Read other replies.

Regardless they are horrible due to every aspect of them being inherently retarded.

Best case scenario? 1 trillion dollars of electricity generated a year.

Great right? But it costs 70 trillion to build them.(Not counting the electrical infrastructure, batteries, grid changes and hundreds of other things needed)

So 70 years to pay them off right? Being very generous.

Nope, they have an estimated lifetime of 15 years, even being generous and saying 25 years you generate 25 trillion$ and lost 70 trillion and need to replace the whole thing again.

They inherently have no value.

Even if they generated more then they cost, they are still pretty bad.

Engineers weigh in the glass itself is horrendous idea, and won't even come close to 1 trillion generated. Some estimates put it as low as 200 billion.

Materials can only have certain properties. For example you know how a diamond is the hardest material on the planet and see in shows people hit diamonds with hammers to prove they are real? Don't ever do that, a diamond will turn to dust if you hit it with a hammer. Hardness means it's going to be extremely brittle.

So when they say glass is harder then asphalt it also means it's going to instead of wearing down due to scratching just outright shatter with enough load in the right place, or rock in tire treads hits it the wrong way.

Even then they outright lie. Asphalt isn't a single thing, and when they say glass is harder then it doesn't make sense, it might be harder them some of the rocks in asphalt but not all of them, not to mention the countless rocks and dirt that will be applied with high pressure to the glass surfaces.

We use asphalt because it's plastic it deforms and distributes weight extremely well, we don't use tiles on roadways for a reason, even places that used to use bricks/tiles all changed them due to large vehicles wrecking havoc on not only the tiles but the underneath due to differential loading.

They say they'll make it recycled by using recycled glass and show them shoveling glass into a wheel barrel, coloured glass does not make clear glass, nor can you from coloured glass. For stuff like tempered glass you pretty much need new glass or high quality clear glass.

Concrete is needed underneath them. We don't use concrete for roadways for a reason. Water freezing and expanding destroys concrete. Asphalt is plastic and can expand with water pressure and even then over time still fails to water and loading problems. Concrete is also HORRIBLE for the environment as are solar panels and electronics from the materials needed to produce them, and concretes greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar panels are great, but due to environmental impact the best case scenario is going to be the highest efficiency put in places that optimize light collection and wear and tear. Like... Roofs.

The kicker though? Asphalt itself is 99% recycled, and even brand new asphalt is a byproduct so if we don't use asphalt anymore, all that shit is going into landfills/being buried/put somewhere. Why not put a byproduct to use? Especially when it's a highly recyclced product.

LEDs aren't bright enough to see in the day. Covered by many, and even ones you can see in the day require more power then the panels generate. So what's the point?

You can't make use of solar panel energy right away. Well you can, using 12v DC devices or 24v DC devices, and let's give a quick lesson in electricity to show how bad these are.

This is going to be simplified but it essentially goes like this.

We have something called transmission loss when transporting energy. Energy is lost as heat mostly.

We when designing something and to keep this simple in your house we have acceptable losses.

In Canada we can not exceed a 3% voltage loss in homes.

So when designing the layout of wiring, we can't just put it anywhere, the shorter the better and we must optimize things. In fact it's not even 120v at your outlets, coming into your home it might be 125v but by the time it gets to panel, and to your outlet it could be 115-120v.

Power/Watts/Energy is Volts * Amps. So if voltage drops, overall power drops. It's lost.

It makes sense you would think to lose the least amount of power possible right? Why generate 1,000 watts and only get to use 400 watts when if you properly design it you can use 900 watts.

Well we know how to effectively do that. Higher voltage means less power loss. Alternating current has less power loss over DC. More amperage is going to mean more power loss.

So that's why we transport electricity on high voltage transmission lines upwards of 120,000v AC to 500,000 v AC and we STILL get an average power loss of 7% for our transmission of power. Lost. Gone. Kaput.

So guess what that 12v DC and 24v DC need to have done to it?

Be converted to AC and high voltage.

Here's the thing. Inverters that change DC to AC or AC to DC have power loss as well.

So far you lose power converting the energy to DC to AC.

However now you need high power transmission lines ON EVERY ROAD THAT SOLAR POWERED. You would need transformers everywhere which poses both a huge environmental risk as well as safety risk and maintenance risk in general.

Now would that be the same with solar panels on the roads? Yup and it depends. The best place is roofs because we can directly either store the power, or invert it to usable power with minimal losses and put it back into the existing grid.

We'd also have to completely change our grid, have huge storage facilities for power and...

Oh god I could go on for hours why this is a horrible idea from every conceivable angle. Nothing makes this a good idea, whether it is affordable or not.

Now the ONLY conceivable thing I can even think of that makes these worth it in any way shape or form is maybe a path, maybe a drive way, but even then it's still in every way shape or form better to place it on roofs.

Hell remember that high voltage power lines we need? Costs about 1 million dollar a mile. Oh we can do it underground? That costs 10 million dollars a mile. Now try and calculate the cost of that for every mile of road in the US alone.

Oh how about melting snow? Needs more power then they can even generate.

Let's assume 100% efficient solar panels? Still retarded to put them in the road.

It's just an idea that seems vaguely cool on the surface, but everything is shit upon shit upon shit below it.