Your safety is the thing that counts most while being behind the wheel on the highway. And when the night falls the situation is getting critical. But Solaroad Technologies Group has thought of a system that can light the roads using the daylight energy without any risk of a “brown out” (a partial loss of electrical current over long distances).
ElectraWall is a photovoltaic system that is completely different than any other systems made up to now. It can collect and store energy from many outdoor locations and has a built in battery allowing the system to work in any kind of weather conditions. The cylindrical shape makes the system independent of the light’s angle of incidence so it doesn’t need additional motors to follow the Sun. This increases the efficiency of the photovoltaic cylinder compared to others systems.
Besides the fact that the ElectraWall can produce energy day or night, rain or clear sky, it is made from many recycled materials and is configurable allowing multiple modules to be placed in a 3D watt stack.
The device can be applied on a wide variety of surfaces: clipped on top of the highway jersey/barrier walls, sound walls, light poles, road signs, parking garages or rooftops.
Solaroad Technologies expects to sell this product starting with this year’s fall. Let’s just hope it will catch fast and it will not be very expensive.
Being eew technology adopted more information like cost per watt hour etc is required. How far it is commercially successful?
Mr M K rightly mentioned that this system may prove expensive as most of th surface would be inactive resulting higher size system. Ravi Soparkar, Pune India
Cells, to date have been far more expensive than tracking equipment. 1/2 of these cells are always in shade, self shaded. Thus I would question if the “improved efficiency” outweighs the added cost of reducing cost efficiency by the 50% shading and much larger cells (circumference =pi x diam therefore 3.1415 x the flat cells) for similar sq ft of exposure.