Historic Route 66 To Feature Solar Road Technology (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has announced plans to upgrade a small stretch of the historic Route 66 roadway with solar-powered panels. The panels, which are created by Solar Roadways, can support the weight of cars, feature built-in LEDs to create light-up road markings, and can be used to generate electricity to donate back to the grid. The company has won a number of contracts with the U.S. Department of Transportation, though it's unlikely we'll see solar-powered roadways throughout the country anytime soon. MoDOT said it hopes to lay the first panels starting with the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center by the end of the year, The Kansas City Star reports. SolarCity released a new report recently that says their solar power systems have a usable lifetime of at least 35 years, which is 40% longer than what the market expects.

Comments

Bloody F!@#ing Idiots.

[jcochran]

The concept of "solar roadways" has already been so thoroughly debunked, it's totally unbelievable that anyone would fund them.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Bloody F!@#ing Idiots.

[Solandri]

Jones' mistake is that he doesn't understand the economics. Most of the cost of paving a road is not the surface material, it's the labour and the equipment.

If the marginal cost of making a road a solar road is $x / Watt of installed capacity, and the number of Watt-hours generated over the expected lifetime adds up to a value of $y, and x > y, then the labor and equipment cost doesn't matter. It's never worth it.

You're demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding about opportunity costs and percentages which is all too common (and is a large part of how marketers exploit people's purchasing habits to upsell you). That if a cost of an option exceeds its benefit, that you can somehow make it worthwile by reducing its percentage share of the overall cost. i.e. When a product is 100% of the cost, it's not worth it. But if you add it onto another much more expensive purchase, it's now "only" 1% of the cost and that somehow makes it now worth it. Yes the percentage got smaller, but it's irrelevant. You're comparing against an absolute benefit, so you need to use the absolute cost to make a proper comparison. No those floor mats aren't worth $150. But add them onto a $25,000 car, and suddenly people will pay it because it only adds 0.6% to the price of the car.

You can argue that the cost of a solar road surface is reduced compared to plain panels because the people making the road would be doing the labor anyway, and that it's no additional work to lay down the PV material since (for installation purposes) it behaves similar to other material they're already using to make the road (I dunno, I haven't read up on solar roads). Or you could argue the PV material replaces some other material they're using to build the road, and so represents less additional cost than just the PV material alone. But you cannot argue that it somehow magically becomes worth it because you're tacking on a bunch of other costs (labor and equipment) which you would be paying for anyway.

Another crucial aspect here is that electricity cost is about 20-35 cents/kWh in Europe, while it's only 11.5 cents/kWh in the U.S. So a solar project that's marginally "worth it" in Europe can be a total money loser in the U.S. (unless you're in Hawaii).

Re:Bloody F!@#ing Idiots.

[Citizen of Earth]

The idea is pure lunacy. Here's more details on your test cycle path from thunderf00t. They got about half of the power you'd get from putting the solar panels on a roof.

Re:This should be interesting.

[jellomizer]

Sometimes it is a good idea to test this stuff out before jumping into conclusions on why it may be a bad idea.

We are moving from a success reward system to a failure avoidance culture. Lets avoid making things better because there is a chance that someone could make it worse.
Lets try it out, see the failure points and see if those have a workaround.
Vs. hiding our head in fear that it may not work out 100% right at go live.