Solar Roads: A Sign of the Future of Infrastructure

Of all the areas in which our country’s been known to excel, infrastructure might be the least anticipatory. In fact, the last time America acted with an anticipatory attitude toward its infrastructure, Dwight D. Eisenhower was President; as Cold War-era thinking consumed the American mindset, Ike signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which was meant to offer easy access and transportation to ground troops in case of invasion and an easy escape route for civilians when The Bomb inevitably landed on domestic soil.

 The 2013 Infrastructure Report Card, developed by the American Society of Civil Engineers, offers a damning assessment of our infrastructure at large. As it stands, the country is just barely getting by; the report assigned Ds to most infrastructural areas, including roads, transit systems, levees, and dams. Overall, our infrastructure earned a D+ — so, sure, we’re “passing,” but just marginally. Such low grades indicate our highways, bridges, tunnels, and other crucial bits of infrastructure are so poorly maintained as to presumably put many lives at risk, meaning they really ought to be fixed sooner, rather than later.

 Given this widespread need for improvement, however, we can and should begin to think of not just repairing our infrastructure based on old designs, but implementing new ones. Right now, the average age of bridges in America is 42 years old. Four decades is a long time in which to design a better bridge — and that improved design is certainly out there; it just needs to be found and funded.

 The Report Card declares that in America, “we have a significant backlog of overdue maintenance across our infrastructure systems, a pressing need for modernization, and an immense opportunity to create reliable, long-term funding.” The last part of that appraisal should be music to the ears of inventive civil engineers and architects; those who follow my Anticipatory Organization? Model are likely already designing advanced infrastructural systems and attempting to secure funding for their ideas. Historically, funding for these projects has been tied to whether or not states adopt particular pieces of legislation — for example, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (1984) threatened states with a ten-percent reduction of their annual highway apportionments if they didn’t raise the drinking age to 21. But the perpetual gridlock in which our national legislature is mired doesn’t bode well for the passage of new measures to fund the overhaul our nation’s highways, bridges, and tunnels so badly need.

However, when it comes to roads, innovation is happening all around us. For example, last year, the Netherlands started building solar roads, a world first. These roads contain solar panels sandwiched between layers of silicon, glass, and concrete. The panels are connected to the city’s grid, offering an ample source of energy. The group behind the project, SolaRoad, estimates solar roads will provide an extra 70 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year.

 The benefits of applied innovation cannot be denied. Civil engineers have taken something that served one major purpose — transportation — and given it an added function: harvesting energy. This innovation is truly astounding when you consider that the road has basically served the same purpose since the days of the Roman Empire. With this dual-purpose development, there’s no reason the US should continue simply putting a bandage on our infrastructural problems by filling potholes and occasionally laying down fresh pavement. Adopting solar roads where the sun shines most could not only solve many of these problems, it could also help us become less dependent on fossil fuels and their related emissions.

 But it seems like the US has already taken notice, having recently signed a contract in California with SolaRoad. To boot, an American counterpart to SolaRoad, Solar Roadways, has already started experimenting with its own designs, having received a grant of $100,000 from the Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2009. While nothing’s actually been built yet, the group continues to work with the DOT to improve its performance; and it has started crowdfunding its projects, which some consider dubious. However, with SolaRoad in California, perhaps the US will focus on building smart roads with embedded sensors (IoT). Innovations such as these will transform our roads into more than a just a way to get from Point A to B.

While solar roads may be the new wave in transportation infrastructure, they’re still largely in the experimentation process. For SolaRoad, this means developing a better coating for panels that can withstand heavy traffic.

The key to any Future Mindset is proper preparation for incorporation of new developments. The collaboration between the DOT and Solar Roadways is a good sign of the intelligent forward thinking I’m talking of — but it’s only a start. As a country, we need to assume an anticipatory approach to redeveloping our infrastructure or risk falling further into a state of nationwide disrepair.

 ?2015 Burrus Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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DANIEL BURRUS is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and innovation experts, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books including The New York Times best seller Flash Foresight.