[Someone]

The company leading the project claims commercialization is five years away. They likely are optimistic or biased, but I am not sure they are outright lying.

Prices of solar cells drop fast. Extrapolate a few years, and costs of solar installations will be dominated not by what solar cells cost, but by what it costs to install them.

In this case, something must be installed anyways to build the cycle path. It might well be that installing a (cycle path, solar cells) combination will only be marginally more expensive than installing a traditional cycle path.

Will we get there? If solar cells and the electronics needed to wire than together (which, in this case, are more complex because the road may see highly variable shading patterns) get dirt cheap, we might.

[mason240]

Do you really believe that it is more efficient to build a bike lane paved with solar panels, rather than a bike lane paved with asphalt and separate, dedicated solar facilitates?

EDIT: Looking at the pictures others have posted you still have to use asphalt (or more likely concrete because you need better stability, which is even more expensive) underneath, so there really is nothing saved by doing this. What a waste of money.

[drabiega]

How is the presence of asphalt underneath an issue? The deciding factor will be whether the marginal cost of a solar path over an asphalt path will be greater or less than building an equivalent solar facility. That seems like it could go either way.

[IkmoIkmo]

Very good point. Plus even if the marginal cost is lower than a dedicated solar facility, we don't necessarily have that luxury. We do if we want just 5% sustainable energy, not a problem. But if we want 99% sustainable energy, surface area is a very tricky challenge [0] and so it'd be a matter of the one and the other, instead of the one or the other.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE

[woah]

Why are you so negative about research?

[maxerickson]

Would you pay me to research the practicalities of installing solar panels in my basement?

The arguments about this thing not making any sense aren't so far away from the arguments about my basement not being very sunny.

[sosborn]

>The arguments about this thing not making any sense aren't so far away from the arguments about my basement not being very sunny.

Actually, they are. At its best, getting sunlight in your basement is impossible. For solar bike lanes, the worst possible outcome is that they are impractical. And that is a purely financial consideration. At some point the benefits of solar (regardless of cost) might outweigt the negatives of using fossil fuel.

[maxerickson]

You never know, I might live in a glass house.

That it is observably impractical was the point I was trying to make.