SOLAR PANEL ROADS

not to mention the cost of repairing these solar panels, putting electrical lines under or near the roads, cleaning the solar panels of dust, ownership of the panels and electricity, etc etc.

The real problem here is that's fixing a problem we don't have. Electricity is cheap and easy to make already. Even if you did want to get a lot of power out of the sun, there's huge vacant areas of land the government owns but can't sell or use that could be used without mounting the huge cost of solar panel roads.

alternately put the solar panels somewhere where people do not drive over them and also remove "standard road removal" from the equation entirely.

so uh do you have enough money to end world hunger because I sure don't

author=Craze
Hexatona, you're Canadian. Don't tell me you wouldn't love LED road lines and roads that melt ice by themselves.

If some of our cities had this, and it worked, I would cry manly tears of joy.

hehe what a crazy idea, wouldnt that be great if that actually happened. Might cost a fair bit though dont you think. And what about the heat and electricity that you would have to drive over, might be a bit dangerous too. 1000s of volts passing underneath everyone! http://www.solarpanelscamping.com.au has this publication on the dangers of solar power, and also the costs of raw materials, what do you guys think?

I actually do a lot of research into alternative energies, as well as biomimicry (Which is designing technologies or processes that draw inspiration from biology). The interesting thing about doing this kind of research is that the major problems that arise with all of the new ideas for innovation are not the ones you might expect. Steep cost is certainly a consideration, but new plans that do manage to get implemented are often derailed by unexpected issues resulting in millions of lost dollars. For example, one building tried using solar panels to produce electricity to help run the building. The light reflected from the solar panels ended up focusing on very inconvenient places. Most notably the apartment building next door and the park across the street. The temperature inside the apartment building climbed drastically and resulted in significantly higher cooling costs and the park across the street ended up with several patches of dead plants. The company that installed the solar panels had to take them down and was out the money. The interactions these technologies have is one of the things that is most often overlooked and yet has one of the biggest impacts. Another fun story is of a building that modelled it's shape after a termite mound to get a passive heating and cooling system working inside the building. They built it facing the wrong direction though since the design would have only worked with the wide section facing north/south. Oops.