Scott Brusaw has founded Solar Roadways, a company dedicated to the design, manufacture and lobby for the legislated implementation of glass roadways that harness solar energy for the production of electricity.

Have you ever walked on a road with your bare feet in summertime, and noticed how much heat the tar holds? That heat isn’t generated by the ambient temperature alone. The heat is an expression of solar energy, received from the sun, held in the conducive asphalt, and radiated back on to your toes.

Brusaw’s premise is that the material that we currently build our roads with, asphalt, is petroleum-based. Ructions in middle-eastern geo-politics and an increasing natural scarcity of oil means that we will almost definitely lose our ability to build asphalt roads at some point in the next century.

Moreover, the scarcity of oil will limit our ability to produce fuel for the vehicles that drive on the asphalt, industrial for the tyres of those self-same vehicles, and electricty to drive the onward motion of daily life, domestic and industrial. In short, we’re heading for a glass ceiling of development.

But one of those antidotes to that glass ceiling could be glass itself. What if we substituted our asphalt highways for glass ones, embedded with the means to convert photo-energy into usable and sustainable electricity?

They have a fairly horrific (albeit informative) website, and they are geeks to the nth degree, but that’s to be expected. They’re engineers, not marketers.

Feel free to link to other cool solar solutions you’ve found in the comments section.

[Video Source: YERT]

[Thanks, Dad]