I was excited. I was hopeful. I very much wanted it to be true. But I’m not at all surprised (a bit depressed though) that solar roadways are a bad idea. Three main categories of problems have been illustrated by many.

One is cost. This one is tough as the solar roadway people haven’t been all that forthcoming on how much each panel might be, but estimates based on what little we do know show roadways costing somewhere between 20 and 56 trillion dollars.

Two is solar efficiency. Solar panels are angled to best capture sunlight, the really good ones tilt to follow the sun. Lying flat on the road is just a bad place to collect solar energy. And as everything these roads are supposed to do is based on them collecting massive amounts of solar energy, this is a huge problem.

Three is durability. Rock erodes glass. Rock being ground in by untold tonnes of traffic erode glass fast. Those super expensive modules wouldn’t last too long.

And these are only very brief summations of entire categories of problems that have been pointed out about the roadways.

Now, if the solar roadway people are earnest in their efforts (and I have no reason to suspect they aren’t) they now have over 2 million dollars to get this idea as far as it can possibly go. While that won’t be a fraction of how far they envisioned or how far I had hoped, they should be able to learn something. Whatever they find, doubtless there is an easier and cheaper way we could be learning it, but as is so often the case, we’re doing it the hard way. Salvage what we can and move on.

If nothing else, more people are thinking about roadway improvements, which is a good thing. Someone will look back at this and think, “Boy, that was a horrible idea, the REAL way to improve roads is by…” and they will probably be wrong too. But they will be slightly less wrong. So plods on progress.