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My thing still stands, it's cheaper, easier and more effective to put them next to roads... so like... why not...?

If a solar roadway breaks you gotta shut off the whole road to repair it if a solar panel next to a road breaks it causes no traffic disruption... They don't need special coatings and can be angled towards the sun, they wouldn't need heaters to stop snow from covering them because they could angle down, or at the very least they'd need fewer heaters and the angle would assist the snow falling off...

If a company wants to build solar roads, and another company built solar arrays next to roads, which are half the price and maintenance, and nearly double the output... which company will succeed?

This is less like comparing VHS and Betamax (despite the fact Betamax was actually more expensive than VHS) more like comparing VHS with digital download... sure VHS are still used occasionally... but for every practical purpose a digital file would be better.

This naysaying piling on is bordering on obsessiveness at this point, you know.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter...we (or at least Solar Roadways) live in a country where people can pursue their ideas and their dreams even when some or many people think it's silly. And sometimes it doesn't work out, but in many cases it does...or at least it does some good even if they don't accomplish exactly what they aimed to do. I think that'll happen here, and no amount of piling on is going to convince me otherwise.

We actually only find out that the other is posting after they do.. >.>
Not intentionally piling. My predictions for this project: Huge costs, zero profits.

So this just showed up on the reddit front page today:

https://reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5yp2l0/americas_first_solar_roadway_is_a_total_disaster/

My predictions for this project: Huge costs, zero profits.

Ah, the project people love to hate.

I don't think anyone expected such an early, experimental concept to be economically viable currently. To be fair the Sandpoint prototype was just that, a prototype, and hopefully they'll learn from the problems its had and improve their product. The only critique I have is that they may be trying to do too much too soon...instead of focusing on a simple, rugged, efficient, and cheap source of solar power that you can put on a road, they're doing these bells and whistles that make the tiles more complex and more likely to have problems. Another company just laid a kilometer of solar roadway using their own cheaper, simpler tiles in France, and while it's hardly economically viable itself, it's at least functional as far as I know. I believe they also have plans to lay solar roadway in Georgia as well.

At the end of the day I still think if people want to pursue this they should, and if others what to pursue other ways they think are better, they should too. I think any investment into solar power is awesome...the more research and investment is done, the better and cheaper the technology will be for all applications. And even if solar roadways never become a big thing, hopefully the people pursuing them will at least make some discoveries that will help in other applications.