What price green solutions?

[bekdik]

Saw these two articles.

Solar Roadway

What is all this going to cost?

The average cost of asphalt roads in 2006 was roughly $16 per square foot. The cost does not include maintenance (pot hole repair, repainting lines, etc.) or snow/ice removal. The average lane width is 12 feet, so a 4 lane highway would be 12' (width per lane) x 4 (lanes) x 5280' (one mile) = 253440 square feet. Multiply this by $16 per square foot and your one-mile stretch of asphalt highway will cost $4,055,040.00 and will last an average of seven years.

We plan to design the Solar Roadways™to last at least 21 years (three times that of asphalt roads), at which time the panels would need to be refurbished. Adding no additional cost to the current asphalt system, this will allow us to invest about $48 ($16 x 3) per square foot. This means that if each individual panel can be made for no more than $6912.00, then the Solar Roadway™ can be built for the same cost as current asphalt roads. However, asphalt roads don't give you anything back.

Wind farms can appear sinister to the weatherman

The spinning blades atop 200-foot towers might appear to the naked eye as ... well ... spinning blades. But to Doppler radar, wind farms appear as a splatter of green, yellow, orange and red -- much like a violent storm or even a tornado.

[davemc]

ROFL! My road is offline!


Otherwise, I like it.
Here in SA - KZN - Margate, a 1KM stretch of tarred 2 lane road re-surfacing costs R17m.
We could have covered the road in gold for that price, so, we may as well use this kind of technology.

[BCO]

Jeez those solar roadways are awesome.