Bottom line: Great we need to do this, but we’ve to clean up after ourselves and help out the oil states.

And when using electric vehicles, the road can also fuel your car *while you drive*!

Would superconducting super grid power lines with no transmission loss act as a storage device instead of using ultra capacitors(Eestor)? Is the technology there for this?

Solasta is an interesting solar cell enhancing start up that may be able to get the efficiency rates up to 66%. Kleiner/Perkins is involved with them. I’m thinking a partnership between Solasta and Nanosolar could be beneficial to getting very cheap highly efficient solar cells. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24240/page2/
Another possibility(Scott has stated he’s talked to this Idaho lab about this technology. It could be 88% efficient and work in bad weather and night)http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1329/

This would probably be too expensive to put this many LED’s in the thing but it would be cool if the road could look like this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niGDrvHYnew&feature=related

I believe you are intending to have standard sized pannels which makes sence from a manufacturing point of view, however man hole cover positions, sewer access pannels etc.. are not in set positions thus requiring holes in a pannel of varying sizes and positions. This may present a bulk manufacturing issue. Another manufacturing issue would be, are you assembling components manufactured elsewhere or are you producting your own solar cells, glass pannels, etc.. either method will require a lot of supply chains ,diverse sources for components supplier quality control etc..

Are any actual pannels in use at this time or is this still just a great theory. If these pannels exist then a usefull product would be to allow homeowners to replace their driveways with your panneling and an appropriate hookup for the residence.

Oh and who knew Al Gore’s phrase “internet superhighway” could be prophetic. haha you should use that phrase somehow in selling your idea.

Another way to lower overall costs is to have high speed electric tracks next to and powered by the solar highway to be used to replace the semi trucks in transporting goods and to decrease overall auto traffic by providing high speed personal travel. This will lower maintenance costs of the roadway by taking the semis off of it and it will drastically lower shipping costs(no driver, fuel, less maintenance of transportation vehicle, goods get there 5-7 times faster to their destination). Imagine a shipping company having a fleet of individual, remote controlled train cars(not connected like a train just the cars themselves)and these driver less cargo cars are then sent anywhere in the U.S. by remote control at speeds of 300 mph. Imagine someone in New York wanting to travel to LA and instead of flying or driving he hops on a high speed train and arrives 12 hours later.

I wonder if the glass on top of the road could be designed to have a magnifying effect to increase the energy each panel produces. If so this would mean less mileage of roadways would be needed which would lower costs.

I also hope the solar roadway itself is aesthetically pleasing. I’m thinking a transparent roadway or one that is white would look like a sea of glass or ice. That would look nice.

Use a working liquid other than water and you can probably run a compressor for air conditioning during the summer.

I read the inquiry as to how the roads would be powered at night. As I understand it (don’t quote me I am not one of the inventors) the idea is that the roads will move the energy as needed nation wide (and maybe even internationally). Since the whole road is a gigantic energy grid the energy could be rapidly transferred to other parts of the country as needed. Not to mention the cells will store extra energy from the day that could be used later. I hope that helped to answer your question.

Night time won’t pose a problem as energy can be transfered in any direction. For instance, from the went to the east after the east has gone dark, and from east to west in the morning.