Economic Recovery

It will take roughly five billion 12' by 12' Solar Road Panels™ just to cover the roads, parking lots, and driveways in the United States. Imagine the manufacturing requirements: it will create so many new jobs that it may very well become the "New Deal" of the 21st century. We can retrain workers from obsolete jobs such as coal miners and asphalt workers with new "Green Collar" jobs. Unemployment rates will plummet. Vast sums of money will be injected back into our economy. This could create the biggest mobilization this country has seen since WWII.

Each Solar Road Panel™ measures 12 feet (about 4 meters) by 12 feet. Each panel contains solar collectors, circuit boards, electronics parts, etc. All of these have to be assembled. Let's say it take a minimum of 10 hours to completely assemble one Solar Road Panel™. Ten hours is probably a conservative estimate, but it's a nice round number.

Five billion panels requiring 10 hours to assemble means 50 billion assembly hours. Let's give ourselves ten years to accomplish this monumental task, leaving us 5 billion assembly hours per year. A typical U.S. worker spends 40 hours per week at work. Let's give our worker two weeks vacation and say he never misses a day of work otherwise. That's 50 weeks at 40 hours per week comes to 2000 work hours per year. Divide that into five billion assembly hours and you'd put 2,500,000 people to work full-time for ten years. This is just the final assembly!

We haven't yet taken into account the increased jobs at the suppliers end. For instance, the glass maker has to create five billion sheets of special textured glass for the top layer. Someone has to create all of the circuit boards and what about all of increased jobs at the parts manufacturers? Each Solar Road Panel™ contains 6192 LEDs alone. Who will make all of these parts? Then we must take into account installation, maintenance, system monitoring, panel refurbishing, distribution, etc. Every aspect of our economy could flourish.