Electric Highway

I read this from Discovery Channel Magazine Feb 2010 (asia version I think):

roadway 

“Imagine a future with no power plants and no electrical transmission lines, but plenty of cheap electricity delivered right to your door. Sound impossible? Not if we pave our roads with solar panels. The road would become both the source of electricity and the means of distributing it. This is the dream of Scott Brusaw, co-founder of Solar Roadway, a company based in the US state of Idoha. The dream drew a step closer to reality last August when the US Department of Transportation issued the company a USD100,000 contract to develop a prototype 13.4 square-metre panel. Brusaw hopes that similar panels will some day cover all 65,000 square kilometres of the nation’s roadways.”

After reading this, I was like “wow, this is very cool”. Try to imagine, if we replace every road with this Electric Highway, everyone in this world will have free electricity. Generating electricity is not the only function of the road, it also distribute power, television, internet and telephone signal. We will never need to have the ugly cable tower at the road side anymore. All the cable will be embed under this Electric Highway. The surface of the road will be made of textured class where it have LED display to display warning message or light up the road at night, and it will also have a heater where it can remove ice and snow at cold area. Doesn’t all those feature sound great?

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