For the last several years I’ve been seeing occasional enthusiasm for “Solar Roadways.” If you have missed out on this, the idea is: hexagonal solar panels that you lay down to form ground surfaces like roads, parking lots, walkways, basketball courts, etc. The panels would be toughened to withstand automobiles driving over them, and would have integrated into them LEDs and microcomputers so that you could “paint” your lines and symbols and symbols and whatnot with light, rather than paint. The lines could be changed… parking lots could add or subtract handicapped parking spots, speed limits could be changed by having a great big “85” lit up in the road surface every half mile change to “95,” so on.
Sounds great, right??
No. It sounds freakin’ retarded.
I’ve never bothered to post anything about it because the idea seemed so patently and obviously absurd to me right from the get-go that I immediately shoved the thought aside, assuming it would vanish shortly like so many other ill-conceived notions. The world is *filled* with ideas for technologies that might sound good on an emotional level, but don’t stand up to even minimal mathematical scrutiny. This is one of many, many reasons why the public and the government *REALLY* need a better understanding of the basic precepts of science… not least of which being basic skepticism.
Anyway, I’ve tried to ignore solar roadways. Because it’s simply not going to work. But that hasn’t stopped people from throwing money at it. And rather than going through all the ways in which this is dumb (top of *my* list was “You really want to drive on glass?”), I’ve linked below the latest video on the topic from pro-science (and, bonus, anti-SJW) YouTuber where he smacks down the whole concept with logic and – GASP – math. Included are bits of video of the first public installation of a solar roadway, and it’s just tragically sad. Not only is the construction of the small patch of some thirty or so panels laughable amateurish, there’s a seventy-five percent failure rate in the panels in the first *week.* And that’s without cars driving on them.
“Solar roadways” is what happens when you prioritize “hope” over “math.” Like a jetliner designed by economists and built by poets, brain surgery conducted by homeopaths, a skyscraper designed by musicians and built by spirit mediums, or a nation guided by politicians, “solar roadways” is just a bad idea.