I'm not seeing many actual rebuttals here. I don't have a hell of a lot of context because I don't know what the exact initial claims were, but take this: "Fa

I'm not seeing many actual rebuttals here. I don't have a hell of a lot of context because I don't know what the exact initial claims were, but take this: "False Claim: we can't afford to heat roads" Their response doesn't actually talk about the feasibility of heating roads. They don't mention how much energy their solar panels will have stored before a snow storm, and whether or not it would be sufficient to melt lots of snow. My half-assed guess is that there's maybe enough energy in theory to melt an inch or two of snow, but they don't really provide sufficient detail: (From their website): "Currently, the full size hexagons are 36-watt solar panels, with 69-percent surface coverage by solar cells. This will become 52-watts when we cover the whole surface when we go into production. When we add piezoelectric, they'll be capable of producing even more power. Also, as the efficiency of solar cells increase, more power will be converted. We tested the heaters over the winter with a DC power supply that provided them with 72-watts. This was an overkill and made the surface warm to the touch on most winter days. We still need to experiment with different voltages at different temperatures, to determine the minimum amount of power required to keep the surface above freezing. Remember, they don't have to heat up to 85 degrees like the defroster wire in the windows of your car: they only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation (35 degrees?)." You need what, like 300 Joules to melt a single gram of ice/snow/etc. So their 50W panels could melt a gram of water per 6 seconds. I can't figure out how big the panels are, but their website seems to say 4 square feet. So each 2'x2' square area (hexagon, whatever) can melt 0.166 grams of ice/snow/etc per second. Say you get a hypothetical snowfall of 2" (not very damn much for some areas). That's 4 ft * 2 in of snow, or 2/3 of a cubic foot. That's about 10 pounds of water in solid form, or 4.5k grams. So assuming their 50W panels are 100% efficient at melting snow, it would take their accumulated energy about 8 hours to melt the snow. (Of course please check my math, I might be off by an order of magnitude on either end here) That seems at least theoretically possible, but there's no discussion about how much energy a panel can store, or other factors that would weigh in here. There's no actual technical discussion whatsoever for that matter. So I was kind of disappointed by the article. Edit, sorry: 'It would take their panels about 8 hours to accumulate the energy necessary to melt 2" of snow' (That's at least somewhat in the realm of possibility, though for many areas 8 hours of direct sunlight during the winter ain't happening, and a guarantee of a max of ~2" of snow in a day also ain't happening)