Solar panelling highways

[Belwarrior]

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/mans-tham-solar-highway,news-8780.html

how feasible would this be? i like the idea though as long as the exhaust gases are sucked out of the way

[KRSESQ]

If it's open at the sides, as the artist's rendering seems to suggest, then the auto exhaust would be a trivial problem compared to the sheer expense of roofing over the entire Santa Monica freeway with solar panels.

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

5 lanes each side = 40 m wide. Per km = 40,000 m2 = 5.2 MWe = $15M/km just for the panels with economy of scale

Solar panels block most visible light but are transparent to IR. Tunnel would be dark, requiring lighting 24/7, but as hot as hell in summer. The panels would have to be flat on the top, not wrap-around as illustrated.

Pie in the sky, IMHO

[Dr Mordrid]

Dark in the California desert is an advantage

There's a new generation of solar panels coming that not only convert light into electricity but also heat. The tech adds a layer of cesium over a gallium nitride substrate. It's perfect for high temp ops like the California deserts since its peak efficiency (50%) is at high enough temps to fry other solar panels. What heat isn't converted directly can be channeled to a Stirling cycle generator, boosting effeciency even further. NASA is also very interested for use in space.

[Brian Ellis]

They've been coming for a long, long time (several years)! It's one thing to make a lab prototype and a totally different thing to put it into production.

[Belwarrior]

guess the wait wiill take another decade then.. still not a bad idea

[Dr Mordrid]

They've been coming for a long, long time (several years)!

Times up. Stanford is well into the patent and sounds like production gets fast-tracked soon as it's granted. Should get the well-greased path at the Patent Office since the project was a joint venture of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford, the SLAC National Accelerator Lab, the US Dept. of Energy and DARPA, the US Dept. of Defense mad-science lab.

[Brian Ellis]

Anyone can start production of a patented item and reveal it as soon as he has deposited the patent application with a list of prior art. It is not required to await the grant of the patent. That is why many items are marked, "Patent applied for". This is because, by definition, the application is public, so that a third party may contest it.