If you're on Facebook or any other corner of the Internet where people traffic in populism, you're likely one of the 14 million people who've seen a YouTube video advertising Solar Roadways. Adam Sandler would kill for those numbers.

In case you haven't seen the video (http://ow.ly/xMIjP), allow me to summarize. A woodsy married couple in Idaho has an idea to replace all of the nation's roads, sidewalks and parking lots with hexagonal solar cells in order to produce cheap, clean electricity. The video is well-produced and very convincing; so much so, in fact, that it's generated nearly $2 million dollars in crowd-funding -- just normal folks sending these people free money to help them achieve their dream.

It's an undeniably cool concept. It's also undeniably stupid.

It turns out that like most ideas born of idealism yet not conceived in reality, solar roads are completely unfeasible.

First and foremost, solar roads suffer the same problem as all renewable energy panaceas. The wind only blows and the sun only shines sometimes, so power needs to be stored in anticipation of all the times it doesn't. Until someone develops a massive-scale method to turn kinetic energy potential and then back again with minimal loss, renewable energy cannot be counted on as a baseload fuel. The Solar Roadways backers suggest that the energy will be "placed back to the grid during daylight hours and then can be drawn back out of the grid at night," as if "the grid" is some mythical battery bank somewhere. It is not.

Regarding the DC-to-AC power conversion that would be required to use solar-road-energy in homes and businesses, the Idaho couple simply suggests converting all buildings to DC. This ignores entirely the fact that DC energy can't be transported over long distances like AC, not to mention the trillions of dollars it would take to convert every structure in America to direct current. But hey, at least the ghost of Thomas Edison would feel vindicated.

Virtually every aspect of the Solar Roadways concept glosses (Glasses?) over reality and technical problems wherever they might be inconvenient to the idealism of the plan. That thousands of people who contributed to the crowd-fund played along with Solar Roadways' selective vision isn't surprising -- it's a hallmark of populism to ignore the details. But it is frustrating, none the less.

It's easy to say, "This is where we are" and "Wouldn't it be cool if we were over there instead?" It's significantly harder to say, "This is what it would take to get from here to there, and this is what it would cost." People love to hear radical concepts that could hypothetically change the world, and they especially love when those ideas come from somewhere besides a profit-motivated business. We'd all like to imagine that a couple of hippies in Idaho could parlay their love of recycling and renewable energy into a world-changing revolution.

What's significantly less sexy and significantly more world-changing is people looking to get rich who delve into the grit and the grime and the opportunity costs of real innovation; the people who eschew "Wouldn't it be cool" in favor of "Can it be done?" If solar roadways or solar rooftops or solar unicorns are technically and economically sensible, some money-grubbing company will make it happen, guaranteed.

The thing that's far more powerful than populism or crowd-funding or YouTube commercials is the self-interest behind the profit motive. It's one of two things in the history of the modern world that has ever moved the needle of innovation, the other being military conquest. So until Solar Roadways can make someone some money or win a war, it will remain a high-minded wisp of smoke in the ether -- grist for masses to chew while real innovators are off doing real work.

NATE STRAUCH IS A REPORTER AND COLUMNIST WITH THE SHERMAN-DENISON HERALD DEMOCRAT.

Commentary on 06/13/2014