Hi yes, its Solar Roadways time again because we have some new data that's coming for their new installation. Live live feed here of the new SR 4 panels, the fourth-generation or whatever. they've installed 30 brand new panels. Um, a couple of weeks back I think and they're all still working.

They're all gone, flashy flash like this. and they just held a Christmas party here as well where they actually put a tent over the solar panels in the middle of winter. Oh, and they install Christmas lights where they already have Christmas lights in. The panel's dull.

Just ridiculous. Anyway, we've got the data from these new panels. It just snowed and I actually tweeted here. not sure how deep it is.

what a foot deep or something like that? Not quite. Um, the road closed sign says it all here. And yeah, it started. Of course they've got the heaters in there and it started to melt this tiny little holes in each one of these panels.

So all the heaters in the panel's here are actually working. All the LEDs still seem to be working and I actually am snapped a photo of a this an electric car charging point here and there was actually a car charging up. and no, it just comes from the grid and this one. it presumably feeds back into the grid.

But we'll go into the calculation shortly about melting ice and about how much power is actually generated from this. So after almost what 4 million US dollars raised in five and a half years, we've got just more flashing lights and still a car has not driven I Look at car just drove past. Why couldn't they install half cars driving over this solar roadway? But yeah, we have another car drive on this since the John Deere tractor the infamous John Deere tractor with that weighs bugger-all weighs less than even a small car with the low pressure tires on it rolling over it back in the original video and it's gotta be money well spent just on entertainment value alone. Anyway, we've got an article here from Boehner County.

It's probably Bono County, but I'm gonna call it Bony County just because. And here's our old friend Scott. Enjoy! Brew Showcase Cotton Julie Here we go. There's the selfie.

They just installed the new ones good on under. Still at it. They're still eking a living out of this. I Guess they're still got money left over because they did pay for these panels themselves I Guess they couldn't get the Sandpoint council to pony up the money yet again.

What it cost what they spend? Fifty or sixty grand or something. Last time they gave them to install this our pilot and they have a new anti glare surface apparently cuz of course Thunderfoot Went actually visited there and got the video of like if you just look at these things on an angle the glare was terrible. So yeah, apparently the new anti-glare coating there installed by the company in its own expenses. Way to thank the city and community for serving a real-world pilot site.

And these are the newer Sr4 panels. These are 50 watt panels, so go into the calculation shortly and you should be able to buy these. You should be able to buy these suckers. First quarter.

Twenty twenty new panels have a new texture, a feel of rough concrete than the small knobbly bumps. The service comes from a Canadian company that makes pool surrounds, which means little or no skidding or slipping. Not a bonus. And another thing, the panels are produced diffuse light because they've got the new I Guess that's inherent in the new coating they've got on there.

It just diffuses it out so you can see them better at an angle. So yeah. okay, whatever. the LEDs are still the dumbest idea imaginable.

That's a no. The dumbest idea is trying to melt the snow as will go into the calculations in a minute. But second best is lighting. No.

Are they equal? I Don't know. Maybe I'll put up a pole? I'll put up a pole here in the corner up here. Let us know which is the dumber idea. LEDs or heating them up and melting the snow and they heat up faster.

Apparently There you go, The LEDs are our customers do everything from parking lot signs to advertising. We still after five and a half years have not seen a single example of like lane markings and/or a handicap sign or something like that. All we get is this Christmas light show. Because of the solar technology, the snow melts eliminating the need for snow removal.

Well, they've already removed snow here and here. Somebody from the council presumably has come along and removed all this snow. Could have just shoveled the snow off here and we'll do the calculations in a minute. Why that would be better than trying to melt it? Well, some of the base centers are used to route different conduits and cable.

Others have been drilled through to give the water a place to seep into the ground beneath the system because I tweeted a photo sorry I don't have it. But yeah, there's like a rubber mat bottom. Yeah, a recycled rubber base. Speeding the installation helped take more items out of the waste stream.

Hmm. anyway um yeah, they've got like a rubber base on the bottom and the drilled holes in the bottom to let the water escape because if any water at all moisture water buildup inside there. If you just had the rubber coating, it's gonna pull up there. You have to get the water out of these things and well yeah, I don't know how long they're gonna last I don't know how well that's going to go.

how like the drainage of the water into the system because if you've seen the installation of these things the old you know those strips they put over the top and I do have a video of them on my second channel actually using a caulking gun to go along and puts elastic on all the panels. But that's only gonna last so long. So yeah, can you imagine doing this on a road? These hexagonal glass big tiles? You have to silastic up each one of them and then rely on that for your water sealing. Oh, it's just insane.

The new base improves the modularity of the panel's matching the shape and size of the solar array panels. Now, if crews have access to something underneath the panel's it's an easy process Because yeah, people are really gonna build roads out of these things. Sure. So it's now truly modular, blah blah blah.

What keeps them actually down? What anchors them down won't? When you drive cars, you put a rubber base down. Okay, you drive the cars over them. They're gonna like wiggle-wiggle-wiggle year and the silastic is not going to hold it there eventually, just going to crap out. So I Don't get it.

No one would ever know that you repaired something. It's just as good as new. You can't do that with the asphalt or concrete easily. Usually they do a quick fix.

Oh, you see that? Wow Yeah, okay, if Jock went up the solar waise. While they are slightly more expensive to make, they weigh much less than the old concrete pads and as a result, cost less to ship. They are also more environmentally friendly since they use all recycled materials the Bruce or said no, they don't use all recycled materials. The glass might be either, even if it is a hundred percent recycled glass.

All the electronics, all the LEDs or the componentry. You know how much energy embodied energy goes into manufacturing electronic components on this sort of scale. If you implemented this globally, it's just insane to say these are more environmentally friendly than Ashphalt, which is basically mostly recycled material. Anyway, they can recycle that and reuse it.

It's incredibly cheap and not to mention more reliable than these things, which looks like they're not even bolted down. What are they just doing? Sitting there? you expect to drive cars and trucks over these. Even the best ones are not like even coal less. One of the best Road Engineering companies in the world couldn't even engineer well that didn't include any electronics or anything like that.

a solar road surface. The whatwe system that could last, It just didn't Not every solar installation in the world has completely failed and these tiles. These hexagonal tiles will be the absolute worst. Reliability guaranteed, but the material holds up well.

In fact, during a test to simulate the wear and tear caused by a tractor-trailer both the panels and connectors exceeded expectations. I Would have thought the test would have torn these things to shred. Instead, it pretty much looks new, so we didn't have much hope in his own panels, but they've been tested. That test.

Simulated 15 years of truck abuse in three months is cursed. This could last longer than asphalt. could you think? Come on please! I Want to see some cars and trucks drive over these things? They're in talks with several companies. They can't name them, but the entities include NASA to do at least a portion of the Kennedy Space Center parking lot.

Saw The cars can park on top where the Sun can't get through. It looks like they don't have with installations. you'll be able to buy these. There you go.

If you want to buy some customers at Solar roadways com2 get yours put on the notification list. Beauty! So it turns out that they're not using the old are in-phase website which we used to get the old data from That stopped in I believe September last year 2018 so it's been over a year, hasn't been producing any data at all and they've been busted of course. But thank you to whoever pointed this out. I Let me show you the actual link.

There you go, That's the actual full link there for those playing along at home. It does actually hide that when I go here. I'm not sure why it does that Anyway, if you know how to get into more detailed data because I'll show you you can possibly get more data than this. but anyway, it is their parent energy.

For the last seven days, it's nighttime. now. it's currently not producing any power. There's our live feed.

so the lifetime energy is produced. Four kilowatt hours Wow My home solar installation. My 3 kilowatt system produces double that. Yeah, here's my system here.

And yeah, I'm producing five kilowatt hour. So I'm producing more than this because it's winter time here. So my three kilowatt system is producing more power per day than this thing has since its installation. But just for reference, their installation is a 1.5 kilowatt system.

There's 30 panels at a rated 50 watts each. See now I'm not sure how I can like get back in date. We'll take this day here because this looks like it was sort of a peaky day here. This was the 28th of November and about 0.46 or something kilowatt hours 0.46 for the entire installation.

And the interesting thing is is that this arm SolarEdge website. they have lots of other public installations as well. So I went through and I found the nearest possible installation which was this one here, which is the Gonzaga Gonzaga University and that's actually this system here. Million! There we go.

Got a photo of it. It uses 12 panels and they're three hundred and sixty watts a panel. and so you know. it's a decent sized installation and we've actually got the data from this so we can compare and it's the closest one I could physically find.

Here's Gonzaga University it's in Spokane and Sand Point is up here. If you get the scale down the bottom there, it's about ten kilometres. It's you know, it's about eighty or a hundred way as the crow flies. So yeah, it's the closest that I can get with public data on the same website.

So if we go to the same date the 28th of the 11th, that looks, you know, reasonably decent. You know, a little like sort of bit of cloud cover came over there, right? But it's Of course, it's the middle of winter over there. but it produced three kilowatts. So you know there's a reasonable amount of Sun on that day.

So that system produced ten point Eight five kilowatt hours on that day. So ten point Eight five kilowatt hours divided by Four point Four kilowatt system. I'm just going to use like a ratio metric here. that's two point four, six, or basically are two and a half times the rated capacity of the system on that particular day.

So Solar Roadways produced naught point four six kilowatt hours, say, divided by one point five kilowatts for the system capacity. That's a factor of not 0.187 compared to two and a half. So this installation here with its angled panels like this up on the roof, is 13 times 13 times better. produces 13 times the energy per you know space.

hi someone who's walking through there I'm a per area per square area then Solar freakin' Roadways? Not it. Well, Ok, there could be different solar insolation. Okay, I know it's like seventy eighty kilometres away or whatever. The solar insolation might be different, but you know it's not gonna be hugely different I like and it could have been more cloudy on that day, but this is the best day that we have about, but even factored in in this sort of stuff.

Let's say it's even five times worse. It's awful. Absolutely awful. And this matches the calculations in the data that we've done in the previous videos and we've seen from all the other solar roadways installations as well.

But the solar freaking roadways here. It seems to be like the worst of the bunch. so that's going to be a combination. the fact that they're flat and also the fact that they have this thick glass coating over them and they've got the heating elements and they're They're not full solar panels, but they're right.

I'm using the actual radium their own rating 50 watt nominal panels and it's tips. No, it's just a joke. Come on. It was done and dusted from day one.

but this is this is their latest and greatest generation panel. Oh God Anyway, now we have to talk about clearing the snow shell. So what do you need to melt snow? Well, just to actually take snow at zero degrees? Not to actually. you know if it's a minus ten or something like that, you need to put energy into the system to actually warm up the snow until it gets to zero degrees.

But let's assume it's already just at zero degrees just to turn it from snow slash ice into water takes 335 kilojoules of energy per kilogram. So yeah, it's a lot just to transition it. That's not to evaporate it or anything like that. So here we're being very generous.

We're assuming that we don't need to change the temperature of it. we just need to transition from snow to liquid and the fact that we don't have to, you know, evaporate it or whatever, it'll just drain off as you might expect on a road something like that. So just for the transition, so snow is about, let's work in pounds for you Yanks Because we're You know we're in Yankee land here. and it makes it easy anyway.

10 pounds per cubic foot of snow. that's how much it weighs. And each solar roadways tile from their own data is 4.4 square feet. So 10 pounds times 4.4 Let's assume that we have a a foot of snow on these things.

that's 44 pounds per tile. But hey, let's say it's not a foot deep. Let's say it's only half a foot deep. So let's divide that by two and these numbers work out nice and round.

So we've got 22 pounds of snow per tile like this, which works out to 10 kilograms of snow per tile Now 335 kilojoules per kilogram for the latent heat of fusion to transition it from ice to water. That's equal to about 93 watt hours per kilogram. And if we've got 10 kilograms of snow per tile, you're talking 930 watt hours per tile. Hi, someone else is walking past ya have a look at the screen I Tell us what energy has got a real-time I Don't think Anyway, bye and I Love watching this live.

It's just great. So it takes 930 watt hours per tile. We've got 30 tiles, so 930 times 30 is 27.9 kilowatt hours required to melt this adjust to transition the snow from ice to water. if it's covering half a foot deep on this 30 tile array here.

and remember, this is a 1.5 kilowatt system. So even with 8 hours of full Sun on these things producing, you know, like producing its maximum output, you're still only going to generate half the energy required to melt the snow at like under I did like like Pie-in-the-sky Best case: Like it's not going to be practical because it's going to be a lot worse than this. But just like right off the bat there just to transition it. This is ridiculous.

Come on, here's Sandpoint Idaho of all the places to put this in the U.s. like right up near the Canadian border. Yeah, that's where you want the world's first installation of solar roadways I Know that's where they're from and you know it makes it easy. and stuff like that.

But even if you put these suckers in California down here in San Diego and still ain't gonna work. So anyway, there you go. after five and a half years and how many millions of Yankee bucks are spent on this thing and well, we've got a glorified Christmas light show in the snow I Mean it's the dumbest idea ever. These solar freakin' Roadways has always been the dumbest of all the solar roadways installations by far because they try and heat the snow.

They try and light up the leads with the lead markers and everything and it's just it's hard enough. It's a ridiculous enough concept doing this with just solar panels. Every other installation of solar roadways has failed. They've lasted days, weeks or months tops before these things are ruined.

I'd love to see cars and trucks try and drive over this. Wow I was flying everywhere. It'll be hilarious watch a live web cam watch these things rock. Anyway, good on Scott and Julie brew.

Sure it's good to have a hobby and yeah, they're still going. They're still going. Still got some money left in the bank and the piggy bank. So as always I hope you found that interesting.

And Solar Roadways is just. it's comedy gold. It really is. It never stops giving.

It's fantastic. If you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up. As always discussed down below and over on the Eevblog forum and also check me out on LBI Why.com there I am there's my channel over there. got 841 subs see if we can get to a thousand subs on LBO or library sorry I keep calling Lb ry I can't help myself Library TV Catch you next time.