We had this discussion on old SE the last time this came up years ago. It was a stupid idea then, it's a stupid idea now. We should build solar plants to make solar energy and roads to drive on. There is zero logical reason to attempt to combine them and a laundry list of readily understood reasons why making roads into solar panels makes for bad solar panels and bad roads.

Keep going donnie, this really seems to be your métier.

It's spelled meteor, you ignorant hick. I don't know why donnie has a meteor, though.

I want a meteor. I'll name it George.

And for my next trick, pointing out the technical difficulties of installing screen doors on submarines.

It seems like it would be pretty easy to install a screen door on a submarine.

Indeed. A perfect reason to do it, wouldn't you say?

The TV tells me I am happy with the current paradigm.

As a motorcyclist this scares the shit out of me. Nice soft tyres will pick up small pieces of glass like a mofo (and I've had two punctures this last year) and a very slippery surface.

We have trouble enough in the wet with the large painted areas such as turning arrows.

I remember riding my bike on the sidewalk as a kid and coming on one of those slate slabs. I swear, whoever put those fucking things there must have really hated kids.

You came on a slate slab?

Who hasn't?

Do bathroom tiles count as slate slabs?

I remember storm drains covered with grates that had gaps in them that were exactly the right size to grab your front tire and bring your bike to an abrupt stop, making you fly over the handlebars and land 10 feet away.

One of those threw my bike into a hedge once. Next thing I knew I was lying in the next driveway with my knees torn up while my bike was in the next driveway down with the front tire bent about 45 degrees.

Yup, sounds about right.

I haven't seen this brought up anywhere else, but wouldn't acquiring the necessary amount of unobtainium mean we would have to rip up the Na'avi's Deku tree?

The mixed reference got me.

Meh Good luck in trying to even get my state to pave normal roads.

From this article (relinked because you borked it a little bit) :

It came to light this week that Texas is ripping up the asphalt roads damaged by oil and gas drilling activities and returning them to gravel because the state does not want to spend the money to repave them.


And from an WSJ article linked into it :

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years.

This is somehow hilarious that oil companies damage the roads that cannot be fixed because of the raising price of oil.

work, damn it

Oddly enough Naturally, the same folks who are against basic road maintenance are also against solar power.

Maybe we should make these companies pay for their own damn roads.

Eh, nope.

Sorry, I got about 3 minutes in to the FUD part of this and decided that hearing "I have my doubts" in a chippy british accent, from an anonymous source on the internet, is not really objective analysis of the proposal. This is not a project where they just thought "hey, let's propose an idea and see if we can scam a bunch of money!", they have been working on this program for several years and have both won awards from traffic authorities as well as subjected their technology to requirements for use [i]which they have passed[/i].

Don't even get me started on the "but look at the cost!" part - if they have a greater in-service life than their blacktop counterparts, and if they are manufactured on a scale to actually meet the demand of covering "every road, highway, tarmac, driveway", then economies of scale will close the price gap very quickly. Wind and Solar installation costs have come down in the last decade an amazing amount, once there was serious investment from Governments into deploying them (and manufacturing cost savings through volume).

I agree that these panels are likely not the panacea they are made out to be, but they are at least one step in a direction that I believe is "the right one", so I'm happy to invest a little dosh into hopefully improving the world that I interact with on a daily basis.

Thunderfoot can be a bit of a douche, but if you bothered to watch it all the way through he brought up other logistical nightmares something like this could cause. Like the insanity of building a road out of glass. Glass gets slippery when wet, and adding a texture to it wouldn't help because glass gets worn down pretty damn quickly.

At the end he suggests installing solar panels along side of roads rather than making the roads itself out of solar panels would be a far more practical solution.

Yeah. You'd still need a very stable concrete slab to house all the electronics underneath.

No, sorry. It's an objectively stupid idea. It doesn't matter if Albert Einstein himself endorses an objectively stupid idea - it's still an objectively stupid idea. This is such an idea. Solar panels in roads is demonstrably foolish.

Please tell me that isn't you talking in the video.

It's not a good video. I only watched the first 5 minutes, but in that time I noted at least two instances of the announcer ignoring the same evidence he just cited, and one of brushing off the claims of meeting official standards with his "doubts".

Fuck it, any internet asshole can have an opinion, even me. I'm not a standards body, nor yet do I spend hours producing lame youtubes about things I don't understand.

The guy is a nuclear technician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaQI21LwueM

Yeah, when he does his political rants he comes off as any internet asshole, but his science videos have a bit more weight to them.

Just to be a cost effective generator of power, taking into account transmission losses, you would need a high-temperature superconductor (still superconducting at over 150 degrees Fahrenheit, because brother, roads get hot) that costs pennies per mile. Otherwise, I think transmission losses would completely eat up all the power generated within a few hundred yards of each panel.

Yeah, not likely to be commonplace anytime soon. But might be a feasible way to pave your front-yard.

If it holds up to the freeze-thaw better than standard roads, great! If it doesn't, meh.

I'll believe in this more after datapoints on its efficacy / durability.
Put it on a stretch of main roadway for a year,
wouldn't be surprised if it's torn to shreds.

While it's a lot less likely to be deployed up in the northern states where i'm from, I have a hard time believing it would hold up to plowing, either.
Freaking plow drivers don't give a fuck, man.

I contributed to this campaign; they have a proof-of-concept already installed in a parking lot, and frankly I expect that is the "first wave" implementation.

I'm less keen now that they have apparently extended their campaign for another month even though they exceeded their goal. Yes more money helps, but I would rather they said "Thanks everyone, we're off to make things awesome, we may be back for more!" than to say "Holy Fuck, Reading Rainbow got more than we asked [b]in a day[/b]!!! We should ask for more!"

In terms of roll-out of this, there are many, many stationary flat surfaces in the US that could benefit, and there are more in countries around the equator that have less built-up infrastructure that would need replacing. The individual units are servicable, and so in the event that one or two crack, they can be repaired / replaced without having to rip up an entire stretch. They also have paths for cable management and stormwater management, which makes them much better suited for residential areas that have increased needs for this. People automatically jump to "well highways would be bad!" without considering how many roads are on this continent that could be used.

Anyhow, point being (for me at least) that it is a good idea, it has a means to be improved over time as new solar technologies come online, and it meets several functional goals that combined show it to be a worthwhile investment. If someone had a practical, well designed "Solar Shingle" that provided this level of modularity and was within the cost range of current rooftop shingles, I'd back that one too.

I would love nothing more than solar roads. The prototype implementation of this has a long way to go. Like others have said, durability and cost are huge factors. Personally, I cannot imagine producing enough of those panels to cover even a relatively modest stretch of highway. Not to mention, you have to rip out all of the existing road and do something with that material, do a costly install etc etc.

In my mind a substance that behaves like asphalt but also can generate electricity somehow would be the smarter way to go. It would be great to remove petroleum product from the mix as that's not long term. Some sort of organically grown product that binds sand and gravel and also conducts electricity?

Not buying into it. As noted elsewhere, snowplows would likely fuck them up something fierce. Dirt would accumulate on them and block sunlight. Salt put down to melt ice would definitely do bad things to them, even if it was only a little salt.

Neat thought, but impractical. Maybe solar parking areas, but roads? Not likely.

My main concerns:
--Glass wears down easily and when wet will become a skating rink. Even high-pressure tempered glass, it's going to be getting friction elements in a direction it's not built for (why you can use sandpaper to wear down a block of concrete).
--Always-on LEDs will produce more light pollution than the current system of passive reflectors. Even if you limit it to a dynamic area around vehicles this could really add up. I would have liked to see some shots in the video of their surface at night to gauge how bright those lights are and how much spillover there is -- is my bedroom going to light up when a car's within half a mile of it?
--Roads get a lot of varying pressure and severe temperature changes. They mention pressure testing but not temperature, and while the folks in testing departments are no dummies I'd prefer to see that addressed directly.
--Their FAQ index does not list the questions in the same order they're answered (this is just a formatting peeve)

"--Glass wears down easily and when wet will become a skating rink. Even high-pressure tempered glass, it's going to be getting friction elements in a direction it's not built for (why you can use sandpaper to wear down a block of concrete)."

Doesn't seem very practical for many reasons, but it does serve to further demonstrate the potential of solar technology, so I say 'bravo'.

But that impracticality could cause the opposite effect by making people indifferent to the viability of solar power scoff if/when this spectacularly fails.

Putting solar panels on every roof would be a cheaper and easier alternative than literally uprooting the entire nation's infrastructure.

I don't think this is a serious concern. Considering that we can't even muster the ability to repair and maintain our existing infrastructure, it's pretty difficult to see this technology ever put in place in any practical way. But in very limited testing scenarios it could be interesting and informative.

I think the best option for "make something ordinary into a solar panel" would be in researching the possibility of photo-receptive paint. Make everything into a giant leaf.

Grind up all of the "used" tires in the junk yards, mix them with asphalt, pour over miles of heating elements.

...just an idea.

That's already used elsewhere. (bike trails, public basketball courts, etc.)

Would this work well for driveways?