Solar Roadways
If you’ve come across the concept of the “solar roadway,” you know that replacing all our roads with this new kind of highly durable solar photovoltaic panel would generate more energy than all of us are using — three times over. Moreover, the idea comes along with some really cool side benefits, e.g., we’d have roadways that never accumulate snow and ice, and that warn the driver when a moose inadvertently steps onto the street. When it comes down to economics, promoters claim that “it pays for itself.” After all, it generates electricity, which has a cash value, so, technically, this is true.
But when most people say that something “pays for itself,” they’ve taken that concept to a point that such a statement has meaning. Solar roadway promoters admit that they don’t know the cost of the project, so here’s some help. By my rough calcs, based on the idea of converting the 3.9 million miles of U.S. roadways, the price-tag would be in the neighborhood of $50 trillion, about $160,000 for every man, woman and child.
When someone tells you that something “pays for itself,” it’s fair to ask them: How fast? If I ask to borrow $100 from you, and offer to repay you a dime a year for the next 1000 years, I’m guessing you wouldn’t find that too attractive. Sadly, the business case here isn’t too much more appealing.
I’m inclined to agree, and many forms of PV aren’t especially environmentally friendly or highly resource-available.
Alternatively, we could build ten thousand Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants, each a mile square – completely proven power generation technology – dotted along our Sunbelt from Southern California to Georgia.
Using our proven storage technologies – such as molten salt and pumped hydro – and transmitting power over High-Voltage Direct-Current (HVDC), those plants will provide all the electricity currently consumed all across the entire continental US. This system will also scale up nicely to power a new electric infrastructure for freight, as well as public and individual transportation. Advances in battery technology will also very soon compete in the grid energy storage arena.
Those 10,000 plants will cover less than one third of a percent of the land area in the lower 48 states (about the total area of the little state of Vermont), and at $600 million per square mile, those ten thousand CSP plants will total $6 trillion (plus a few hundred billion for infrastructure improvements).
It still sounds like a lot of cash, but that’s just nine years of our foreign oil expenses (and that’s without even mentioning any military savings) – and it’ll give us a permanently maintainable system in place that provides cheap, clean and sustainable energy for all our nation’s electricity.
It’s a big project, but it’s worth the cost. From there, it will then be a relatively small matter to scale that CSP system up for all the rest of our energy needs.
“If that’s true,” you say (and it is true), “why aren’t we doing it?”
Ask why seat belts took decades to become a required standard in cars.
Ask why US vehicle fuel efficiency still drags behind Japan and Europe, and why we’re still far behind the standards that we ourselves achieved decades ago during WWII.
American broadband speed (and coverage) is yet another example of the willful restraint of technology that’s been inflicted on us by entrenched vested interests.
Unless they’re forced by law to behave otherwise, corporations will do only whatever will make them or save them a buck, no matter what the (temporarily) externalized consequences.
CSP is completely doable and is, in fact, inevitable. It’s already on the grid in California, Arizona, Spain and the United Arab Emirates, and many other places around the globe. The vast majority of the material needed is concrete, steel and glass.
The present barriers against this elegant solution are neither technical nor resource-based, nor even financial – they’re purely political barriers that are erected and reinforced by bribery, and by those intractable fossil interests that do the bribing.
Isn’t it about time We the People stood up, and put an end to bribery, and to the ruin it spreads across our society and the world?
Excellent. Thanks for being a part of the process by which we’re making it happen.