China’s first solar powered highway will recharge electric cars (PHOTOS,VIDEO)

a reply to: purplemer

Yes this scam has indeed popped up a bunch of places... Idaho for example... It has a sister scam about using recycled plastic to build roads out of.

It takes advantage of the fact that a tremendous percentage of the population have never built anything in their whole lives, much less has any idea how much of a fantastically complex and expensive undertaking modern road building is.

Hey remember that elevated Chinese bus the cars could go under?

That was a scam too!

China has massive issues with this type of fraud and scamming just like we in the West do...

I wish people weren't so damn susceptible to the grass is greener on the other side fallacy.

a reply to: purplemer

sigh - any given PV cell will be most efficient is :

it is on a tracking frame that angles and slews [ this is also the most expensive ]

the most cost effective is fixed and angled frames - that are set for and angle and bearing specific to the site

flat mounted panels in a roadway = the most utterly inefficient clusterfook possible

a reply to: ignorant_ape

Translucent concrete (also: light-transmitting concrete) is a concrete based building material with light-transmissive properties due to embedded light optical elements — usually optical fibers. Light is conducted through the stone from one end to the other. Therefore, the fibers have to go through the whole object. This results in a certain light pattern on the other surface, depending on the fiber structure. Shadows cast onto one side appear as silhouettes through the material.

Source: Wikipedia.

I was wondering wth "see through concrete" was myself!

If they can guide the incident light from the sun onto the PV cell then it would be a little better... but not much. The entry goes on to say only about 75% of the light gets through. Then PV cells are around 20% efficient at conversion. It is a good idea but I doubt it will change the world (as is).

They could probably get more energy by throwing some graphene aerogel underneath the roadway and try capturing the compression as vehicles roll over the top.

Somebody says that only after a couple days of operation somebody stole a chunk of the road! This is one of two places reporting this, so take it with a grain of salt.

NextBigFuture.com - Part of China’s solar highway was stolen causing a shutdown.