Well, if that would be the criterium, a lot of great investments would never have happened. E.g. many railroad routes that were constructed in the late 19th century took decades to be profitable. However, in the very long term they were good investments. Luckily, we had/have governments that are bold enough to invest in stuff that doesn't lead to an IPO the next 5 or 10 years.

Be happy with 25% from solar, if you can sustain that. After that, work on wind or thermal solar or natural gas or nuclear or tidal or something.

This is called research and development. They're not replacing all the roads and cyclepaths with this stuff, they are testing and developing it because we will need it in the future.

Also, I do not appreciate the "you" in that sentence.

I am just very sensitive about public funded projects.

To give you an example:

"XYZ is a project co-founded by the European Union that aims to validate how to approach Open & User Driven Innovation methodologies to the Public Sector in a scenario of Future Internet Services for Smart Cities. It will do so, by leveraging existing tools, trials and platforms in Crowdsourcing, Open Data, Fiber to the Home and Open Sensor Networks in seven major European cities: Helsinki, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Barcelona and Bologna."

Would YC fund that? Would they get an interview?

The EU gave 3M€ for that. The outcome is three websites that nobody uses.

There are companies in the EU specialised for grant grabbing. They will get 10% of the funding if the application succeeds.

The EU funds 50% and the expected outcome is that the funded companies will create a viable product out of it. Now tell me, why do the same companies funded over and over again?

Just google for "Wetab". The same company of that miserable disaster was on plenty of EU funded projects.

Thanks. It can be used both ways but being a Dutchman I wasn't sure. Not my native tongue either :)

I understand your issues with publicly funded projects, and where there is money there will always be abuse. I've interned at a company that did research because they could get it subsidized and I know they wouldn't if they didn't get that money; it was simply too expensive (they didn't have a lot to spend). However that is also the goal of the grant/subsidy: stimulating companies to do that very research (if I remember correctly it was something about VoIP, not sure).

So yeah people make money with it, but it also helps development. I too think that €3 mil is a bit much for 70m of cyclepath, but if it's the first in the world... gotta start somewhere when you have huge R&D costs. If you read their FAQ, they are testing for a lot of things like slickness, reflection, strength, etc. I always just hope they know more about it than I do.

Sometime the idea is just outright stupid, like flying cars.

Solar roadways, though? I don't see any need that actually meets.