Dream about a sun path

Slapping solar cells on the highway, an American couple in Idaho is looking for ways to create smart roads that not only serve people's travel but also meet many items. Other targets such as reducing traffic accidents, saving fossil fuels.

With slices of photovoltaic cells on the surface, roads can turn solar energy into electricity supplied to residential areas on both sides of the road. Exploiting this huge alternative energy source, the road called Solar Roadways will also reduce the use of gasoline for power generation and motoring.

Fossil fuels are also reduced in the making of sugar because asphalt has been replaced by photovoltaic panels. And in the winter, this high-tech road can generate heat to clear snow itself, helping to reduce the number of traffic accidents caused by heavy snow making the road surface slippery. Moreover, Solar Roadways road surface is also equipped with LED panels that can display the traffic lanes and instructions previously used to be painted.

Solar Roadways are fitted with LED panels that can show traffic lanes and traffic paths that were previously painted with paint.(Photo: Spiegel)

Photovoltaic paving is the idea of ​​husband Julie and Scott Brusaw, living in the city of Sandpoint. 'At first, half of the people thought we were geniuses, the other half thought we were crazy,' said Scott Brusaw. This electrical engineer took years to turn his wife's idea - a psychologist - into effective models.

Introduced amid a heated discussion by the United States about their climate change, their idea was to get the first financial help from the state government in 2009 to develop the prototype. Understanding that this idea could not be realized day by day, the scientist couple decided to start paving photovoltaic cells on pedestrian and bicycle paths, or Parking in supermarkets.

Construction of Solar Roadways with three layers.

Scott Brusaw had to study a type of photovoltaic cell with a hard but non-slip glass surface, which could provide good grip for similar wheels on asphalt, even when it rains. In terms of structure, Solar Roadways has three sections with the top layer of photovoltaic panels, LED lights and heating plates; the second layer consists of microprocessors; and the third layer is the infrastructure that collects and transmits electricity to households and charging stations for electric cars.

In addition, the inventor also took into account the arrangement under Solar Roadways for telecom and television cables, rainwater collection systems. The risk of earthquakes was also taken into account by Brusaw with a simple repair solution that only needed to replace pavement panels. While waiting to be replaced, the pavement can automatically display on the LED panels the instructions for pedestrians to divert away from the broken road sections.

By the spring of 2013, the pilot project was the first photovoltaic cell parking lot to be tested with impressive results. With the success of the pilot project, Julie and Scott Brusaw were granted $ 750,000 by Idaho state government to develop the experiment.

The last challenge Julie and Scott Brusaw had to overcome was the price of photovoltaic cells, which were still quite expensive, and the cost of building the Solar Roadways road was three times that of paved roads. But hopefully, mass and increasingly popular photovoltaic cell production will help reduce costs, and smart sunways in the dream of the Brusaw couple will one day reach out.