A startup company in Idaho has built the prototype for a new road surface that they hope will replace asphalt. The glass-based road surface is an amazing concept that is designed to be a solar array, electrical grid and traffic safety system all in one.
Asphalt covers a great deal of the Earth and absorbs solar energy as heat so converting these surfaces to solar panels makes perfect sense. But the genius of this design lies in combining other energy and transportation needs in innovative ways.
Since the panels will need to transmit electricity anyhow, the designers of the solar roadway have built electrical grid capabilities into the system, allowing the road itself to transmit electricity and eliminating the need for overhead electrical wiring. Additionally, the designers have embedded LED lighting into the design, allowing the roadway itself to display traffic information, warn drivers of impending conditions… perhaps even changing the road configurations to account for greater one-way traffic during rush hour conditions. Unlike traditional incandescent or fluorescent lights, LEDs are essentially computer and electrical circuits, so their integration into the solar electrical system is highly complimentary.
Check out the video above. Sheer brilliance. Now the question: how does the roadway handle rain and snow?
Yesterday President Barack Obama announced a total of $13 billion in funding for ten high speed rail networks across the US and painted a picture of the future of transportation in America: Continue reading »
Last week, General Motors unvailed the Chevy Volt, gas-backup electric car. In the same week Bob Lutz, the Vice-Chairman of General Motors, recently appeared on ‘The Colbert Report’ and where he clearly stated:
I accept that planet is heated but I, like many noted scientists, don’t believe in the CO2 theory.
The venerable BBC has just begun an experiment to track a shipping container as receives and delivers goods around the world for a year.
Globally, shipping containers come in a certain number of standard sizes so that they can fit equally on trucks, trains, boats and planes. The British broadcaster hopes to visit the container as it makes various stops around the world in order to tell the individual stories interlinked by this single transportation item.
You can track the BBC Box here. You can bet that I look forward to calculating the carbon footprint of this trip.
With high gas prices and a slowing economy, Americans are now taking fewer trips by car and are starting to rely again on muscle power to get around.
If we assume that the average fuel efficiency for all vehicles is 23.1 miles per gallon, that translates to 4.3 million fewer (metric) tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the equivalent of 2200 tonnes of coal not burned.
