Did that ever actually go anywhere? Pretty sure they collected a million dollars then just vanished into the wind.
No, they actually built a stretch of it. It's one of those "cool on paper, impractical in practice" ideas that certain people have to actually attempt before they realize what can go wrong with it: there is no transparent material available that can 1) allow through as close to 100% of all available sunlight as possible, 2) is durable enough to withstand the weight and stresses of having cars and trucks driving on it all the time and 3) doesn't get scratched to shit nearly-immediately, substantially reducing the amount of sunlight that actually makes it to the PV cells.
In short, it works great for like a week after installation, but then it gets scuffed up pretty quickly by ordinary use and stops producing much (if any) energy.
While they
should have been able to foresee those problems in advance, I can at least respect that they built and deployed an actual prototype in the field for real-world testing. You never know, they could have lucked into a material that was easy to refurbish or could withstand wear better without scuffing. At least they used the money for the intended purpose, which is more than you can say for a lot of research these days, especially "environmental" shit.
The experiment
did inspire a couple of other potentially more interesting ideas though. The first was solar canopies over roadways, another "sounds neat but is too impractical to use" idea. Roadways covered by canopies produce shade and leave the upper surface for solar panels, but they're expensive to build, can trap exhaust longer, and they're not aesthetically pleasing at all (who wants to drive in a perpetual tunnel instead of rolling around under the mid-day sun?).
The second, more interesting idea was putting pressure pads on surface roads to generate little "burps" of electricity by mechanical movement as cars rolled over the surface and compressed it with their weight. Of course the trick there is to convey enough mechanical energy to the generator portion while still cushioning the vehicles driving over the pads. Different kind of wear-and-tear problem since you need some sort of semi-flexible padding (like rubber, which degrades over time) unless you can build it perfectly flush with the road surface, but even then just leaving it "bare metal" that flexes is risky in the event of damage -- suddenly you've got sharp metal sticking up out of the roads.
I dunno, I think they'd be better off trying to do something with all the heat asphalt collects during the day if they're so insistent on generating power from roads. It's still a neat idea. It's just that like so many other "neat ideas" it's a pain in the ass to actually put to practical use.
