Ilaria Rosella Pagliaro Covering highways with solar panels could reduce global emissions by 28% and improve road safety: despite high installation and maintenance costs, this innovative solution offers enormous long-term environmental and economic benefits
Covering highways with solar panels has an interesting duality: generating clean energy while at the same time improving safety on the roads. Besides the enormous potential, this project does come along with reasonable economic barriers due to high installation and maintenance costs.
Installation costs and challenges
Installation on a large highway network requires huge upfront capital investment. Assumptions indicate that covering only the highways of the world would require about 52.3 billion panels. A single megawatt of capacity installed over a highway could be as high as four times more expensive than traditional ground-based solar farms. This is in part due to the greater complexity in supporting structures needed for panels over roads, hence more durable materials will be involved, and the installation is more complicated than normally done on the ground.
Besides, maintenance costs will arise. Cleaning such a large scale of panels will present a huge logistical challenge. Repairs would require frequent and complex interventions, especially in those places with heavy traffic or under adverse weather conditions.
Long term, the economic returns may be huge, since this is despite the high startup costs. Considering that it is estimated that more than 17,578 terawatt-hours per year could be achieved from the solar panels installed on the highways, it would cover over 60% of the world energy demand in 2023. In relation, it may significantly cut carbon emissions by up to 28% globally.
Beyond energy production, the solar panels would protect the roads from extreme weather conditions of snow and rain, thereby minimizing road accidents by 10.8%. Also, fewer traffic accidents would translate to reducing the social costs of accidents.
A long road ahead
Yet this way is very long before large-scale implementation. Initial investment is expensive, maintenance requires innovative solutions, and pilot projects will be necessary in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. However, regions with favorable weather conditions-such as the southwestern United States or the eastern coast of China-could enter into the leading position in this concern. When technology will be advanced, costs can decrease, and this project will be increasingly viable.
Although the project of covering highways with photovoltaic panels presents various difficulties of both a practical and economic nature, it remains a very innovative and promising solution for combating climate change and guaranteeing road safety.
Source: Earth’s Future
