Solar Roadway (Bike-Lane) to be open to the public in the Netherlands!

So Netherlands will be the First to Have Solar Roadway (Well it's a Bike Lane Sadly) Open to the Public.

Will this be the Kick in the Arse that will get Other Countries to Adopt this?

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/11/09/netherlands-is-the-first-country-to-open-solar-road-for-public/

who know what the future beholds but the Netherlands are willing to take that risk to find out.

 

Solar roads are not awesome. They are inefficient and a waste of money.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZBrHqTJk4&list=UU2DjFE7Xf11URZqWBigcVOQ

Yeah, sorry but solar roadways have been pretty much debunked.

Well they are being installed, so we shall see what happens.

They will install a few solar sidewalks as a "proof of concept" which will probably power just a few street lights, and after a few years, maybe even a decade or two, the pathways will be replaced with something practical. No matter what improvements are made in solar technology, it will always make much more sense to put these panels somewhere where you can actually orient them to face the sun (they must always be oriented tangential to the ground on a roadway) and somewhere where you don't need thick glass between the sun and the solar panel. 

So. If I did my math right.

3,000,000 Euro for 70M. That is 42,857.14 Euro per M.

That is $16,305.57 per foot.

The average person can install a concrete sidewalk for $3.79 per foot or 9.96 Euro per M. 

That is over 4000% more expensive and for what? 

It won't generate that much electricity- never more to cover the cost. They will be slippery in the winter. They will degrade and need to be replaced more often. They will become less efficient as people use them and they get dirty as in the photo. So that means increased maintenance costs. I could go on.

This is just so incredibly stupid. Can't wait for the legal battle between the Dutch company and everyone else who claims to have invented this technology...

100M by 2016... It'll be ripped up and the solar panels repurposed by next year.

 

Your point rings true but your math is off by a fair margin. Concrete is $3.79/ft2if the sidewalk is 2m wide then the price of the sidewalk would be a little less than $5000 per square foot. It also isn't entirely fair to use that $3 million figure for the cost of the sidewalk. Most of that is probably R&D. I agree that it will never be practical as a baseload source of energy and won't amount to anything more than a novelty, but your numbers are really off.