Anyone have a rough idea of what a traditional ground solar farm costs, either per area or per power output? As in, with all this money dumped in to Solar Roadways, how much of a known, proven system could have been deployed and how much power would it be generating.
About $2.50 USD/W is what the going all-in CAPEX for solar farms once you figure in dirt, plant, and installation, but there is an ongoing revolution with respect to balance of plant costs. I've seen numbers less than that. I'm looking online right now at a 10kW residential system (Eco distributing) for $1.80/W, but that excludes installation and permitting.
As a recent datapoint, India's Kamuthi solar power plant is 648MW and supposedly cost $680MM USD. One has to be careful about published power plant costs because they are sometimes deliberately misleading in order to protect a company's true pricing. Even double that cost would still be an impressive number.
Even at a generous all-in of $5/W, solar roadways 1320W system should cost $6600 as a conventional installation.
Solar roadways received a total of $58,734 to install what by anyone's definition is a maturing power generation technology. At 1320W nameplate, that clocks in at a whopping $44.50/W. and even if scaling would result in a 10X reduction in CAPEX, a solar roadway would still be outrageously uncompetitive compared to where solar farm costs are going, which appears to be $1 USD/W.
If one then factors in that a Solar Roadway generates about 20% the power it ought to, we can simply multiply SR's CAPEX costs by five for a fair comparison with properly-sited power projects. So, $220/W for the demo and $22/W if a miracle happens.
For reference:
Combined cycle gas turbine: $1MM/MWe
Coal (with proper pollution controls): $5MM/MWe
Nuclear: $3MM to $7MM/MWe (depends on when plant was started)