What if the spiderweb of roadways that entangle us daily could be used to generate all of the energy we could possibly need...and then some? Scott Brusaw and his company, Solar Roadways, is on the way to making that dream a reality.
Brusaw told YERT, "There are 25,000+ square miles of road surfaces, parking lots, and driveways in the lower 48 states. If we covered that with solar panels with just a 15% efficiency, we'd produce 3 times as more electricity than this country uses on an annual basis...and it's almost enough to power the entire world."
YERT says,
While building the prototype, Scott quickly realized several opportunities for improvements to the design, and he discusses a few of them in the video [below]. Our favorite is to laminate glass panes together to effectively "sandwich" the solar panels and LEDs inside the road surface. This adds both strength, solar panel surface area, and improved visibility to the design. Scott also has plans to set the glass panels on a sturdy mixture that includes plastic garbage pulled from the oceans. Quite an upgrade from traditional asphalt- power-generating glass roads that use up garbage from the ocean!
One of my favorite concepts from the video is to pull garbage out of landfills and the ocean, turn it into "pellets", and use those garbage pellets to make the internal support structure for the solar panels.
It's no secret that the vast wasteland of commercial parking areas is a monolith of wasted space that holds immeasurable potential for solar energy generation. Some shopping malls, corporate offices, and other organizations have begun to install solar canopies over their parking lots – which is a great step towards reclaiming that space – but integrating solar panels into the pavement itself seems to be a much more permanent solution.
What do you think? Are roads and driveways made of solar panels something we could see happen in the next 30-50 years?
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