Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Geosciences, and Columbia University have concluded that solar-covered highways could meet more than 60% of the world’s annual energy needs.
This sort of solution is, in reality, just another way for us not to address the root of the problem, which is that car-centric infrastructure is orders of magnitude worse for the environment and even just global warming than whatever benefit solar roadway roofs could provide.
Cars today mostly burn fossil fuels. EVs are better but are having slow adoption and are still quite energy-inefficient compared to e.g electrified public transit.
The cars have to have a bunch more energy dumped into them for procuring and assembling the materials compared to public transit.
Car-centric planning means extremely space-inefficient, sprawling design, resulting in the removal of natural ecosystems that help fight global warming through carbon capture.
The amount of energy that goes into building such massive parking lots and extensive road networks to accommodate car-centrism has to be unfathomable.
Car centrism physically makes things more distant from each other, meaning not only is the transit medium itself less energy-efficient over the same distance, but travel distances are much longer.
There can still be rooftops over above-ground public transit infrastructure, and even a fraction of the space saved on sprawling design could be used for solar farms.
Yeah, this is literally just highlighting the huge amount of land dedicated to cars. People complain about the space used by solar, but a small subset of roads take up as much space as a solar farm that could provide the majority of our energy.
This sort of solution is, in reality, just another way for us not to address the root of the problem, which is that car-centric infrastructure is orders of magnitude worse for the environment and even just global warming than whatever benefit solar roadway roofs could provide.
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Yeah, this is literally just highlighting the huge amount of land dedicated to cars. People complain about the space used by solar, but a small subset of roads take up as much space as a solar farm that could provide the majority of our energy.