This thread is inspired by another: view original post
Just gonna tl;dr this shit since this needs to get cleared up, fast.
-Each tile costs roughly $3,000 per square foot, not including cost of maintenance and installation (holy shit that's a lot!)
-Roads are not an ideal surface for solar panels because they are frequently covered by cars, dirt, oil, water, etc
-Glass is unsuitable to drive on
-The government would need to buy a separate power line system (cannot be simply "plugged into" existing power lines)
-Solar panels are optimally angled towards the sun, not straight up
-The issue with solar isn't the lack of space to put panels (they go very well on roofs, parking cover, etc.), it's the current cost of producing and maintaining panels vs. the value of the energy they generate
Watch the video for some more. Solar roadways were never going to happen. Maybe next time you guys will use a bit more scrutiny after watching a video with a caricatured person saying "whoooaaa" liked a stoned dumbass, or telling you that the world is going to look like Tron.
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Wait, some people seriously thought solarpanels on a roadway surface was a viable energy solution? The idea that even using an acrylic surface to protect the solar cells would survive road traffic and other environmental damage is absurd. That's not to say that large projects where solar cells are installed on great tracts of land or already existing infrastructure won't happen, but it certainly won't happen on roadways. Not using solar cells at least. Perhaps something thermal could work, but there are still a ton of engineering obstacles to overcome before anyone would seriously look at it as an energy source in the macro.