If you haven’t seen any of the Solar Roadways video or text
presentations you can find a good selection of them on You Tube, but the basic
idea is to replace the asphalt and concrete surfaces of all of the roads (and
highways and parking lots and so on) in America with solar panels. Since that’s
somewhere around 29,000 square miles, we could conceivably generate three times
our current total energy requirements just using current solar cell
technologies, with more to come as the state of the art improves. There are a
number of technical issues involved, which you can read about on the Jalopnik site here, but there are also some offsetting advantages, such as using the
same roadway-mounted solar panels to house programmable LEDs, making the roads
reconfigurable in real time. Unfortunately, when we look at the business side
of the concept the whole thing gets murky with amazing speed…
Project estimates provided by the Extreme Tech website put
the total cost of conversion for 29,000 square miles of roads at around $56
trillion USD – or about four times our current National Debt – using the cost
figures provided by the Solar Roadways company’s own projections. And that
doesn’t even consider the costs involved in developing the clear outer layer of
the roadway – there isn’t currently any form of super-glass that can handle all
of the operational requirements for such a substance. There are also issues
like the proposed LED lane marker system costing more than the solar cells
themselves, the cost of transmitting the generated energy to customers who can
use it (which dwarfs the rest of the project), and operational concerns like
cleaning the glass tiles (roadways get dirty a lot), replacing broken elements
while traffic swirls around you at highway speeds, and hackers getting into the
LED lane markers and configuring the roads into one giant death trap…
Now, we should probably acknowledge that there is nothing
inherently wrong with the idea of widely dispersed solar collectors, assuming
there is some economical and technically feasible way of connecting them to the
power grid. For that matter, even if a continental-scale project isn’t
possible, there’s no reason you couldn’t have single streets or individual
parking lots built this way that can power their surrounding buildings. If
creating a self-cleaning glass strong enough to stand up to truck traffic while
still collecting sunlight isn’t feasible, then what about roof tiles made the
same way? Or simple parking-space carports, which are common in the sunny parts
of our country, that use the same technology to turn entire parking lots into
giant solar arrays? Of course, that would require further research and
development, since the current solar cells are still a bit too expensive for
this sort of mass use. If only somebody were to come up with seed money for
such a program – say, using crowdfunding…
It remains to be seen if the Solar Roadways people will get
anywhere with their more advanced designs; as previously noted, they still need
40,000,000 times more money to complete the project. But between crowdfunding
and Department of Transportation grants they now have around $2.2 million USD
in research funds, which isn’t exactly small change. I don’t know if we will
ever drive on continuous bands of solar collectors, but it’s possible that we
might park under them, work under them, or live under them sometime soon. Even
with a funding percentage of 0.0000025%, it’s hard to call that a failure…
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