The most brilliant thing you've ever heard ofFollow

That is a horribly annoying video.



And I'm guessing the up front cost will scare people away.

The up front cost would likely be prohibitive for the private use they advocate as a first step. It's unlikely that a solar driveway would recoup its cost any time soon, I don't need LEDs in my driveway and my driveway is largely shaded anyway. A store or business parking lot may pick up more sun (although when a car is parked on a panel, it's not producing electricity) but with a much higher upfront cost. I assume most stores don't need to change parking configurations pretty much at all so again the LED aspect is an unnecessary cost over good ole cheap paint. How visible is the LED in bright sunlight?

I would think the glass would be reflective in bright sun. Also, traction on it would be terrible especially in rain and sleet (despite the 'warming' property, it's not going to out-melt a heavy falling snow). If the glass is textured to reduce glare and increase traction, it'll be worse for capturing sunlight. How well do the panels work when covered in tire rubber residue, oil, mud and other debris? Again, despite the pollyanna depiction in the video, they're not going to out-melt a heavy snowfall in any way that keeps traffic moving through the storm so how well do they hold up to being plowed? Will they get scratched and scraped and will they still function?

LEDs all over all the surfaces seem like an incredible amount of light pollution. Not everyone wants to live in Tron World.

A major refitting of all our roads with panels and access tunnels is laughable to imagine. Maybe the surface maintenance is easier (taking video at face value) but the part where you have to remove the existing roadway down five or six feet, lay the underground cables and tunnel, provide the appropriate base, etc would make this insanely expensive. Tremendous upfront costs that no one is going to want to take on.

That's off the top of my head. Seems like a cute idea for a walking/biking path or a courtyard though and probably good for achieving a LEED Gold rating.

I see in the new video that the glass is textured. Not sure if that was in the previous video, I missed it or I skipped it.

Cost and Wear are going to be the two things that make this very difficult to implement on a large scale. Right now, it costs about $240,000 to resurface a mile of 4 lane road, not including bed prep, grinding, etc. These glass solar cells, even assuming a very super low cost cell are going to be much more expensive just for the surface material costs alone, ignoring the power runs and inverters, etc. To cover a typical 1 square mile section of road which is 27,878,400 square feet with industry standard 200 watt $200 per panel 8 square foot panels, you would need 34,84800 panels, at a minimal cost of $696,960,000. So call it $697 million give or take to replace $0.24 million worth of paving.

Then there are the wear concerns. A typical interstate aggregate asphalt paving surface will wear almost half an inch over a 5 year period with winter driving. The concrete ones wear much less, but are more expensive to put in. Glass isn't a really good wear surface for friction, and studded tires would pretty much instantly destroy it. There is also a very high temperature differential. A large double trailer truck fully loaded driving down a road at high speed generates a huge amount of heat at the road surface and at it's tires. That coupled with a glass surface prone to temperature shock might be a bad thing, even with the built in surface heaters.

All that being said, I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea used strategically. There are millions of miles of road shoulders and sidewalks surrounding important roads, and heating a roadbed during icy conditions would flat out save lives. If they were to put something like that in strips along areas that would not experience all that much wear, it would probably work fine and be effective if the cost could be made to work. I fully expect solar panel prices to keep going down as the new printable high efficient ones start coming on market, so it's not out of the realm of possibility.

The aggregate road paving process is actually pretty green as it is to resurface a road anyways. they typically grind off the outer wear layer, take that ground up material back to be recycled into new asphalt at the plant, add some new oil and new rock to make up for wear loss, then put about 95% of it back on the road again with 5% new material. There are new materials too that are starting to be used that allow groundwater to actually penetrate the asphalt, leading to less surface water in rain conditions, and also letting rain water get back into the soil below and filter down into water tables, leading to less water loss due to surface covering. Long term that's probably going to be more important for parking lots.

The most promising electricity from road surface technology I have seen is a technique that uses piezoelectric cells to harvest electricity from the moving weight of a vehicle. Similar to this: http://www.innowattech.co.il/ There is no reason that you couldn't make that compatible with existing paving practices. Asphalt certainly can be made electrically conductive with the introduction of metal powder to the mix, and the aggregate could be replaced with piezoelectric quartz crystals, pave the whole thing, call it $2-4 million per 4 lane mile, and then yeah, maybe you have something that's affordable enough to be implemented on a larger scale.

Before the roadways all get solerified though, people really should pass laws allocating funding to require solar cells on top of the millions of government owned buildings across the country at a federal, state, county, and city level. Even ignoring the ones that would be infeasible to add cells to for historical building preservation purposes, you're still talking a huge square footage area of publically owned roof space that the government already has right of way for.

Isn't that what they're (working on) doing with sidewalks? Paving Times Square with that stuff would produce enough power to run one of those giant signs...

With a piezoelectric crystal, the amount of force (weight) you apply = the amount of electricity you generate. Driving a large truck over a piezoelectric crystal would generate as much electrical energy as that trucks weight of people walking on that same cell. The higher weight you can drive over it, and the more rapidly you can do so, the more energy you recover, at the potntial cost of wear and tear. You could always put an upper solar layer on top of a lower piezoelectric layer and generate both ways, as they aren't mutually exclusive technologies. Piezoelectrics makes more sense right now in roadways though than it would on sidewalks in my oppinion. Except for really super heavy travel areas, you wouldn't ever generate enough electricity to make it worth the effort otherwise. Plus, piezo and solar electricity are burst energy sources. They aren't a steady delivery stream, so you need to be able to store and release that energy as needed quickly and efficiently. Right now the best technology we have to do that is the Molten Salt Battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_battery which work well, but involve corrosive salt lava, which tends to cause some occasional issues here and there. But you put in some sort of power generation station like that, you'll either need to dump the energy to the grid through a meter, or store and distribute it as needed.

This device addresses an issue that doesn't exist. Not the "clean power" part but it presupposes that the issue with solar panels is a lack of places to put them. The actual issue is cost versus efficiency. We'd be far better off starting with covering every roof with solar panels than every road. Less labor versus replacing all the roads, roofs are less likely to be shaded, less maintenance vs a road surface, etc. Plus rooftop solar panels wouldn't require the additional road-glass and LED nonsense so they'd be cheaper and with less manufacturing energy cost.

I've got my eye on the new fully electric BMW.

I really wish this concept were feasible. Hopefully they'll try it in small areas first. I think it would be a great idea to start with sidewalks or parking lots.

Sounds reasonable, you know start with small squares of the stuff on various south-facing rooftops and try to grow it from there.

It could work.

I admit I didn't read the whole article, but what is the purpose of building the panels into roadways?

Flat, cleared area usually in direct sunlight most of the day. I assume. I didn't read any of the article.

Not only did I decline to read the article, I also knifed the guy that wrote it and spat in his eye as he bled to death.

All the roads are going to be mostly abandoned next year, anyway.