solar roads and history of effects

[Grantofhell]

I heard some sort of a rumor about "Wireless Power" But I just don't see how it is possible, electricity is unable to be "transmitted". My friend could have made the whole thing up, but he's normally pretty serious.

 

[berry120]

I heard some sort of a rumor about "Wireless Power" But I just don't see how it is possible, electricity is unable to be "transmitted".

It's perfectly possible using huge quantities of electro magnetic waves. We're using this sort of radiation all the time at the moment, and it's well known that this is a transmission of power. Problem is at the moment that with current technologies these power levels are so weak they can only really be used as signals rather than to power devices - however we are getting there. There have been demos for example of mobile phones being charged by simply being placed on a special mat. This may well be how the technology starts, but it could go anywhere if it's possible to scale it up hugely

I suspect that while the solar roadways are a nice idea theoretically, practically there's going to be huge problems with them. How is the electricity going to get to substations? Providing that sort of an infrastructure along each road would be a HUGE undertaking. And until these are installed en mass there's no proof of their scalable reliability, it's all very well for a few guys to say they've done some tests but in the real world this means quite little. We've currently got no clue as to the actual lifetime of these things, what happens if they all pack up after a decade and need replacing? And then there's the practicalities of putting these things over all the roads in the first place, that's going to cause MASSIVE hold ups and diversions for a long time, especially on the bigger roads.

Nice idea and perhaps the technology can be used in other ways (powering lights on nearby road signs for example) but I can't see this scaling up to solving the world's energy problems.

 

[Grantofhell]

Not only that, but as I mentioned before the cost. The website fails to get a realistic number on the cost of this project they wish to undertake, they call it the cost of replacing the roads anyways, which was estimated out at 17 trillion? Something like that.