Oh fuck this guy. A cellphone that requires you to carry a battery in a suitcase is not a great idea either. A wheeled vehicle in a country with no roads and horse trails is not a great idea either. An app that reduces public discourse to 140 characters is not a great idea either. A piece of software that allows the very few connected computers to talk to each other, is not a great idea either. Expecting your homemade rocket to revolutionize space flight on its first flight is not a great idea either. Taking on the entrenched auto manufacturers and the legislature of all 50 individual states and the battery industry and the gas and oil industry and public perception is not a great idea either. I could go on and on and on and on. Expecting the first prototype implementation of an audacious idea to be a commercial success is fucking moronic. It's amazing they got ANY power out of these panels. At all. Just finding a glassine surface that kinda worked... Just finding a way to store and distribute that power... Just finding a way to manufacture these panels in ANY quantity at all... Just finding the funding to build such a project... Just finding a municipality that was willing to take a chance on it... ALL of those are successes that would be lauded in ANY other context. Those are all significant technological, legislative, funding, and prototyping wins. Fuck this guy. I bet his next article will be about how stupid NASA was to test a rover in the Arctic. What a fucking tool. However, perhaps there’s a bigger point — solar roads on city streets are just not a great idea.
... and when you can simply pour Perovskites into your glass slurry, and turn it into a 60% efficient solar capturing mechanism, and you already have a town square and a road wired up, and all you need to do is replace the panels with a new type, and see how they work... Innovation happens. Some people are just better positioned to take advantage of these innovations when they come along.
And it's not just the positioning of the panels. Designing solar panels to withstand the abuse of a roadway means they're going to be way more expensive to produce. So even if roadways were somehow as good of a place for solar panels, it's still far less economical. The only way this makes sense is if you have nowhere else to put the panels, but in the areas where the has been tried (USA and Australia), there is an abundance of space for solar installations.
Yeah but... why roads? Why build solar roads specifically? Nobody is arguing against solar power. What benefit do solar roads provide that solar roofs don't? Because the roads will ALWAYS provide less power per square foot no matter what technology advancements happen.
The key benefit of solar roads is the reduction in toxic, non-reusable materials. Glass is just easier to get, form, and re-use than asphalt, which simply is toxic waste, temporarily held in semi-stasis in the form of a road. In the pacific islands they use shells for roads. Hard on the tires, but almost infinitely reusable for them. In India, they have thousands of miles of road made from recycled plastic waste. It's an improvement, but - over time - the road is just a temporary placeholder before the plastic makes it to its final home: unreducible waste.
If you are claiming glass is a better top surface than asphalt construction, you have a ways to go to show it. I couldn't find anything on shells in roads, but unless you are talking about something equivalent to a compacted gravel semi-improved road, I bet they use a binder, and I bet the binder is asphalt. Easier to form seems unlikely since asphalt melts a lot lower, and to render glass to give it some impact resistance requires tight temperate control. So you can't feed sand, lime, and soda into a paver and spit a tempered glass road surface out the back. If you want tempered, you make it in a plant and buy a brick paving machine if you don't want to lay your cobblestones by hand. You can feed asphalt and aggregate into and roll a lane's width of road that hardly needs more than striping. And re-use: when they resurface asphalt, the asphalt binding and the aggregate are reused. And another thing is pedestrian hazard - asphalt is petroleum, but at least it sticks to the aggregate mostly. Glass chips won't and thats a hazard, and if they grind small enough to blow around and breathe they're a worse hazard. And there is a trade-off between hardness and flexibility that goes into road surfaces- too flexible and the surface cracks, to stiff and any settling causes it to crack. Asphalt doesn't have some great combination of properties that makes everyone used it, it just wins out because it's easy enough to build and forgiving enough to roadbed prep and cheap enough (because you're using the same material over and over) and predictable and time tested enough. Glass as a road surface has a long uphill battle to fight.Glass is just easier to get, form, and re-use than asphalt