they don't exist.  You even demonstrated not knowing the difference between an LED display and and LCD display with LED backlighting when pretending that my pointing out they are entirely different things was moving the goalposts.

You weaseled on about the unimportant side topic of the brighter LEDs that the ELECTRICAL ENGINEER who invented the glass road never thought to use until AFTER he discovered the relatively low level of light emitted by normal LEDs (and since something he SHOULD know about entirely escaped his attention, the question of just how many of the things an electrical engineer wouldn't be expected to know about roads, which have several engineering specialties behind them, have been ignored and are fatal problems that haven't been thought up yet) to avoid trying to defend your claim that WINDOW GLASS is a perfectly good paving material.

Tf00t demonstrated that window glass is not a good paving material.  He demonstrated that using toughened window glass doesn't actually help, and creates ideal conditions to have entire tiles catastrophically fail from minor impacts of critical (and common) materials like broken porcelain.  (Imagine what's going to happen when a chunk of porcelain gets picked up by a vehicle tire and hammered into a few hundred tiles.  In any medium-sized city, you can expect multiple incidents per day.  It doesn't need to be porcelain, either.  I've seen toughened glass shattered from a hammer blow, and in windshields it shatters under the impact of a human under medium speed crash conditions.  Toughened glass is great UNLESS there's something that can damage it, like, say, any part of a crashing car that strikes the road surface.  Or some larger hailstones.  Those things can hit with greater force than a human's head in a medium speed car crash, and recorded sizes in extreme weather events are up to baseball size.)

You've never even pretended to deal with the colossal cost of not only the extremely expensive paving material they want to use, but the massive conventional generating capacity needed to provide the huge quantity of electricity the glass roads would use (as Tf00t demonstrated, several times the current usage of the US would be consumed for the road heating if all the heat just went into melting the snow and ice, never mind heating it from the actual ambient temperature, and losses to the atmosphere directly).  You couldn't even use nuclear plants to generate the power because it would vary too fast for the slow power response of nuclear plants.  It would have to be done with coal fired plants (there simply isn't enough oil or gas production available to produce the quantity of power needed, and hydroelectric is already on most of the good places to put it as well as a lot of questionable ones and the few that are left are being fiercely opposed due to the huge environmental impact they have).  Far from being environmentally beneficial, glass roads would cause a vast increase in pollution.  (And the pollution from making them hasn't even been considered, nor the cost of the waste they produce.  What are we going to do with the heaps of glass fragments we're going to get from all the shattering tiles?  What about all the pollution from making the electronics and the scrapping of the electronics when the tiles shatter?)

They made the trivially false claim of having passed all testing while not actually having made any of the proposed production version at all.  Perhaps they tested just the glass tiles, without the electronics package underneath it.  The apparently bolted down tiles would never pass any kind of realistic surface stability test for the reason Tf00t showed diagrammatically in his first video (which you now claim to have watched, while before commenting that you couldn't be bothered to watch all the way through), the fact that differential forces as the load of vehicle tires moves across the tiles would act to loosen them (which is a reason to not use any sort of tiles as a road surface, it takes big slabs to avoid this effect) but also because any kind of fastener merely creates small areas that have to take the entire load stress applied, which makes the effective strength of the system the strength of just the loaded area.  This is why WELDING or GLUING (with appropriate adhesives) is stronger than BOLTS or NAILS: Spreading the load over a larger area makes the connection stronger.

Checking their web site for future redesign of their glass road shows they plan to make the solar cells load bearing by placing them over the whole area of the tile.  This means the effective strength of the tile is now the strength of the solar cells, at the most.  If the cells break mechanically, the tile breaks mechanically.  If the circuit board breaks mechanically, the tile breaks mechanically.  (Notice how we're not even dealing with the paving surface here, but the internal structure of the pavement tiles.  These need to be at least as strong in compression and tension as the glass plates, and bonded with an optically clear adhesive of similar strength, or the tiles will separate at the weaker layer.  Yes, there are conductive glasses, but solar cells aren't glass, they're all semiconductor materials that have quite different mechanical properties from glass.  The glass, the solar cells, the conductor traces, the optically clear adhesive that's as strong as tempered glass, and the circuit board, whatever that would be made out of that's as strong as tempered glass, would all also have to have sufficiently close coefficients of expansion that the hundred-degree-plus Fahrenheit temperature variations the tiles will regularly be exposed to won't make them shear apart.  (That's harder than it sounds.  If the joints crack at all, the changing stress on the tiles will tend to spread the cracking until the whole tile splits apart.  See, there's a REASON for not using materials with radically dissimilar properties in some applications.)

This is just some of the faults with the idea of glass roadways that amateurs can point out (and you will, no doubt, completely ignore, just as you have all the other times it's been pointed out why this is a really stupid idea).  Can you IMAGINE how many hundreds of catastrophic engineering faults glass roads will be found to have if engineers who actually know about roads and the require materials properties of their components get tasked with examining this nonsense?  (I expect you will only read a single sentence, just as you did the last time, and hope nobody notices all the stuff you ignored.)

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 07:12:38 PM
You've showed a FLOODLIGHT ONLY (which more detailed images than you showed appears to have a cluster of LEDs,

No, LIAR, a SINGLE LED, as the picture made clear. This was pointed out to you at the time. You STILL can't stop yourself from lying, can you?

Quoteand your claims indicate that you didn't know the difference between what an LED display and an LCD with LED backlighting.

BULLSHIT. NOT AT ALL. You only came up with that bullshit after I showed you how incredibly ignorant you are.

An LED-backlit LCD screen that is visible in daylight MUST get its brightness from the LEDs. And AGAIN, the ONLY thing the LCDs are going to do is DIM THE LED LIGHT!

QuoteYou showed a FLOODLIGHT when you were asked about the LED-generated DISPLAYS you were claiming to have.

No, LIAR, I showed an LED studio light because YOU SAID THERE WERE NO LEDs BRIGHT ENOUGH TO BE SEEN IN DAYLIGHT.

EVERYTHING you have said here is a LIE. We're done.

Here's just one example of what you claim doesn't exist: http://www.smallhd.com/products/dp7-pro/dp7-pro-hb.html

And again, the studio light: http://www.prostudiousa.com/10000-Lumen-LED-Studio-Light-P5407.aspx

As the product description says, that's a single 100-watt LED. And even if they weren't, even if it were an array, it STILL wouldn't help you because the SFWs use arrays and in order for an array to be bright enough the individual LEDs would have to be bright enough, too.

If you're STILL going to lie about the existence of these things and how they show you to be wrong, then you have nothing more to contribute to this conversation.

Quote from: dallen68 on June 21, 2014, 06:11:21 PM
If you look at the panels for the proposed roads, they are textured, they also appear to be green. Also, there's no reason the technology wouldn't continue to evolve, esp. with public investment (not talking about the gov't kind ). For all we know, by the time this comes about for a real world test (other wise known as beta testing) the panels will be made out of a semi-transparent silicate composite.

I think you're seeing the color of the solder mask on the circuit boards underneath the glass tiles.  The most commonly used color of that is green.  There are a few pictures of the glass tiles without electronics under them on the site, and they appear colorless.

Do you really think they can get a semi-transparent silicate composite material into production in time for their planned beta testing NEXT SPRING?

(Sandpoint, Idaho is wanting to put these in a number of places, including the AMTRAK station, and they claim they'll be able to start manufacturing by the end of this year.)

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solar-roadways-plans-to-create-smart-roads-to-produce-clean-energy-and-save-lives-and-money/ (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solar-roadways-plans-to-create-smart-roads-to-produce-clean-energy-and-save-lives-and-money/)

If they don't collapse suspiciously before then, and the city of Sandpoint doesn't gain some sanity, and I'm able to swing a few improvements in my life, I might be taking a train through Sandpoint next summer, in time to see the mess these will be.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 07:51:16 PM
I think you're seeing the color of the solder mask on the circuit boards underneath the glass tiles.  The most commonly used color of that is green.  There are a few pictures of the glass tiles without electronics under them on the site, and they appear colorless.

Do you really think they can get a semi-transparent silicate composite material into production in time for their planned beta testing NEXT SPRING?

(Sandpoint, Idaho is wanting to put these in a number of places, including the AMTRAK station, and they claim they'll be able to start manufacturing by the end of this year.)

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solar-roadways-plans-to-create-smart-roads-to-produce-clean-energy-and-save-lives-and-money/ (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solar-roadways-plans-to-create-smart-roads-to-produce-clean-energy-and-save-lives-and-money/)

If they don't collapse suspiciously before then, and the city of Sandpoint doesn't gain some sanity, and I'm able to swing a few improvements in my life, I might be taking a train through Sandpoint next summer, in time to see the mess these will be.

My understanding is the Sandpoint project(s) are for things like parking lots, playgrounds, and sidewalks, which is a bit different than a road.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 21, 2014, 07:42:23 PM
No, LIAR, a SINGLE LED, as the picture made clear. This was pointed out to you at the time. You STILL can't stop yourself from lying, can you?

BULLSHIT. NOT AT ALL. You only came up with that bullshit after I showed you how incredibly ignorant you are.

An LED-backlit LCD screen that is visible in daylight MUST get its brightness from the LEDs. And AGAIN, the ONLY thing the LCDs are going to do is DIM THE LED LIGHT!

No, LIAR, I showed an LED studio light because YOU SAID THERE WERE NO LEDs BRIGHT ENOUGH TO BE SEEN IN DAYLIGHT.

EVERYTHING you have said here is a LIE. We're done.

Aparently not...

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 21, 2014, 07:46:54 PM
Here's just one example of what you claim doesn't exist: http://www.smallhd.com/products/dp7-pro/dp7-pro-hb.html

And again, the studio light: http://www.prostudiousa.com/10000-Lumen-LED-Studio-Light-P5407.aspx

As the product description says, that's a single 100-watt LED. And even if they weren't, even if it were an array, it STILL wouldn't help you because the SFWs use arrays and in order for an array to be bright enough the individual LEDs would have to be bright enough, too.

If you're STILL going to lie about the existence of these things and how they show you to be wrong, then you have nothing more to contribute to this conversation.

I'm not the one lying about that display, Shane.  YOU are.  YOU claimed it was an LED display, when everyone can clearly see it is an LCD display.  Not that you bothered to mention it before, despite it being what you were asked about, and then being reminded that it was what you were being asked about.

You are using classic Creationist tactics:  Fixate on some minor side issue (in this case, the inexplicable incompetence of an electrical engineer to correctly design an electrical device and use the correct parts so it would at least not obviously not do what he claims) and hope to distract from the major issues (that WINDOW GLASS IS NOT A SUITABLE MATERIAL FOR PAVING ROADS and that THESE GLASS ROADS CONSUME FAR MORE ELECTRICITY THAN THEY PRODUCE).

Now, to eliminate this canard of yours, I will admit that there exist LED FLOOD LIGHTS that can be seen to be lit while under daylight.  You have already admitted to not owning any LED displays that are visible in daylight.  (No, an LCD with an LED light source cannot count.  It obviously isn't an LED-created image, it's an LCD-created image.  The light source isn't even RELEVANT, and an intelligent engineer could design it to use the sunlight itself as the light source, eliminating the need for high-consumption lighting.  How would you REMOVE the sunlight anyway?  There's no black layer inside an LCD system, it wouldn't work correctly if there was because the backlight wouldn't have anything to diffuse it.  If you cleverly use two layers of polarizing material to cut out all the light except what gets twisted by clever LCDs that can change the polarization plane of different colors separately, you would have a nearly perfectly black screen under all conditions and not need a very, very bright backlight to begin with.  Sort of like how outdoor LED billboards actually work.  And how those LED traffic signals you don't seem to have ever examined in any detail work, too, especially with the sun shades you demanded they don't have.)

The fact that the LEDs in question CANNOT BE POWERED BY THE GLASS ROAD TO GENERATE PAVEMENT MARKINGS BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ENOUGH POWER AVAILABLE is rather a serious problem for you.  The fact that they plan to heat the glass road surface, thus consuming far more power than the glass roads could generate even if it was being stored, is a complete demolition of their claims that this will somehow reduce CO2 emissions.

Are you going to continue to ignore ALL the ways this has ALREADY been shown to not work?

The fact that all their claimed benefits are either completely wrong or cost more than the problems they are claimed to correct cost demonstrates that this isn't going to work.

The only real question about this is how much of the project driver is stupidity and how much is malicious.

Quote from: dallen68 on June 21, 2014, 08:07:48 PM
My understanding is the Sandpoint project(s) are for things like parking lots, playgrounds, and sidewalks, which is a bit different than a road.

And the airport, although they don't indicate which bits of the airport they want to repave with glass.

It doesn't really matter, though.  Someone with the wrong kind of debris lodged in their shoes will shatter tiles.  There's no way their glass paving tiles will last 20 years. 

Even if they could get the cost down to a thousand dollars a square meter, it would never make sense to pave sidewalks, driveways, and most parking lots with it.  I was able to find cost estimators for parking lot and sidewalk paving, and their tiles are way to costly for those applications.  We're literally talking a driveway that would cost more than the house.  (Not a sidewalk more costly than a house, fortunately, but sometime next month they're going to have to finally release their genuine pricing estimates and this will finally end when it becomes clear that it cannot pay for itself, even if it didn't use more electricity than it produces.)

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 09:03:43 PM
And the airport, although they don't indicate which bits of the airport they want to repave with glass.

It doesn't really matter, though.  Someone with the wrong kind of debris lodged in their shoes will shatter tiles.  There's no way their glass paving tiles will last 20 years. 

Even if they could get the cost down to a thousand dollars a square meter, it would never make sense to pave sidewalks, driveways, and most parking lots with it.  I was able to find cost estimators for parking lot and sidewalk paving, and their tiles are way to costly for those applications.  We're literally talking a driveway that would cost more than the house.  (Not a sidewalk more costly than a house, fortunately, but sometime next month they're going to have to finally release their genuine pricing estimates and this will finally end when it becomes clear that it cannot pay for itself, even if it didn't use more electricity than it produces.)

Well, I was thinking about it and even if they did find a suitable material, and all that, it would actually see limited use in the real world. For example, a lot that you want for multi-functions/ use as needed basis. Like, it wouldn't be very practical if all that section of road ever has is uni/bi directional traffic but if sometimes you have an event, like a block party, or other entertainment, maybe. Or Maybe if you want to use the parking lot as a basketball court or something like that it would be useful. But unlike TFoot's (and assumably the developer's speculations), even in my best guesses, it would be a marginal percentage. Everything else (i.e. everywhere the road/parking lot/playground/whatever has one purpose only) would probably continue to be painted blacktop.

As far as the power thing, I would imagine that unless the sections were being used for an event, they'd be OFF most of the time.

As for the costs:

If the technology got enough traction, the price would eventually come down to something more reasonable. It might be a hundred years - or a week after the premier - but eventually. Hey, there was a time when digital calculators cost about the same as a car, so...

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 08:21:22 PM
I'm not the one lying about that display, Shane.  YOU are.  YOU claimed it was an LED display, when everyone can clearly see it is an LCD display.

No, LIAR, this was NEVER the case.

QuoteYou have already admitted to not owning any LED displays that are visible in daylight.  (No, an LCD with an LED light source cannot count.  It obviously isn't an LED-created image, it's an LCD-created image.

Why? Because you don't WANT it to? Who the FUCK cares about the image when we're talking about the BRIGHTNESS OF THE LEDs? And I've already explained how the LEDs actually need to be EVEN BRIGHTER because the LCDs attenuate the light.

You were WRONG. Admit it or STFU.

QuoteThe light source isn't even RELEVANT,

The light source is the ONLY thing that's relevant when you're talking about how bright it is!

Quoteand an intelligent engineer could design it to use the sunlight itself as the light source

No, they couldn't, and I already explained why. At best you'd see a dim photo-negative.

QuoteHow would you REMOVE the sunlight anyway?  There's no black layer inside an LCD system

Wow. Just wow. I already explained this. Your capacity for delusion here is astounding. When you see a red pixel on an LCD display, it's because the LCD has created a cyan pigment (or one blue and one green pigment) to block the blue and green light, letting only the red through. This has FUCK ALL to do with sunlight, and again, means that--despite you insisting on maintaining your delusion--that it CANNOT WORK WITH REFLECTED LIGHT!!!

QuoteThe fact that the LEDs in question CANNOT BE POWERED BY THE GLASS ROAD TO GENERATE PAVEMENT MARKINGS BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ENOUGH POWER AVAILABLE

Hasn't been shown yet. You clearly know fuck all about LEDs and how they work, and your calculations are based on bullshit like assuming that all the LEDs on the panel would be lit all the time, when it's only some of them on some panels, and most wouldn't be lit at all.

QuoteThe fact that they plan to heat the glass road surface, thus consuming far more power than the glass roads could generate even if it was being stored, is a complete demolition of their claims that this will somehow reduce CO2 emissions.

They're already heating roads carbon-free to keep them free of snow. Again, you're ignoring technology that ALREADY EXISTS!

Quote from: evensgrey on June 21, 2014, 09:03:43 PM
Someone with the wrong kind of debris lodged in their shoes will shatter tiles.

WHAT??? Someone with debris in his shoe will shatter TEMPERED GLASS??? Yeah, you've gone WAY off the deep end here...

Quote from: dallen68 on June 22, 2014, 07:06:15 AM
As for the costs:

If the technology got enough traction, the price would eventually come down to something more reasonable. It might be a hundred years - or a week after the premier - but eventually. Hey, there was a time when digital calculators cost about the same as a car, so...

The efficiencies would increase as well. In fact, the efficiencies are GOING to increase whether we have SFWs or not. Again, the naysayers are pretending like there will never be any more technology than what exists today.

Quote from: dallen68 on June 22, 2014, 07:06:15 AM
As for the costs:

If the technology got enough traction, the price would eventually come down to something more reasonable. It might be a hundred years - or a week after the premier - but eventually. Hey, there was a time when digital calculators cost about the same as a car, so...

The first relay-based electromechanical calculator priced out at much more than ten times the price of a car (in about 1938) and Bell Labs decided not to pursue the technology for precisely that reason.

These things aren't likely to get very much cheaper, since everything identifiable that's used in them already is in mass production.  The unidentifiable parts (like the still-missing gasketing material between the tiles, and the optically clear glue needed to hold the solar cells to the glass tiles and the circuit boards to the solar cells, and the circuit boards themselves since normal circuit board materials aren't nearly strong enough to take the load, and nobody seems to have any idea what will happen when you apply the loads involved to the solar cells, which are generally brittle and prone to cleavage within crystals if they are the usual silicon solar cells).

While you might get away with walking on these (although the price is far higher than concrete sidewalks), any sort of significant vehicle traffic looks to be certain to shear them at the solar cell layer, once they switch over to 100% solar cell coverage. This also makes them unusable to most sidewalks, which require places for passenger vehicles to cross them.  (They don't seem to have actually LOOKED at the geometry of any actual sidewalks when proposing making sidewalks out of them.  Sidewalks have a remarkable amount of curvature in their surfaces where the intersect driveways and for whellchair ramps.  And there's really no doing without wheelchar ramps and driveways.  Two or three inches is a huge barrier for someone in a wheelchair, and it's extremely bad for both tires, rims, and suspension for a car to be hitting those as well.)

Oddly enough, it turns out that making the solar cells load bearing DOES enable their plans for pressure sensors, since the resistance of a silicon crystal changes as you apply force to it.  If you monitored the resistance of the solar cells precisely enough, you could use them to detect changes in tile loading.  Doesn't look promising, though.  Traffic loads are not likely to be sustainable.  They put usable solar cells behind protective glass panels to keep them from being damaged by things hitting them.  They might have a tempered glass PLATE that will survive the force of a semi, but they aren't going to have solar cells that will hold together for any length of time once you start driving on the tiles.

Always keep in mind what they actually say, not what they would like you to hear.  What they actually say is that tempered glass is used in making bullet proof glass panels, not that they're using bullet proof glass in their tiles.  (Bullet proof glass wouldn't help much, since tiles would still shatter, the just wouldn't then come apart immediately.)  They also say that they have passed impact and load tests, but the also state that they have not made anything like the proposed production models of their tiles, so what can they really have had tested?  Sure, the glass component may have done implausibly well on its' own, but this isn't just a problem of the glass (although the speed it will wear out is a huge problem).  The electronics need to be just as durable as the rest, and they don't appear to have even considered that.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 22, 2014, 08:00:25 AM
WHAT??? Someone with debris in his shoe will shatter TEMPERED GLASS??? Yeah, you've gone WAY off the deep end here...

Yes, right down to reality.  Had you bothered to watch Tf00t's videos, he included a DEMONSTRATION of how little force is required for the right kind of material to shatter tempered glass.  Now, going back to the part that you ignored because it wasn't the first sentence, what happens when a vehicle tire oicks up a chunk of broken ceramic and smashes it into a few HUNDRED tiles with far more force?

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 22, 2014, 08:02:46 AM
The efficiencies would increase as well. In fact, the efficiencies are GOING to increase whether we have SFWs or not. Again, the naysayers are pretending like there will never be any more technology than what exists today.

You can get, at most, about 2.5 times the efficiency of the solar cells compared to what they claim.  You can get, currently, three times the total light out of LED than your flood light gets, which would bring it's ability to light up a single square meter to slightly less than the dimmest full sunlight is (but you'd need a moderately large array of these LEDs to do it, since they work at much less than an amp and your flood light would be probably working at something like 8 to 9 amps total to get the power over the low-voltage power system portable devices use).  Good thing numerous LEDs in an array can be easily packed into a single plastic module, isn't it?  They do tend to get quite warm when used as high-intensity light, especially when they don't convert even a third of the power into light.

The notion that the prototype heats itself to melt snow without using power drawn from the grid (and hence mostly fossil fuel sources) is stupid.  Blacktop absorbs better than 80% of the light falling on it and doesn't stay warm enough in winter to melt the snow that falls on it.  On really warm, bright days, you get some warming and some melting, but not enough to reliably clear the roads, and if they ACTUALLY eliminated all other generating sources (which they claim it will do) then there couldn't be any 'virtual storage' in the grid to draw back from, nor the huge amount of extra electricity Tf00t already demonstrated would be required just to melt the snow and ice if the system suffered no other inefficiencies.  ($5 billion worth of electricity each year, for a perfectly efficient system that JUST melted the snow and ice.  Easily twice that and more for raising the snow and ice from ambient to freezing first, and for convective losses to the air, and to reheat the road itself before it could be warm enough to melt the snow and ice since they propose to only operate the heaters when some unknown sensors report there is snow and ice.)  This specific boondogle was investigated and abandoned 60 years ago because of the huge power requirements.

Literally the ONLY reason they can pretend their DC-only system makes sense is because long-distance power transmission often does use DC, particularly if it's underground.  The fatal problem with DC systems is that there's no way to change the voltage easily, so you end up using really thick wires if you want to carry lots of power, since wire cross section scales directly with current load. Wire isn't exactly cheap, copper or aluminum.  High-current cables are a whole sub-specialty in themselves.  DC has to be used for long-run underground cables because AC has capacitive effects in insulated wires that become prohibitive after only tens of miles.  At very high power levels, AC has a number of unpleasant loss effects that DC doesn't, and the AC-DC interface systems have the added benefit of not passing the kind of spikes that can knock whole regions of the  grid out. (In 2003, Quebec stayed up because the power grid there only couples to outside grids by DC lines.)

Now, the reason it matters that the device you claimed was an LED device that produced an image visible in daylight is actually an LCD device is because an LCD and an LED are two completely different technologies.  LED devices are normally black surfaces with the LEDs on, in, or in front of them.  Color LCDs normally have a backlight (any light source will work, provided it doesn't shed too much heat into the LCD panel itself, which is usually thermally sensitive) that is spread out by a WHITE diffuser plate at the back of the system, which scatters the light such that some comes through the LCD panel to be filtered.  Now, unlike you, I've actually taken one of these apart and I've actually seen the absence of a black layer and the presence of a white one.  The LCD, being an optically passive device, is the same color as the light that passes through it.  It doesn't have pigments in it, it's not a chromatophore.  You don't get a negative image if you front-light it (and I've seen this too, the way you tell an LCD display with a failed backlight from one with a failed LCD controller is to look at the screen in the brightest available light when it should show an image and see if it's just very dim, which indicates a failed backlight, or entirely blank, indicating a failed controller).  The idea that color LCDs cannot be designed for front-illumination at all or even that the ability to operate bimodally (with front sunlight or internal backlight) for a low price is rendered stupid by the existence of the One Laptop Per Child notebook prototypes, which had precisely that kind of screen.  I also find your claim that the first form of LCD (front-lit only monochrome) doesn't exist to be quite amusing.  I'm sure everyone who's been using them for the last few decades will be amazed.

I have yet to figure out what source you have for the LED backlight claimed on the LCD display you cited, as the web site doesn't mention what the backlight is for their LCD displays.  (They also have genuine LED displays, but these are all about 1/6 as bright as the LCD you cited, being sold for their high contrast ratio and superior color rendering, rather than brightness.)  The image brightness listed is 1500 nits, which is a third to a quarter the brightness of a typical fully sunlit scene at 5000 nits, and less than a sixth the brightness of the closest thing to full sunlight on a white surface I could find a reference for, a white illuminated cloud at about 10000 nits.  Don't pretend like this display overpowers the sunllight or anything, because that just isn't so.  (Wait until they convert to epaper, which will eliminate the distinction of 'sunlight viewability' entirely, since they don't have backlights.)  If they're using something as inefficient as a traditional LCD, then you might actually have a backlight that could generate a field brightness of 10000 niits (traditional LCDs waste about 85% of the backlight), but that's just back to your floodlight again, not something you could generate an image with.  If it uses the type of LCD used in the OLPC systems, it would have a much dimmer backlight for not throwing away most of the light in passive filters.

You've never even PRETENDED to address the fatal problem of the viewing angle, either.  You need to be able to see the markings at less than 2 degrees from horizontal viewing angle.  You've got no references for anything with less than a 10 degree angle from horizontal.   LEDs are BAD at shining directly to the sides.  If you go look at how they're built, you'll see why:  The normal design for an LED intentionally points all the light possible upwards.  There's NEVER been a good reason to make the light shine out sideways before, and this application isn't one that does since it isn't a good reason for anything.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 22, 2014, 08:18:42 AMThese things aren't likely to get very much cheaper, since everything identifiable that's used in them already is in mass production.

Not for this purpose. You know enough about economics to know how important that is.

QuoteAlways keep in mind what they actually say, not what they would like you to hear.

Sorry, but no, I don't put much stock in what they say. A lot of innovations end up being implemented or even designed quite differently than the inventor originally envisioned. If SFWs are to work, then yes, it does look as if it'll have to be significantly different than what they originally planned--but what invention HASN'T worked that way?

One thing I've been kicking around in my mind is something I saw on Dara Ó Briain's Science Club. I just looked around for the video and couldn't find it online, but they had the audience come in over a panel that was hooked to a device that converted the pressure of their feet into electricity. Even though it was a fairly small audience (looked like about 100 people), IIRC they actually generated enough electricity to charge an iPhone. That could be incorporated into panels and potentially solve some of these issues.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 22, 2014, 10:21:50 AM
Not for this purpose. You know enough about economics to know how important that is.

Sorry, but no, I don't put much stock in what they say. A lot of innovations end up being implemented or even designed quite differently than the inventor originally envisioned. If SFWs are to work, then yes, it does look as if it'll have to be significantly different than what they originally planned--but what invention HASN'T worked that way?

One thing I've been kicking around in my mind is something I saw on Dara Ó Briain's Science Club. I just looked around for the video and couldn't find it online, but they had the audience come in over a panel that was hooked to a device that converted the pressure of their feet into electricity. Even though it was a fairly small audience (looked like about 100 people), IIRC they actually generated enough electricity to charge an iPhone. That could be incorporated into panels and potentially solve some of these issues.

Reminds me of the pressure plates we already have for triggering traffic lights.

Quote from: Travis Retriever on June 22, 2014, 11:21:40 AM
Reminds me of the pressure plates we already have for triggering traffic lights.

Except these actually generate electricity.

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 22, 2014, 12:21:06 PM
Except these actually generate electricity.

True.  You know what I mean. :P  btw, this discussion has gotten a bit off topic.  Maybe consider moving these posts to the topic on solar roadways? ^^;

Quote from: MrBogosity on June 22, 2014, 10:21:50 AM
Not for this purpose. You know enough about economics to know how important that is.

Sorry, but no, I don't put much stock in what they say. A lot of innovations end up being implemented or even designed quite differently than the inventor originally envisioned. If SFWs are to work, then yes, it does look as if it'll have to be significantly different than what they originally planned--but what invention HASN'T worked that way?

One thing I've been kicking around in my mind is something I saw on Dara Ó Briain's Science Club. I just looked around for the video and couldn't find it online, but they had the audience come in over a panel that was hooked to a device that converted the pressure of their feet into electricity. Even though it was a fairly small audience (looked like about 100 people), IIRC they actually generated enough electricity to charge an iPhone. That could be incorporated into panels and potentially solve some of these issues.

They already though of incorporating that one.  It also goes along with their (as yet unimplemented) pressure sensors.  Of course, that will have to go under the solar cells, and they don't appear to have noticed that the whole thing needs to be one solid mass and adequately stuck down (or alternatively, stuck adequately to the adjacent tiles) or the fact that it's TILES of glass will make the whole thing fall apart with tiles being knocked right out of the road.  I think there are epoxies that will do the job, but that does put paid to their claims of easy and quick replacement of tiles.

They keep heaping features on these things without solving the faults the existing features have.  If the whole point wasn't to snare that government grant for new road pavements, they never would have come up with the lame idea of putting solar cells UNDER the road surface.

Quote from: evensgrey on June 27, 2014, 07:55:17 AMThey keep heaping features on these things without solving the faults the existing features have.

That's probably the biggest criticism that could be levied against them. A lot of these features seem like add-ons, and yet they're trying to incorporate them from the start.