This is a pretty simplified and reductive take. How much electricity does it take to power a snowplow that can weigh as much as 30 tons with salt for all surface street miles? Is the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle plus weight damage to the road more efficient by cost/resource use? What about snowbanks as a hazard and visibility obstruction?
And that’s putting aside all the ecological damage salt causes or that these systems can often recycle waste heat. Your video about a car traveling highway speeds melting multiple inches of snow isn’t a gotcha for a completely different situation.
A Manhattan city block, on the short end of the rectangle, is 264 feet. A typical road lane is 12 ft across. Assume two road lanes and 4 inches of snow, getting 2100 cu ft of snow.
Using this snow weight calculator, fresh snow of that size will be 6,589.4 - 9,229.4 lbs. Let’s take the midpoint of 8100 lbs. That’s 3 million grams. And from here on, I can do the rest in metric.
Assuming it’s at 0C already, it takes 334 Joules to melt 1 gram of snow. It will take 1.2GJ to melt the amount above.
There are electric snowplows being tested in Norway with 1000 kwh battery packs. That’s 3.6 MJ. Quoting the article: "In light to moderate snowfall and temperatures as low as minus five degrees, the truck covered a total distance of 293 kilometers (km) at an average speed of 47 kilometers per hour (km/h). "
Yes, snow plows are more efficient. It’s not even close. You can chop off orders of magnitude and it’s still not even close.
I really, really need people in this thread to understand thermodynamics. Melting ice takes a fuckton of energy.
Maybe these can be useful to hybridize the system, where you plow normally and then melt the little remaining to avoid the use of salt. As a total replacement, no. That’s a laughably bad idea.
The counter here is that oftentimes, snow melting systems like in the OP use waste heat that would otherwise get sent into the atmosphere or a lake. There is no power being generated specifically for melting snow. Using waste energy could be seen as a “free” way to melt the snow.
You’re really caught up on energy efficiency, civil engineering is not just thermodynamics. Energy is becoming incredibly cheap, before the current administration derailed our energy sector, we were on track to hit $0.03/kWh for utility scale renewable power by 2030. For reference, that’s about $10 to clear that city block.
And again, systems like this and the more famous one in Holland MI are generally run on waste heat (from a power plant, wastewater treatment plant or datacenter), so that math doesn’t even apply. Looking only at energy cost leaves you tripping over dollars to save pennies.
The real costs are and always have been infrastructure. Yes, it’s not possible to use this as a drop-in everywhere. It highly depends on the usage/wear of the road, space constraints, upfront cost of installation, maintenance, access to a heating solution, etc, etc… Even with this hydronic layout the main costs are the transmission lines, the cost to heat them is minor.
It’s very weird to see so much resistance to this in an anti-car community, as if pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure doesn’t need snow removal too.
Not an excuse for wastefulness. The numbers here are so great that a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.
systems like this and the more famous one in Holland MI are generally run on waste heat
That’s fine if it’s available. It’s usually heavy industry that’s providing that. If you don’t have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.
It’s very weird to see so much resistance to this in an anti-car community, as if pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure doesn’t need snow removal too.
What of it? There’s perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths, too.
Every single study shows it saving money in the long run. It’s already in use and doesn’t cause problems because professionals spend more thought and time on it than armchair internet engineers. You’re tilting at windmills.
a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.
I mean maybe if our cities existed in Antarctica and experience 3"+ of snow per hour nearly every day year round and we insisted on keeping 40% of our city footprint as roads. How are cities currently running these systems? Somehow I haven’t heard of any of them building extra nuclear reactors or going broke?
You realize that power use fluctuates and thermal energy storage is a dead simple, ancient technology? That the majority of snowfall happens overnight when power demand is at a minimum? You’re just waving around napkin math with no concept of how anything actually works.
It’s usually heavy industry that’s providing that. If you don’t have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.
So we’re just making things up now? CHP plants no longer exist? 17k water treatment plants and 4k datacenters using a combined 8-10% of all US power just vanished? Renewable power surpluses no longer need to be stored?
There’s perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths
Isn’t the goal in reducing car based infrastructure to cut the number of roads and make infrastructure more efficient? Instead of scaling heating costs to be smaller and more manageable you’d rather keep the fixed costs of a full vehicle fleet and the fixed damage of plowing and deicing? Your argument makes no sense at any scale.
If you want to talk about energy waste how about starting with the kWh you spend defying basic common sense over the internet.
This is a pretty simplified and reductive take. How much electricity does it take to power a snowplow that can weigh as much as 30 tons with salt for all surface street miles? Is the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle plus weight damage to the road more efficient by cost/resource use? What about snowbanks as a hazard and visibility obstruction?
And that’s putting aside all the ecological damage salt causes or that these systems can often recycle waste heat. Your video about a car traveling highway speeds melting multiple inches of snow isn’t a gotcha for a completely different situation.
A Manhattan city block, on the short end of the rectangle, is 264 feet. A typical road lane is 12 ft across. Assume two road lanes and 4 inches of snow, getting 2100 cu ft of snow.
Using this snow weight calculator, fresh snow of that size will be 6,589.4 - 9,229.4 lbs. Let’s take the midpoint of 8100 lbs. That’s 3 million grams. And from here on, I can do the rest in metric.
Assuming it’s at 0C already, it takes 334 Joules to melt 1 gram of snow. It will take 1.2GJ to melt the amount above.
There are electric snowplows being tested in Norway with 1000 kwh battery packs. That’s 3.6 MJ. Quoting the article: "In light to moderate snowfall and temperatures as low as minus five degrees, the truck covered a total distance of 293 kilometers (km) at an average speed of 47 kilometers per hour (km/h). "
Yes, snow plows are more efficient. It’s not even close. You can chop off orders of magnitude and it’s still not even close.
I really, really need people in this thread to understand thermodynamics. Melting ice takes a fuckton of energy.
Maybe these can be useful to hybridize the system, where you plow normally and then melt the little remaining to avoid the use of salt. As a total replacement, no. That’s a laughably bad idea.
The counter here is that oftentimes, snow melting systems like in the OP use waste heat that would otherwise get sent into the atmosphere or a lake. There is no power being generated specifically for melting snow. Using waste energy could be seen as a “free” way to melt the snow.
You’re really caught up on energy efficiency, civil engineering is not just thermodynamics. Energy is becoming incredibly cheap, before the current administration derailed our energy sector, we were on track to hit $0.03/kWh for utility scale renewable power by 2030. For reference, that’s about $10 to clear that city block.
And again, systems like this and the more famous one in Holland MI are generally run on waste heat (from a power plant, wastewater treatment plant or datacenter), so that math doesn’t even apply. Looking only at energy cost leaves you tripping over dollars to save pennies.
The real costs are and always have been infrastructure. Yes, it’s not possible to use this as a drop-in everywhere. It highly depends on the usage/wear of the road, space constraints, upfront cost of installation, maintenance, access to a heating solution, etc, etc… Even with this hydronic layout the main costs are the transmission lines, the cost to heat them is minor.
It’s very weird to see so much resistance to this in an anti-car community, as if pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure doesn’t need snow removal too.
Not an excuse for wastefulness. The numbers here are so great that a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.
That’s fine if it’s available. It’s usually heavy industry that’s providing that. If you don’t have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.
What of it? There’s perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths, too.
Every single study shows it saving money in the long run. It’s already in use and doesn’t cause problems because professionals spend more thought and time on it than armchair internet engineers. You’re tilting at windmills.
I mean maybe if our cities existed in Antarctica and experience 3"+ of snow per hour nearly every day year round and we insisted on keeping 40% of our city footprint as roads. How are cities currently running these systems? Somehow I haven’t heard of any of them building extra nuclear reactors or going broke?
You realize that power use fluctuates and thermal energy storage is a dead simple, ancient technology? That the majority of snowfall happens overnight when power demand is at a minimum? You’re just waving around napkin math with no concept of how anything actually works.
So we’re just making things up now? CHP plants no longer exist? 17k water treatment plants and 4k datacenters using a combined 8-10% of all US power just vanished? Renewable power surpluses no longer need to be stored?
Isn’t the goal in reducing car based infrastructure to cut the number of roads and make infrastructure more efficient? Instead of scaling heating costs to be smaller and more manageable you’d rather keep the fixed costs of a full vehicle fleet and the fixed damage of plowing and deicing? Your argument makes no sense at any scale.
If you want to talk about energy waste how about starting with the kWh you spend defying basic common sense over the internet.