Solar Freakin' Roadways

[PickelledEggs]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU

This is genius.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Sounds nice except the oil lobby and...uhh..republicans.

[missingnocchi]

Sounds nice except the oil lobby and...uhh..republicans.

Yeah, I'm practically brought to tears watching this video and knowing it will never happen, except maybe in Portland or Seattle.

ETA: According to this article, it would be prohibitively expensive to replace all roads with these, to the order of 56 trillion dollars, 20 times the national budget.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/05/20/forget-roofs-are-solar-roads-the-next-big-thing/

[AllPurposeAtheist]

That doesn't even mention the gazillions invested in road building equipment and asphalt and concrete. Those guys don't want to kill their geese laying their golden eggs. Now the megarich might have their own solar powered roads, but Mr & Mrs Average Schmuck are never going to park their fat asses on such marvels.

[missingnocchi]

So I've researched this and thought about it a lot more, and there are a LOT of caveats to this idea.

First of all, there is no way every road in the US could be replaced with solar roadways, even if it weren't prohibitively expensive. For example, my childhood home is on top of a large hill. A spring runs down this hill and comes up at the bottom of the driveway and into the road. In the winter, this means a huge ice sheet. This road could never be replaced with solar roadways, because the ice is coming from below, not above. They would have to be replaced every year, if not multiple times a year.

Second of all, there are a lot of areas where it would be wasteful to spend the money on these roadways when they aren't going to receive sunlight. To use another example from my hometown, there are a number of roads there that are overhung entirely by a veritable tunnel of trees. Now trees can be removed (if people are willing, that is), but buildings are a different story. Is it really worthwhile to cover the streets of Manhattan in photo-voltaic tiles when the shadow of the skyscraper forest nearly constantly blocks the sunlight? Probably not.

Thirdly, I sincerely doubt the claim that this would produce 3x the energy use of the US. Even in areas that do get enough sunlight for this to be feasible, there are going to be times when shade, cloud cover, or simply heavy traffic prevent full efficiency. Not to mention that these cells will each use a certain amount of energy themselves, and with every possible road in the US replaced with them, that would cause a huge increase in the amount of energy used.

Apart from simply improving on the design, one way to make this more feasible is to design a second kind of tile with no photo-voltaic cell which simply feeds off of the energy producing cells. These cells would obviously be less expensive to produce than the original design, but would still benefit from all of their other advantages.

Still, there are also economic factors to consider. Apart from what APA mentioned, there are many, many more people who would have an interest in this not happening. People who plow roads, construction workers who are only trained for asphalt roads, coal companies, etc. This can't possibly be done quickly, because it would put millions if not tens of millions out of work. Sure, it would create jobs of its own, but all of those people would have to be trained in a brand new technology that hardly anyone knows the specific intricacies of. If this is to happen at all, it must happen over the course of several decades. Overall, my diagnosis is the same as APA's above:

Now the megarich might have their own solar powered roads, but Mr & Mrs Average Schmuck are never going to park their fat asses on such marvels.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I think you perhaps read a bit more into my post. I like the idea of these things and people would need trained no doubt, but like most anything of the scale required you would see giant corporate involvement,  but more importantly they would create lots of jobs beyond initial build. The maintenance would be enormous and there would be areas obviously not suited for them, but the overwhelming amount of roads would far offset the areas not suited where flooding is common and flooding would be a huge concern. Entire sections would need news ways to protect them from water and heat, chsnges in temperatures and so on.  I don't have the illusion that every road would or could be replaced quickly, but I can see it grow gradually. The initial cost would be enormous and that's why the initial roads would most likely be in areas where you don't see many if any old hoopties on the roads. It's great if your home is valued at $10 million, but if your place is HUD subsidized your great great grandkids MIGHT drive on them.